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    ‘For All Mankind’ Launches a Mission to Mars, With New Wrinkles

    For a show that has aged its characters over many decades, the biggest challenge is not sending people to Mars but making them look believable once they arrive.When Ed Baldwin lands on the moon in October 1971, he is in early middle age. His light brown hair swoops across his forehead. His clean-shaven face is ruddy and, excepting a divot between his eyebrows, unwrinkled. But space can really age a man. By 2003, on Mars, his hair has grayed and receded, and the wrinkles have multiplied and deepened. His skin is sallow, marked with age spots. His cheeks have sunk in.Ed, a highly decorated astronaut, is a central character of the Apple TV+ series “For All Mankind.” He is played by the Swedish actor Joel Kinnaman, who was a few years younger than Ed during the first season, which debuted in 2019. Kinnaman is now 43, but in the fourth season, which premieres on Nov. 10, Ed is in his 70s. Which meant that Kinnaman’s shooting days typically began before dawn, with four hours in the hair and makeup chair.This is one of the myriad hurdles and minor miracles of “For All Mankind,” a series that posits a world in which the space race never ended. From its painstaking aging process to its imagination of an alternative past and interplanetary future, “For All Mankind” is both quiet and wild in its ambitions, a work of science fiction that retains the texture of observable reality. And in this coming season, which shows characters first seen in their 20s now in their 60s and 70s, the crew has had to work harder than ever to achieve plausibility. Sure, you can send men and women to Mars. But can you make them look believable once they arrive?The new season largely unfolds on a base on Mars.Apple TV+“When we were pitching the show, we were like, ‘Oh, this is going to be so great,’” Ben Nedivi, one of the show’s three creators, said during a recent video call. “Now that we’re in Season 4, the challenge has been enormous.”Season 1 began in 1969, when — mild spoilers for the first three seasons follow — in the initial shift from our own timeline, the Russians first land a man on the moon. It ended in 1974, with American men and women having built a lunar base. Season 2, which took place in the ’80s, expanded on this base. Season 3, set in the 1990s, brought Americans, Russians and a lone surviving North Korean to Mars. Season 4 jumps forward another decade. Throughout, the remaining characters are played by the same actors. (The exceptions are characters who first appear as children.)“For All Mankind,” which Nedivi created with Matt Wolpert, his fellow showrunner, and Ronald D. Moore, was always intended as a generational show. Its goal was to take the space race from the 1960s to the present and perhaps beyond, showing exploration and advancement across lifetimes.Sometimes those lifetimes are short. “Space is an insanely dangerous place,” Wolpert said. Otherwise the show’s format requires its characters to age a decade between seasons, without the use of computer-generated effects. (The C.G.I. on “For All Mankind” is for asteroids and explosions, not hair loss.)“The amount of time that Ben and I spend talking about hair and makeup and aging is not something we anticipated,” Wolpert said.“It doesn’t hurt that we’re aging during the show,” added Nedivi, who is visibly grayer than he was when the show debuted. “Trust me, I feel like I’m aging double-time.”From top, Joel Kinnaman in the first, second and third seasons. The makeup artists tried to age the stars subtly.Apple TV+This illusionism began years ago, in the initial casting sessions. Nedivi and Wolpert were looking for actors who were somewhat older than their characters, with the thought that they could be aged down for Season 1 and up beginning in Season 3.During Season 1, the makeup department, led by Erin Koplow, used foundation to give the actors a youthful, dewy look, covering up wrinkles and any discoloration. For the women, makeup appropriate to the era was laid over that. Hair was given extra luster.In the second season, the actors were more or less left alone, though some were given small pieces of what Koplow calls “stretch and stipple,” a latex solution that gives the appearance of fine lines. (The actors are mostly in their 30s, which means they should have fine lines of their own. That’s between them and their dermatologists.)For Season 3 there was more stretch and stipple, more gray hair. Kinnaman, whose character is older than most in the show, was given prosthetic silicone pieces, which created deeper wrinkles. If dark circles or eye bags existed, they were left uncorrected or were even accentuated. And the actors learned to hold themselves differently, better reflecting sore backs and joint pain.Several critics reviewing Seasons 2 and 3 found these interventions insufficient. “The effort to age its stars is negligible at best,” a Vanity Fair writer wrote of the third season. But this was intentional, meant to reflect a natural, gradual process.“With women in particular, it’s really easy to go too far and to make them monstrous with aging,” Glen P. Griffin, who oversees makeup’s special effects and prosthetics, said. “So you have to be really, really subtle.”That subtlety can be thankless: The actors don’t enjoy it; the viewers don’t see it. Griffin and Koplow both described believable middle-age makeup as the hardest part of the job. But this nuance is necessary. Should characters survive, the hair and makeup teams will have to intervene further.Kinnaman’s shooting days typically began before dawn, with hours in the hair and makeup chair.Apple TV+Costuming also helps to age and situate the characters. As with the makeup, the period clothes are meant to murmur, not to shout.