Eliana Willis

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    Emily Is Still in Paris. Why Are We Still Watching?

    The Netflix hit has been widely mocked from the beginning. But despite its flaws — or perhaps because of them — it’s a pop-culture phenomenon.Here is one inviolable rule that I have learned governs American screens: If ever I see a young woman standing before a mirror holding a pair of scissors, it is almost always a harbinger of some unspeakable doom. Whether in comedy or in horror, this image is cinematic shorthand for when the writers want us to know that whatever this woman’s inner torment may have been in that moment, it won, obliterating her sanity and driving her to this act of assured self-destruction.That is how we find the titular heroine of “Emily in Paris,” in the third season’s premiere: still in Paris, standing before a mirror in the middle of the night, muttering to herself before snipping off a jagged, uneven chunk of hair across her forehead. She has been jolted awake from a nightmare in which she saw herself forced to confront her deepest fear: having to make a decision on her own.This is an existential crisis for Emily Cooper, who, before her French sojourn, was happily shilling tag lines for I.B.S. drugs in Chicago. As laid out in the series’s first season, by way of a mystifying fluke, Emily finds herself at a luxury marketing firm in Paris, going in place of her pregnant boss. (In this universe, we are to assume that this enormous company has only two employees and that corporations simply love to give unasked-for promotions to junior underlings.) She is there in Paris to provide an “American point of view,” despite not possessing much of one, beyond lovingly declaring that “the entire city looks like ‘Ratatouille.’” By the end of the first two seasons, she has conducted sanitized love affairs with a rotating cast of forgettable men and embodied a portrait of American middle-managerial insufferability specifically calculated to drive her Parisian co-workers and watchers of the show equally apoplectic.The show’s second season ends on a low-stakes cliffhanger that kept unwilling “Emily in Paris” hostages like me (I cannot in all honesty call us “fans”) on begrudging tenterhooks for a year: Will Emily choose the safety of a big corporation and stick with Madeline, her mentor from Chicago, an ur-girlboss of corporate marketing who is obnoxiously secure in her American basicness and a cartoonish portrait of who Emily might become two decades from now? Or will she defect and join the marketing coup being staged by Sylvie, the abrasive yet terrifyingly magnetic Frenchwoman whose approval Emily has spent the past two seasons trying to win with an almost-feral desperation?Beneath the Bambi-like visage and the sweet ebullience lies a stark void of nothingness.For the pugnaciously good-humored Emily, whose sole defining characteristic so far has been her geniality (even being called an “illiterate sociopath” by her former friend barely made a dent in her sunniness), this outer turbulence has forced her to exhibit signs of an inner life for the first time in the show’s run. For once, Emily is visibly shaken. And in the time-honored tradition of one-dimensional screen heroines who came before her, Emily has commenced yet another season-long course of causing unintentional catastrophes with the only act of intention seen from her so far: the guillotining of her own bangs.When the first season of “Emily in Paris” debuted on Netflix in October 2020, it was widely mocked and near-universally reviled in both nations for an abundance of reasons. There was the literalism of its construct. (There is truly nothing more to it than here is Emily, who is in Paris.) There was the egregiously loud costuming. (What sort of corporate culture in France allows for bucket hats to be worn at an office, and why is Emily in possession of so many of them?) Then there were the characters, a buffoonish assemblage of dated stereotypes that managed to offend both the Americans and the French.But despite its utter frictionlessness or perhaps because of it, the compulsively hate-​watchable show became a phenomenon.I began watching this show out of the crudest form of identitarian loyalty, because I harbor an unshakable sympathy for any youngish woman (even fictional; even if she wears bucket hats) whose profession (like mine) requires using the word “social” as a noun with a straight face. Far be it from me to demand interiority from rom-com ingénues experiencing character development for the first time, but watching Emily utter marketing argot like “corporate commandments” and breezily brush off every cruel joke about her dimwittedness left me wondering: Does this show want me to laugh at Emily for the particular brand of sincere, millennial smarm she represents? Or am I meant to cheer at her (very American) refusal to change, no matter what her travails in Paris put her through?To say Emily is chasing anything would be ascribing too much agency, with which even her creators have not dignified her.In both literature and cinema, Paris has long been the milieu in which to place a certain class of mordantly restless, cosmopolitan and upwardly mobile white American woman, who finds herself in the city (often fruitlessly) chasing things her homeland has denied her: a renewed sense of self after heartbreak; liberation (both sexual and intellectual); sometimes adventure; occasionally adultery. Paris harbored Edith Wharton’s Countess Olenska when the insipid society gentleman she fell in love with hadn’t the spine or the stomach to claim their life together. In her memoir, “My Life in France,” Julia Child recalls arriving in Paris still a “rather loud and unserious Californian,” and how it was the city, along with her beloved husband, Paul, that molded her into the woman the world got to know. Paris was where Carrie Bradshaw, perpetually in love with the idea of love, finally realized that maybe all it did was make her more miserable. Emily Cooper, however, is not one of these women. To say she is chasing anything (except perhaps a steady stream of head pats of approval from her bosses) would be ascribing too much agency, with which even her creators have not dignified her.In 1919, when Wharton, herself an expatriate in Paris, wrote that “compared with the women of France, the average American woman is still in the kindergarten,” she might as well have been talking about Emily, whose stock-in-trade is a unique brand of empty infantilism. Nowhere is this more evident than in the way the millennial Emily Cooper seems engineered from a boomer’s nightmare of what young people today are like: indolent, addicted to their phones and obsessed with being rewarded for doing the bare minimum. The show’s architects have endowed her with what has come to be known as her generation’s worst trait: a compulsive devotion to online oversharing and the cult of manufactured relatability. But what sets Emily apart is that beneath the Bambi-like visage and the sweet ebullience lies a stark void of nothingness.The Chekhov’s Bangs incident turns out to have only the most minor payoff later on, when for once, Emily makes a life-altering choice that of course fosters zero introspection. For a show that managed to make even the complexity and angst of infidelity as saccharine as the pain au chocolat that Emily posts on Instagram with the caption “butter+chocolate = 💓,” watching her give herself what her friend calls “trauma bangs” was about as abrupt an upping of the stakes in the Emilyverse as can be. But for those of us who’ve continued to watch, we do it despite our bewilderment — like Emily butchering her hair — even though we know it’s a mess.Iva Dixit is a staff editor for the magazine. She last wrote a Letter of Recommendation about raw onions.Source photographs: Stéphanie Branchu/Netflix More

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    The Artists We Lost in 2022, in Their Words

    Music innovators who sang of coal country and “Great Balls of Fire.” An actress who made a signature role out of a devilish baker who meets a fiery end. The trailblazing heart of “In the Heat of the Night.”The creative people who died this year include many whose lives helped shape our own — through the art they made, and through the words they said. Here is a tribute to just some of them, in their own voices.Sidney Poitier.Sam Falk/The New York Times“Life offered no auditions for the many roles I had to play.”— Sidney Poitier, actor, born 1927 (Read the obituary.)“People in the past have done what we’re trying to do infinitely better. That’s why, for one’s own sanity, to keep one’s own sense of proportion, one must regularly go back to them.”— Peter Brook, director, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)Ronnie Spector.Art Zelin/Getty Images“Every song is a little piece of my life.”— Ronnie Spector, singer, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Yuriko.Jack Mitchell/Getty Images“Dance is living. Dance is, for me, it’s survival.”— Yuriko, dancer, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Kirstie Alley.Vinnie Zuffante/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty Images“The question is, how do you create with what you have?”— Kirstie Alley, actress, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)Carmen Herrera.Todd Heisler/The New York Times“Every painting has been a fight between the painting and me. I tend to win. But you know how many paintings I threw in the garbage?”— Carmen Herrera, artist, born 1915 (Read the obituary.)“I decided that in every scene, you’re naked. If you’re dressed in a parka, what’s the difference if you’re dressed in nothing at all, if you’re exploring yourself?”— William Hurt, actor, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Takeoff.Rich Fury/Getty Images For Global Citizen“You gotta have fun with a song, make somebody laugh. You gotta have character. A hard punchline can make you laugh, but you gotta know how to say it.”— Takeoff, rapper, born 1994 (Read the obituary.)“I love watching people get hit in the crotch. But only if they get back up.”— Bob Saget, comedian and actor, born 1956 (Read the obituary.)Olivia Newton-John.Las Vegas News Bureau/EPA, via Shutterstock“I do like to be alone at times, just to breathe.”— Olivia Newton-John, singer, born 1948 (Read the obituary.)“Movies are like clouds that sit over reality: If I do cinema well, I can uncover what is beneath, my friends, my allies, what I am, where I come from.”— Jean-Luc Godard, director, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Sam Gilliam.Anthony Barboza/Getty Images“The expressive act of making a mark and hanging it in space is always political.”— Sam Gilliam, artist, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“Everyone says that I was a role model. But I never thought of it when I was doing the music and when I was performing. I just wanted to make good music.”— Betty Davis, singer-songwriter, born 1944 (Read the obituary.)Nichelle Nichols.Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images“The next Einstein might have a Black face — and she’s female.”— Nichelle Nichols, actress, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)“If I could have dinner with anyone, dead or alive, it would be with Albert Einstein at Panzanella.”— Judy Tenuta, comedian, born 1949 (Read the obituary.)“In time, writers learn that good fiction editors care as much about the story as the writer does, or almost, anyway. And you really often end up, the three of you — the writer, and the editor, and the story — working on this obdurate, beautiful thing, this brand-new creation.”— Roger Angell, writer and editor, born 1920 (Read the obituary.)Jennifer Bartlett.Susan Wood/Getty Images“I spent 30 years trying to convince people and myself that I was smart, that I was a good painter, that I was this or that. It’s not going to happen. The only person that it should happen for is me. This is what I was meant to do.”— Jennifer Bartlett, artist, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)Christine McVie.P. Floyd/Daily Express, via Hulton Archive and Getty Images“I didn’t aspire to be on the stage playing piano, let alone singing, because I never thought I had much of a voice. But my option was window-dresser or jump off the cliff and try this. So I jumped off the cliff.”— Christine McVie, musician and songwriter, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)“Sometimes you have to put yourself on the edge. You go to the precipice and lean over it.”— Maria Ewing, opera singer, born 1950 (Read the obituary.)Taylor Hawkins.John Atashian/Getty Images“There’s so much in what I do that is beyond hard work — there’s luck and timing and just being in the right place at the right time with the right hairdo.”— Taylor Hawkins, drummer, born 1972 (Read the obituary.)“I was primarily an actress and not a pretty face.”— Angela Lansbury, actress, born 1925 (Read the obituary.)“I always try to improve upon what I’ve done. If something’s not working, I’ll change it to make it better. I’m an artist and a performer above all, and I don’t limit myself.”— Elza Soares, singer, born 1930 (Read the obituary.)Leslie Jordan.Fred Prouser/Reuters“I’m always working, always. I got to keep the ship afloat.”— Leslie Jordan, actor, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“The reward of the work has always been the work itself.”— David McCullough, historian and author, born 1933 (Read the obituary.)“To me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who’d had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.”— Barbara Ehrenreich, author, born 1941 (Read the obituary.)James Caan.Jack Robinson/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Passion is such an important thing to have in life because it ends so soon, and my passion was to grow up with my son.”— James Caan, actor, born 1940 (Read the obituary.)Tina Ramirez.Michael Falco for The New York Times“Words are unnecessary when movement and feeling and expression can say it all.”— Tina Ramirez, dancer and founder of Ballet Hispánico, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Claes Oldenburg.Tony Evans/Getty Images“I haven’t done anything on the subject of flies. It’s the sort of thing that could interest me. Anything could interest me, actually.”— Claes Oldenburg, artist, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)“A skull is a beautiful thing.”— Lee Bontecou, artist, born 1931 (Read the obituary.)“I like to write strong characters who are no better or worse than anybody else on earth.”— Charles Fuller, playwright, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Ray Liotta.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis, via Getty Images“One review said I played a sleazy, heartless, cold person who you don’t really care about. Great! I love it; that’s what I played.”— Ray Liotta, actor, born around 1954 (Read the obituary.)Jerry Lee Lewis.Thomas S. England/Getty Images“There’s a difference between a phenomenon and a stylist. I’m a stylist, Elvis was the phenomenon, and don’t you forget it.”— Jerry Lee Lewis, musician, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)“All of us have something built into our ears that comes from the place where we grow up and where we were as children.”— George Crumb, composer, born 1929 (Read the obituary.)Anne Heche. SGranitz/WireImage, via Getty Images“People wonder why I am so forthcoming with the truths that have happened in my life, and it’s because the lies that I have been surrounded with and the denial that I was raised in, for better or worse, bore a child of truth and love.”— Anne Heche, actress, born 1969 (Read the obituary.)Louie Anderson.Gary Null/NBCUniversal, via Getty Images“That’s my goal every night: Hopefully at some point in my act, you have forgotten whatever trouble you had when you came in.”— Louie Anderson, comedian and actor, born 1953 (Read the obituary.)“Adult human beings live with the certainty of grief, which deepens us and opens us to other people, who have been there, too.”— Peter Straub, author, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Ned Rorem.Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times“I believe in the importance of the unimportant — in the quotidian pathos.”— Ned Rorem, composer, born 1923 (Read the obituary.)Gilbert Gottfried.Fred Hermansky/NBC, via Getty Images“I don’t always mean to offend. I only sometimes mean to offend.”— Gilbert Gottfried, comedian, born 1955 (Read the obituary.)“Merce Cunningham is quoted somewhere as saying he wanted a company that danced the way he danced. I kept doing the same thing. And I began to wonder why I was insisting that they be as limited as I am.”— David Gordon, choreographer, born 1936 (Read the obituary.)Hilary Mantel.Ellie Smith for The New York Times“The universe is not limited by what I can imagine.”— Hilary Mantel, author, born 1952 (Read the obituary.)“Getting the right people with a shared vision is three-quarters of the battle.”— Anne Parsons, arts administrator, born 1957 (Read the obituary.)Paula Rego.Rita Barros/Getty Images“My paintings are stories, but they are not narratives, in that they have no past and future.”— Paula Rego, artist, born 1935 (Read the obituary.)Javier Marías.Quim Llenas/Getty Images“When you are addressing your fellow citizens, you have to give some hope sometimes, even if you want to say that everything is terrible, that we are governed by a bunch of gangsters. In a novel, you can be much more pessimistic. You are more savage, you are wilder, you are freer, you think truer, you think better.”— Javier Marías, author, born 1951 (Read the obituary.)“Art is not blameless. Art can inflict harm.”— Richard Taruskin, musicologist, born 1945 (Read the obituary.)“I am a worker who labors with songs, doing in my own way what I know best, like any other Cuban worker. I am faithful to my reality, to my revolution and the way in which I have been brought up.”— Pablo Milanés, musician, born 1943 (Read the obituary.)Peter Bogdanovich.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images“Success is very hard. Nobody prepares you for it. You think you’re infallible. You pretend you know more than you do.”— Peter Bogdanovich, director, born 1939 (Read the obituary.)Loretta Lynn.CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images“I think the highest point of my career was in the late ’70s. I had No. 1 songs, a best-selling book and a movie made about my life. But I think it was also the lowest point for me as well. Life gets away from you so fast when you move fast.”— Loretta Lynn, singer-songwriter, born 1932 (Read the obituary.)Thich Nhat Hanh.Golding/Fairfax Media, via Getty Images“Many of us have been running all our lives. Practice stopping.”— Thich Nhat Hanh, monk and author, born 1926 (Read the obituary.)Photographs at top via CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images; Anthony Barboza/Getty Images; Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty Images; Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images. More

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    Lauren Spencer Is a Sex-Positive Disability Influencer

    Name: Lauren SpencerAge: 35Hometown: Stockton, Calif.Now Lives: In a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in Los Angeles.Claim to Fame: Ms. Spencer, who goes by Lolo, is an actress, model and disability influencer who is best known for portraying the quick-witted, sex-positive freshman Jocelyn on “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” currently in its second season on HBO Max.“Jocelyn was the college version of myself,” she said. “I was partying all the time, having sex — maybe not as often as Jocelyn is, though.” Ms. Spencer, who has muscular dystrophy and uses a wheelchair, also createsvideos debunking disability myths and shares fashion and dating tips on Instagram and YouTube. “I wanted to create content that would answer that question and eventually dispel stereotypes about how disabled people live their lives,” she said.Big Break: Ms. Spencer started her YouTube channel, Sitting Pretty Lolo, shortly after graduating from California State University, Northridge in 2012. The channel caught the attention of a Tommy Hilfiger executive who hired her for a fashion campaign. With the help of an agent, she landed the lead role in “Give Me Liberty,” a 2019 independent film about Tracy, a disability advocate, and her relationship with a medical transport driver.“I’m just going to share my truth,” Ms. Spencer said. Carlos JaramilloLatest Project: She recently voiced Jazzy on “Firebuds,” a Disney Junior animated series about a team of first responders. Jazzy, who has spina bifida, uses a combination wheelchair and car. “It’s very important for kids to start learning about disability at a young age,” Ms. Spencer said. In September, she started Live Solo, an online resource that helps young adults with disabilities live independently. “I wanted to challenge myself to figure out how I could make a greater impact on the disabled community beyond me just talking in front of a camera,” Ms. Spencer said.Next Thing: Ms. Spencer will release her first book, “Access Your Drive & Enjoy the Ride,” in February. “My goal is not to inspire anyone,” she said. “I’m just going to share my truth — a different perspective on something that’s been misrepresented for so long.” But, she added, “if people get inspiration, that’s dope.”Dating With a Disability: Ms. Spencer, who is single, said her wheelchair isn’t quite the “no big deal” apparatus it is for her character Jocelyn. “The men I have dated or interacted with haven’t necessarily freaked out or been weird about anything,” she said. “But certain things they’ve either said or done made it feel they didn’t fully accept the fact that I had a disability.” More

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    ‘The Witcher: Blood Origin’ Is TV’s Latest Big Fantasy Prequel

    The mini-series series takes place 1,200 years before the events of “The Witcher,” which has been one of Netflix’s most-watched shows since its debut in 2019.Producers of hit series have long used spinoffs to keep the stories going (and the ad and subscription dollars flowing). In our I.P.-obsessed era of pop culture universes, the desire to preserve — and ideally expand — popular TV franchises has only intensified. And more often than not these days, going forward means looking backward.This year, the biggest new series have been prequels, with “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” and “House of the Dragon” being set long before the events of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Game of Thrones.” “Andor” is a prequel for a movie, “Rogue One,” that was itself a prequel for other “Star Wars” films. This month “Yellowstone” added “1923,” another prequel to join last year’s “1883.”Now on Sunday comes “The Witcher: Blood Origin,” a Netflix mini-series that takes place 1,200 years before Geralt of Rivia started slaying ill-minded creatures and thoughtfully pushing back his signature white mane in “The Witcher,” which premiered in 2019 and returns next summer for its third season.Based on stories by the Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski, the franchise is named after monster hunters, of which Geralt is the most famous. It is set on a continent (conveniently named the Continent) where witchers rub elbows with elves and dwarves, powerful sorceresses and power-hungry nobility.A spinoff was probably inevitable for a title that has conquered every platform it has encountered: The streaming adaptation of “The Witcher” followed popular game and comic book versions, and it has become one of Netflix’s most-watched shows ever.For the creator and showrunner of “Blood Origin,” Declan de Barra, the initial motivation was the opportunity to expand on clues or allusions in Sapkowski’s books, including by introducing new characters. Foremost was a desire to focus on the Continent when it was dominated by elves.“My favorite part of the books was identifying with the elvish story,” de Barra, 51, said in a video conversation. “You could see that they were a post-colonized sort of species, they could barely reproduce and they’re pre-agrarian, but yet they have this mythology that’s sort of hinted out in the background. What happened before? What was their Rome before the fall?”As a writer and co-executive producer for “The Witcher,” de Barra had begun mapping out what he thought happened before the Conjunction of the Spheres — the cataclysm that allowed both humans and monsters to travel from their own worlds to the Continent. So when the original series’ creator, Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, asked him to draw up a spinoff concept, de Barra was ready. For his story engine, he picked one of the oldest and most tested: A group of mismatched individuals must team up to save their world, in this case from rampaging overlords and one demented wizard.“I just imagined a group of people who would hate each other if they turn up at a party, and put them in the crucible together,” he said. “People who are all different and have reason to have beef with each other but have to work together.”Henry Cavill, the monster-slaying star of “The Witcher,” has said he is leaving the show after next season.Jay Maidment/NetflixThis being the “Witcher” franchise, some of them also find reasons to have sex with one another. And yes, there is just as much jarringly modern profanity in “Blood Origin” as in the main show, along with the goofy irreverence that sets the franchise apart. (Last year’s special, “The Witcher: Fireplace,” is an hourlong shot of a crackling fire.)“What’s great about Declan is that he’s very energetic and he has a very raucous, naughty sense of humor — and he brings that to ‘Blood Origin,’” Lenny Henry, who plays the plotting Chief Sage Balor, said in a video chat. “So you get all the heightened Shakespearean arias from some of the characters and then you get that low side.”Balor plays a crucial role in the “Blood Origin” universe, setting in motion a series of events that will ripple through time and space. Among the characters most affected are Éile (Sophia Brown) and Fjall (Laurence O’Fuarain), two warriors from rival clans who end up fighting on the same side as part of the main superteam. (How super? The mighty Michelle Yeoh is a key part of it.)In a way, Éile is “The Witcher” in a nutshell: a fierce fighter who both comments on and drives the action with song — this is, after all, the rare fantasy series that has spawned a cult hit, with “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” from Season 1. This is an essential element for the Ireland-born de Barra, who used to front a hard-rocking band and who is the co-writer of several numbers for both streaming “Witcher” properties.“My favorite songs are ones that end really short,” he said by way of explaining the decision to cut the prequel down from its planned six episodes to four. He also draws connections between epic Celtic ballads and Éile’s tunes, including “The Black Rose” — a direct reference to the 16th-century Irish song“Róisín Dubh.”“I wanted her to be writing rebel songs for the people,” de Barra said. “I knew there would be nods to Irish mythology as well as Eastern European mythology, because Sapkowski does that himself with some of his places and people, like Skellige Islands and stuff like that.“He has a potpourri of all sort of European mythology and he pulls the stories and puts them together and bakes his own cake,” de Barra added. “So I felt very comfortable doing that.”Offscreen, Brown, who is Black, has been at the center of the kinds of caustic discussions, regarding race and how it relates to source material, that have occurred within other fantasy fandoms. (You might recall how the sight of Black elves in “The Rings of Power” threw some viewers into a tizzy.)“If something new is coming into a space, people are always going to think ‘Oh, that’s not right,’” Brown said. “I got some difficulty when the casting came out, but I’m not new to the industry, and I’ve worked very hard to be here, so it didn’t waver my knowing I was meant to be there.”Henry — who is also Black and who played the harfoot Sadoc Burrows in “The Rings of Power” — chose to laugh at it all. “What you have to say to those guys is, ‘You will believe an Upside Down where there’s a big weird creature made out of corned beef threatening children, but you won’t believe a Black elf?’” he said. “It’s all pretend — anybody can be what they want to be.”Angst about Éile’s function in the “Witcher” mythos is also related to what some fans have decried as drastic departures from the books and video games in the original series. These complaints have grown louder online since Henry Cavill, who plays Geralt and who has been an outspoken fan of the Sapkowski stories, announced, with little explanation, that he is leaving the show after the upcoming season.The series follows a makeshift team trying to save the world, including Éile, a warrior elf played by Sophia Brown.Lilja JonsdottirDe Barra said any adapter of the “Witcher” stories is “never going to be able to satisfy everybody,” explaining that dedicated fans of the books and the games will all have their own differing views of what the characters and the world should look like.“No two people are ever going to agree on it,” he said. “The core that was important for me was just telling a story that I believed in and that could work on its own whilst honoring the books.”The TV shows integrate Sapkowski’s vision and broaden it, and this dual approach is particularly apparent in “Blood Origin.” As the title suggests, we meet some familiar characters and there are plot developments that will bear fruit generations later, in the timeline of the main series. But de Barra cautions viewers against drawing too many conclusions.For example, in one scene a seer — who is well known among “Witcher” fans — says one of Éile’s descendants will be very important in the future, but the show doesn’t indicate whom it will be.“We can’t spell it out, not now, but it will be spelled out later,” de Barra said. “Most people are saying. …” He trailed off. “Anyway, I’ll leave it for now.”Such comments will be cryptic for those new to the “Witcher” universe, but they should not worry: While some plot points will be endlessly dissected on “Witcher” subreddits, “Blood Origin” stands on its own. “I hope we can introduce many new fans to the show and then they can pour into the marquee series and fall in love with fantasy,” Brown said.“I’ve watched things when I was younger that made me want to be an actor and made me want to escape and see the world in different ways,” she continued. “So I hope people can see the world differently through seeing our worlds.” More

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    Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye Win 2022 Relentless Award

    The award’s first prize to a musical went to the writing duo for “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia.”Shayok Misha Chowdhury and Laura Grill Jaye have won the 2022 Relentless Musical Award for their new work, “How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” the American Playwriting Foundation announced on Thursday.It is the first Relentless Award to go to a musical. Chowdhury and Jaye, known as the writing duo Grill and Chowder, will receive a $65,000 prize and have the option to hold staged readings at prominent theaters across the country, including a series at Theater Row in New York.“How the White Girl Got Her Spots and Other 90s Trivia,” which centers on race and identity in a musical chock-full of ’90s touchstones like Tamagotchi cyberpets and Abercrombie & Fitch, tells the story of a young white girl whose suburban life is interrupted when she finds an unexpected scar on her shoulder in the form of a brown spot.“At this moment in time when there are so many different approaches to dealing with issues of race, what they’re up to is so complex,” said David Bar Katz, the foundation’s artistic and executive director. “They come at it through humor and discovery.”The Relentless Award was established in honor of the actor Philip Seymour Hoffman after his death in 2014. This year, the award was limited to musical submissions to honor the songwriter Adam Schlesinger, who died in 2020 from complications of the coronavirus.Applicants had the challenge of embodying both artists.In previous years, when plays were evaluated for exemplifying Hoffman’s spirit, “it was more about if someone’s art seemed like they’d ripped their heart out and threw it down on the stage,” Katz said. Schlesinger, on the other hand, “loved creating well-constructed pop songs that were hummable that people would enjoy,” Katz said.“Having to reconcile those things is almost an impossible task,” he added.Going forward, there will be two awards: one for plays with a $45,000 prize and one for musicals with a $65,000 prize.More than 500 entries were read by a panel of judges, including the playwrights Thomas Bradshaw and Lynn Nottage, and the musicians James Iha and Stephin Merritt.The jury also awarded $3,000 prizes to three finalists: Joe Stevens and Keaton Wooden, for “Hills on Fire”; David Gomez and John-Michael Lyles, for “Shoot for the Moon”; and Oliver Houser, for “XY.” More

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    The One About When Groucho Marx and Dick Cavett Became Great Friends

    The beloved talk-show host, now 86, spoke about a new PBS documentary that tells the story of the friendship that changed his life.On a hot summer day in 1961, a young TV writer and aspiring comedian named Dick Cavett attended the funeral of George S. Kaufman, the renowned wit and man of letters. There he saw one of his heroes, Groucho Marx. Cavett approached Marx, and managed to tell him that he was a big fan.Without missing a beat, Marx responded: “Well, if it gets any hotter, I could use a big fan.”“That was the beginning of our friendship,” Cavett said last month. “I thought, well God, I’ve talked to him for actual minutes now. Nobody’s going to believe this. And suddenly he said: ‘Well, you seem like a nice young man. I’d like you to have lunch with me.’”Now, 61 years later, their relationship is the subject of a new PBS documentary, “Groucho & Cavett,” which premieres on Tuesday as part of the “American Masters” series.In a video interview from his home in Ridgefield, Conn., Cavett, 86, recalled with fondness his old friend, whose affection and mentorship changed the young Cavett’s life. As a writer for “The Tonight Show,” Cavett went on to write for Marx when Marx joined a brief rotation of hosts after Jack Paar left the show, in 1962. Starting in 1968, when Cavett got his own program on ABC, “The Dick Cavett Show,” Marx was a frequent guest.“Groucho & Cavett,” directed by Robert S. Bader, captures the mutual affection between Marx, who was in the later stage of his career, and Cavett, a talk-show host on the rise during a tumultuous time in American history. It also gives occasion to consider Cavett’s role in TV culture as an erudite, risk-taking and durable presence whose guests came on to engage in thoroughgoing, often contentious discussion with a dash of witty repartee.“I don’t remember being nervous,” said Cavett, right, as seen with Marx on “The Dick Cavett Show” in 1969. “But I was just so damn grateful.”Ron Baldwin, via PBS“There was nothing like it on television then, and there’s nothing like it on television now,” Bader said. “It was actually an intelligent conversation with people you care about, where in other settings, you just see them trying to be clever for eight minutes.”Bader’s first passion was Groucho — “I was an adolescent Marx Brothers fanatic,” he said. As a child he would sit by the television and tape Marx’s Cavett appearances with a cassette recorder. In college, Bader got the chance to meet Cavett, and he asked him a barrage of questions about Marx, which Cavett was happy to answer.By then, Bader was also a Cavett fan: “I realized he had got some pretty interesting people on,” he said. “It wasn’t just Groucho.” He went on to become friends with Cavett, producing a series of DVD compilations of the show and eventually making a documentary, “Ali & Cavett: Tale of the Tape,” about Cavett and his frequent guest Muhammad Ali. But the one he really wanted to make was “Groucho & Cavett.”You never knew what you might get when Marx walked onto Cavett’s stage — he was a guest seven times — but then that was true of “The Dick Cavett Show” in general. Across four decades and in various iterations, the show was a future time capsule of the politics, letters, movies, art and music of its day. Indeed, if you were a cultural figure and you didn’t visit Cavett’s show at the height of its influence in the 1960s and ’70s, it was almost as if you didn’t exist.The show’s ascendancy coincided with the popularization of rock ’n’ roll subculture, and Cavett took all comers, making them accessible to a wide viewership, in part, by keeping a foot planted firmly in the intellectual traditions of his mentors. Rock artists were among his most memorable guests, including Janis Joplin (who seemed to have a blast), Jimi Hendrix (exhausted, but engaged) and John Lennon and Yoko Ono (quite serious, as usual).“It’s funny because I never gave a damn about rock ’n’ roll until they started appearing on my show,” said Cavett, who just turned 86. “I think Janis Joplin was partly responsible because she had such a good time and she told everybody about it. And then I began to get them one after the other.”“The Dick Cavett Show” became a popular destination for rock stars like Janis Joplin.ABC Photo Archives, via Getty ImagesMarx remained friends with Cavett throughout the turbulent ’60s and gave him career advice. As explained in the film, Marx saw an appealing contradiction in Cavett, the Yale-educated Nebraskan, the erudite hayseed. Marx encouraged his young friend to pursue this idea through humor, and Cavett obliged.When Cavett got his own show, he was quick to book his hero. Marx would sing songs (“Lydia the Tattooed Lady”), tell stories and engage with the adoring audience. But mostly he would riff with his young protégé, who always seemed as if he couldn’t believe he was sitting there with Groucho Marx.“I think I was in a state of exalting disbelief and joy that I had Groucho sitting there and being Groucho Marx,” Cavett said. “I don’t remember being nervous, but I was just so damn grateful that I finally had him where I wanted him, so to speak. And that it was going well, and that it was wonderful.”Much of the time, Cavett was in stitches — Marx was, in that sense, one of the few guests who could render him speechless. “Virtually everything he says, if he wants it to be and he usually does, can be funny,” Cavett said. He rattled off some of his favorites. Like: “I’m not a vegetarian, but I eat animals who are.” Or: “Those are my principles, and if you don’t like them … well, I have others.” (This writer’s favorite, from “Animal Crackers”: “One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don’t know.”)Cavett wasn’t too shabby himself.“It was like you were listening to someone in the ’60s from the Algonquin Round Table,” said Ron Simon, the head of the curatorial department and senior curator at the Paley Center for Media, who has done several events with Cavett. “He could always come up with the precise word. And certainly there is a little bit of Groucho in Dick Cavett and his humor. So Cavett was talking to one of his idols, and that made it special.”Cavett with his dog, Reilly. He still tears up when he speaks of his friendship with Marx, who died in 1977.Timothy O’Connell for The New York TimesIt’s easy to see what Marx admired in his young friend. Cavett was soft-spoken but razor-sharp and unflappable, even when chaos was breaking out around him. (Listen to his voice barely change when in 1971 he offers a pugnacious Norman Mailer “two more chairs to contain your giant intellect.”) For a time, he grew his sandy hair long. He grew a beard. Richard Nixon wanted to destroy him.But his temperament didn’t change: He was insatiably curious and quick, whether he was talking to Truman Capote, Lillian Gish, Ronald Reagan, Sly Stone or Orson Welles. Today, one can scarcely watch a documentary about a late-60s or ’70s subject without a vintage Cavett clip popping up — Zelig-like, he stamps his mark on the subject at hand.Cavett knows he had the goods back then. “When I see myself on Decades, I’m often surprised at how good I am,” he said, referring to a network that carries reruns of his show. “That’s a terrible thing to say in public, but I’m completely entertained by myself.”Marx was entertained, too. He saw in Cavett a kindred spirit, a fellow wit.“Groucho was young in mind, although old in body at that point,” Bader said. He was still widely beloved, known for the television show “You Bet Your Life,” which he hosted from 1947 to 1961. The counterculture had embraced the anarchic spirit of movies like “The Cocoanuts” (1929), “Duck Soup” (1933) and “A Night at the Opera” (1935). He was a sort of éminence grise in American comedy, still revered by younger comics like Cavett. And Marx in turn never tired of the stage lights.“Dick gave Groucho this wide open forum, which he didn’t necessarily have when he went on other shows,” Bader said. “He would just take over.”Cavett tears up in the film as he recalls Marx’s death in 1977 at age 86. “We had lost Captain Spaulding,” he says in the film, referring to the name of the character Marx played in the 1930 movie “Animal Crackers.” For nine years, their friendship was a joyous on-air affair.But he still has the memories and stories, which he loves to share. Like the time a couple recognized the two men on a New York sidewalk and the man asked Marx to say something insulting about his wife.Marx paused, Cavett told me, then replied: “‘Well, with a wife like that, you should be able to think of your own insults.’“Let’s put it his way,” Cavett added. “I’ve never enjoyed a guest more.” More

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    On Gay Street, Another Piece of NYC’s History Is Coming Down

    Like other vulnerable landmarks across the city, the house at 14 Gay Street — which helped inspire the musical “Wonderful Town” — is being demolished.One Monday in late November, preservationists, politicians, neighbors and looky-loos gathered at dusk on Manhattan’s tiny Gay Street, a slim crescent in the heart of Greenwich Village, to protest the demolition of a nearly 200-year-old house there. The place in question, 14 Gay Street, is one of a clutch of six winsome but precarious early 19th-century buildings on Gay and Christopher Streets that were owned for decades by Celeste Martin, a singular character devoted to her properties and to the often eccentric cast of tenants she nurtured.Ms. Martin died in late 2018, at 94, with no will and no close relatives, so the city took over her holdings, selling 14 Gay Street and its siblings for about $9 million to a buyer who flipped them last April to Lionel Nazarian, a 37-year-old developer, for about $12 million. Since then, Mr. Nazarian has done foundation work that has destabilized 14 Gay Street and imperiled its neighbors, so the city has ordered its demolition, a slow, laborious process that began just before Thanksgiving.Chillingly, this scenario is one that is playing out all over the city, said Andrew Berman, the executive director of Village Preservation and the organizer of the November protest: As developers have been buying up vulnerable landmark properties, they are either allowing them to deteriorate or doing work that compromises public safety. In the last year, he said, more than a dozen such buildings have come down.Celeste Martin, who died in 2018 at 94, owned six historic properties on Gay and Christopher Streets, including 14 Gay Street. A singular character, she doted on her properties and her often eccentric tenants.Harry ZernikeMr. Berman blames the lack of oversight and coordination by city agencies. “As a result,” he said, “our neighborhoods are paying the price, our city’s history and heritage are paying the price, and the irreplaceable historic landmarks that distinguish New York from everywhere else are being lost.”The city, along with the Landmarks Preservation Commission, said in a statement it had approved plans for the work on Gay Street and that Mr. Nazarian’s construction crew did not follow their instructions. Preservationists like Mr. Berman and local politicians like Deborah Glick have cried foul, declaring that the city and the commission should have been overseeing the work and described Mr. Nazarian as a bad actor. In 2017, he was accused of creating hazardous conditions and tenant harassment in a property he owns in the East Village. Mr. Berman wondered if his actions were deliberate, to insure he wouldn’t have to restore his new holdings, but be allowed to tear them down and start fresh. For his part, Mr. Nazarian said the construction workers made a terrible mistake, adding that he loves historic architecture and just wants to preserve the buildings.The doughty but fragile antique buildings that Ms. Martin left behind “are part of this incredible surviving collection of very early houses,” said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. “Dozens were built in the 1820s, but not many are left — certainly not in groups on a small, intimate street. They are really precious.”The building at 14 Gay Street dates to 1827; its siblings, a year later. “They were originally built for the mercantile class,” Mr. Dolkart said. “They weren’t built for the wealthy. They aren’t pristine museum pieces: You can see they had lived, and been lived in, over time.”That’s significant, because the early 19th century was the last period “that modest people, shop owners and small business owners, could afford to live in a single-family home in a built-up section of Manhattan,” he continued. “You can still see a number of these houses peppering the Village.”By the end of the century, many had evolved into boardinghouses and multifamily dwellings. By then, Gay Street was an integrated block, with a large Black community and a melting pot of immigrants from Ireland, Denmark, France, Italy, Germany and Belgium.Demolition recently began at 14 Gay Street. The city has ordered that the work be done by hand and the material saved for use in a reconstruction overseen by the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission.Hiroko Masuike/The New York TimesAll six buildings are landmarked — Gay Street is in the Village’s historic district — but No. 14 is especially noteworthy as a literary artifact, the onetime home of Ruth McKenney, who memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment there in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein. (For years, a longtime tenant of the apartment, David Ryan, was awakened by tourists belting the refrain of the musical’s signature number, “Why, oh why, oh why-oh/Why did I ever leave Ohio?” and peering through the bars of his bedroom window. When the play was revived on Broadway in 2003, he suffered acutely.)Ms. Martin’s father, Edmond, who was French, bought the six buildings that now belong to Mr. Nazarian in the 1920s, along with several other properties in the Village, including a fanciful pink Moorish-looking townhouse on Waverly Place, where Ms. Martin grew up. While his father wanted him to join the family’s sail-making business, Edmond fancied himself a real estate mogul and an artist. With the help of his wife, Ramee, he turned the Gay and Christopher Street buildings into a complex of furnished studio apartments, decorated by Ramee and outfitted with slipcovers and curtains sewn by their nanny.In her short story “Mr. Spitzer and the Fungus,” Ms. McKenney renders Edmond as a pompous landlord with artistic pretensions — his character was called Mr. Appopolous in the musical — and her $45 a month basement flat, where she lived with her sister, Eileen, as a dimly lit dump sprouting with mold, including a particularly aggressive fungus that draped from the ceiling. “Every night we cut it down with Eileen’s manicure scissors,” she wrote, “and every morning it was long enough to braid. Eileen thought there was something shameful about the fungus, and she always carefully cut it down before we had a party.”The building in 2003, the year “Wonderful Town” was revived on Broadway.Harry ZernikeEdmond was said to have been miffed by his portrayal in Ms. McKenney’s work; he felt his artistic talents weren’t appropriately recognized. He was not a bad painter, said Matt McGhee, who for decades sold exquisite Christmas ornaments out of his fairyland boutique at 18 Christopher and lived in a one-bedroom next door.Notably, though, Edmond was a racist, cited by the city for refusing to rent to Black people. At one point, he hung a sign in his office at 16 Gay Street declaring this policy. In 1959, The Daily News reported, he filed a suit against the city, claiming that its anti-discrimination housing law interfered with his “aesthetic freedom.” Needless to say, he did not prevail.When he died in 1985, Ms. Martin inherited his properties, but not his bigotry. However, she was never the most assiduous steward of the houses.As Jeanne Kelly, the former director of fossil preparations at the American Museum of Natural History and a Gay Street neighbor for two decades, put it, they were held together with spit and a prayer, and the haphazard ministrations of a retinue of helpers that at one point included a super who was blind and a physics teacher with a number of aliases.But Ms. Martin was generous to her tenants, offering to waive rent if they were in extremis and delivering Christmas gifts of pink Champagne and sweets. (One year, Mr. McGhee said, the gifts included stuffed animals; he received a dog.)She doted on many of the tenants, but Mr. Ryan, who moved into the McKenney apartment in the early 1970s and decorated it with distinctive, decaying élan, English country style, was a favorite. When “Wonderful Town” was in revival on Broadway in December of 2003, they saw the musical together. A few weeks later, on Christmas Eve, Mr. Ryan died in a fire that consumed his apartment, and Ms. Martin never quite recovered.Instead of renovating the apartment, neighbors said, she left it to rot and to the rats. “It was the beginning of her decline,” Ms. Kelly said.David Ryan was the last tenant of the basement apartment that Ruth McKenney rendered as a dimly lit dump in her short stories.Harry ZernikeMr. Ryan decorated the apartment with distinctive, decaying élan…Harry Zernike….in an English country style that involved layers of Persian carpets, velvet- and chintz-upholstered furniture, classical statuary, candelabras and prints in gilded frames.Harry ZernikeSince 1976, Denise Marsa, a singer-songwriter, has lived in her tidy studio around the corner, in the building Ms. Martin once owned at 18 Christopher Street. (She can still remember the original rent: $174.24.). She tried to help Ms. Martin in her final years, urging her to make a will, but her landlord “lived in a fairy tale,” she said.Today, Ms. Marsa, 68, is the last residential tenant in the building, her cheerful apartment, with its kitchen tucked into a closet, an object lesson in small-space living and the promise of studio life as a launching pad. She, too, has rendered her home in song, as Comden and Green once did, in a number featured in “The Pass,” her one-woman show about making it in the big city, which she performed at United Solo, a theater festival in Manhattan, in the fall of 2021. (The storefronts below her are full; John Derian, the purveyor of his own brand of charming decay, took over the spot occupied by Mr. McGhee four years ago.)Back at the rally organized by Mr. Berman, the mood was festive, despite everything. The growl of a bulldozer interrupted the protesters. Its driver, a private contractor, said he was there to do work under the road in front of 14 Gay Street. When questioned, he said he did not know who had hired him, and beat a retreat. Across the street, Joan Goldberg, a broker with Brown Harris Stevens, was holding a quasi-open house at 13 Gay Street, a modest Greek Revival built around 1840 and owned by Margaret Kunstler, the widow of the civil rights lawyer William Kunstler, who died in 1995 and was known for representing some controversial clients. (The house is on the market for $6.9 million.)“It was a wonderful street to live on,” Ms. Kunstler said. “We had big Halloweens. Sometimes we would shut down the street for birthday parties. The house was open; there were constant comings and goings.”Ruth McKenney memorialized her dodgy subterranean apartment 14 Gay Street in “My Sister Eileen,” a collection of stories about her adventures as a young writer in the city that was published in 1938 and inspired the fizzy early 1950s musical “Wonderful Town,” with lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green and music by Leonard Bernstein.These days, from the top floor of Ms. Kunstler’s house, you can see into the dark cavity that is all that’s left of where Ruth and Eileen McKenney once lived: two gaping window frames braced by wooden beams.Representatives from the Landmarks Preservation Commission and the city said that the city will be taking action against Mr. Nazarian for what they say was illegal work done there. Furthermore, the city is requiring that the demolition of 14 Gay Street be done by hand and its material saved for use in a reconstruction that the city and the Landmarks Preservation Commission will oversee.“I never intended to just let them rot,” Mr. Nazarian said of the buildings.Asked to estimate what it might cost to restore them, he said, “More than I thought.”For weekly email updates on residential real estate news, sign up here. More

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    ‘Die Hard’ Comes to the Christmas Stage in London

    The poet Richard Marsh is winning praise in London for a one-man theatrical version of the action movie.LONDON — Every year in the run-up to Christmas, Richard Marsh wraps presents while watching “Die Hard,” the 1980s action movie in which Bruce Willis, playing the cop John McClane, single-handedly takes down a terrorist group in a Los Angeles tower block on Christmas Eve.But this year, Marsh said, he might have to give the ritual a miss. Since the end of November, the poet and playwright has been the star of “Yippee Ki Yay,” a one-man retelling of “Die Hard” at the King’s Head Theater in London.Over 75 minutes, Marsh recreates the film, with the help of just a few props. Speaking mainly in verse, he embodies all the movie’s major characters including McClane and the evil Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman). He has had to rewatch the movie to perfect his accents, he said, and so watching it in his free time might be a little much.“But who knows,” Marsh said in a recent interview: “I haven’t started wrapping my presents yet.”“Die Hard” has been a contentious holiday movie ever since it was released in July 1988. Early reviewers focused on its action credentials, and made little reference to the film’s Christmas Eve setting, or McClane’s desire to reunite with his children and partner for the holidays. In 2018, Willis declared that “Die Hard” wasn’t a Christmas movie, it was a “Bruce Willis movie!”Yet, on both sides of the Atlantic, “Die Hard” regularly appears on polls of the greatest holiday movies. And theater has started to embrace this popularity, too.In the show, Marsh recreates specific scenes, including dramatic moments starring, top left, Bruce Willis and, bottom right, Alan Rickman.20th Century Fox; Rod PennMarsh, 48, is not the first performer to adapt the hit, with “Die Hard” having long been staged as a comedic Christmas musical in Chicago and Minneapolis, and as a comedy in Seattle. Jeff Schell, part of the team behind “A Very Die Hard Christmas,” which ran at the Seattle Public Theater through Dec. 20, said in a telephone interview that he felt these theatrical versions were appearing because people “who remember seeing it in junior high” were getting to an age where they could stage shows.Michael Shepherd Jordan, who wrote the book for “Yippee Ki-Yay Merry Christmas: A Die Hard Musical Parody,” which debuted in Chicago in 2014, said in a telephone interview that “Die Hard” worked so well onstage because of the absurdity of trying to act out a “big, bloody action movie” with a tiny budget. In his show, a police car that is central to the movie has to be recreated with a remote-controlled toy. Explosions are similarly silly.That absurdity is fun to watch, Marsh said, but he felt the movie was also relatable in ways that worked well onstage. “Die Hard” is ultimately about a couple, McClane and his wife Holly, arguing under the pressure of Christmas Eve and struggling to apologize to each other, Marsh said. That was a scenario that anyone could identify with, he added, even if “unusually, John and Holly cannot apologize to each other because of terrorist action.”Over the past decade, Marsh has had several fringe hits in Britain with stories told through poetry, including “Dirty Great Love Story,” written with Katie Bonna, which started at the Edinburgh festivals before heading to the West End. Marsh said he got the idea for “Yippee Ki Yay” — named after one of Willis’s most memorable lines in the movie — so long ago that he couldn’t remember the date. “My plays often start as jokes,” he said, “and the idea of doing ‘Die Hard’ as an epic poem was this delightful contrast.”Last year, as British theaters were reopening following the coronavirus pandemic, Marsh said the idea popped back into his head. He had been working on a play about grief but decided audiences would prefer to see “something that is joyful and hilarious and warm and enlivening.” Soon, he had written a draft, and then was working with the director Hal Chambers and the movement director Emma Webb to turn the movie’s main scenes into low-budget reality.“For all the Hans Gruber-ish terrorist action,” Marsh said, “there’s an emotional truth at the center of ‘Die Hard.’”Tom Jamieson for The New York TimesOnstage, Marsh recreates “Die Hard” often just using sound effects and the audience’s imagination. Early on, he stages a fight with a teddy bear that is meant to be a gun-toting terrorist. Afterward, he dabs himself with fake blood to give the impression of injuries. Later, Marsh, using a stool, recreates a scene in which McClane throws a chair loaded with explosives down an elevator shaft. He then covers himself with cocoa powder to look like soot.The only thing Marsh doesn’t do is take off his shoes. Early in the movie, Willis removes his own and is left to chase terrorists barefoot, cutting his feet on broken glass. In the play, Marsh tells his audience there’s a simple reason he’ll be keeping his on: “Have you seen this floor?” he says.The experience of developing “Yippee Ki Yay” — which is running in London until Dec. 30 before going on a British tour — wasn’t entirely easy, Marsh said. After he performed its first preview, a friend said the show was really funny but didn’t have much emotional impact.“It was a brutal note, but extremely useful,” Marsh said. Afterward, he changed the play so it didn’t just tell the story of “Die Hard,” but also interlaced it with the tale of a romance between two “Die Hard” fanatics who meet on an internet forum.That emotional arc has won praise from reviewers. Dominic Maxwell, writing in The Times of London, said that it was “one thing” to have the idea of turning “Die Hard” into an epic poem. “It’s quite another to deliver on it with this level of panache, wit, insight and — unexpectedly — tenderness,” he wrote.Marsh said the final play drew out what “Die Hard” meant to him today. When he first watched it as a teenager, he simply enjoyed it as a full-throttle action film in which a wisecracking hero overcomes preposterous odds to beat up bad guys, Marsh said. “But it’s different watching it now. I’m a dad, I’m in midlife.”Today, he sees the movie as much about how children can be a “colossal hand grenade” in any relationship, he said, and how families try to connect — a message at the heart of most successful Christmas movies including “Home Alone” and “It’s a Wonderful Life.”“For all the Hans Gruber-ish terrorist action,” Marsh said, “there’s an emotional truth at the center of ‘Die Hard.’”That, he added, “is probably the reason why it’s lasted as long as it has.” More