“It’s best if they’re not overtly loud,” said Esther M. Marquis, the costume designer for the third and fourth seasons. “There has to be space for the actor to be who their character is. I don’t want to crowd in.”As the characters have aged, the tailoring has changed. “Hollywood loves to get all trim and put together, and that’s not really our show,” Marquis said. The fit in subsequent seasons does not always flatter, suggesting maturity, even subtle weight gain.The few costume pieces that do fit and do shout are the spacesuits, each of which is custom-built. While the suits in the first season were closely modeled on NASA’s designs, by Season 2, Americans had established a permanent base on the moon, outpacing current technologies. For the third and fourth seasons, Marquis had to imagine a suit appropriate for Mars’s climate that could be made mostly from materials and methods available in 2003.“The suit that I was designing had to live in both worlds, a future world and a past world,” she said. “I didn’t want to get too far away from a 2003 reality.”But Marquis did give herself some license, dreaming up a textile that would lead to a slimmer and more pliant silhouette. Most real spacesuits are 14 layers thick. Marquis’s are slighter, as are the astronauts’ backpacks, which would struggle to hold both life support and backup life support systems.“There’s a lot of action in Season 4,” she said. “So the suits had to get lighter.” She noted that the real-world suit designers she had spoken to were also wrestling with the same question.Kinnaman and Casey W. Johnson in Season 3 of “For All Mankind.” In the new season, the spacesuits had to be lighter.Apple TV+The show’s depiction of a different Earth extends beyond crow’s feet and helmets. Its approach to alternate reality is typically subtle. A Mars landing is an admittedly big swing, yet most of the other timeline changes are more restrained. Ted Kennedy skips the Chappaquiddick party. John Lennon survives. Michael Jordan plays for a different team.In each subsequent season, the divergence from our world is greater, a butterfly effect enhanced by the technologies the space race of the show has yielded. Most significantly, the moon’s supply of helium-3 has been mined for cold fusion, effectively solving the climate crisis. (Unscientific viewers like me might have assumed that helium-3 was among the show’s inventions. It’s very real.)This reflects the show’s arguably less subtle message, that something profound was lost when America gave up the space race.“That longing is what inspired us,” Nedivi said. “The show presupposes the idea that actually going out into the unknown and learning more about the world will teach us more about who we are and what we’re capable of.”Since the series’s 2019 debut, the space race has coincidentally begun to run just a little faster. More private companies have launched rockets. The Artemis 3 mission, slated for 2025, plans to land a woman and a person of color on the moon, both for the first time. There is new interest in mining metal-rich asteroids, a Season 4 plot point and another example of the show’s science fiction edging closer to reality.“A lot of the technology that we highlight has become part of the conversation in the real timeline,” Wolpert said. “That’s one of the secret weapons of our show: It’s not about impossible stuff. Nothing in our show is impossible.”Nedivi said “For All Mankind” was intended as escapism, as entertainment. “But if we can encourage further space travel,” he said, somewhat grandly, “that would be a huge plus.”While the show can’t take credit for advancing exploration, it has made at least one contribution to the space program, a small stitch for mankind. Last year, Axiom Space, a private company contracted to supply the suits for the upcoming Artemis missions, contacted Marquis. It wanted her to create a spacesuit cover, a garment meant to cloak Axiom’s proprietary technology during a news conference.“There’s no way they can use it in space because it is black and colored,” Marquis said of the cover. “But it was a wonderful experience.”Axiom has since asked her to design flight suits that real astronauts will eventually wear. In tailoring the flight suits for those astronauts, at Axiom’s Houston headquarters, Marquis was struck with a feeling of déjà vu.“It’s very similar to fitting an actor,” she said. “That’s crazy, right?” More

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    Daniel Sloss on Russell Brand and Comedy About Dark Topics

    The Scottish standup went viral for being the sole comic to go on the record in support of Russell Brand’s accusers. He’s made a career of finding humor in “things that we should not be laughing at.”The Scottish comedian Daniel Sloss likes to flout conventional humor.His earliest Netflix special, “Dark,” in 2018, was about the death of his younger sister when he was 8. He also has material about disability (his sister had cerebral palsy), mental illness and sexual assault. “I think there’s ways for everything to be funny,” he said in a video interview this week, before quickly clarifying, “I don’t think everything should be joked about in every way.”Brutality on its own doesn’t make a good punchline, he said. “The art is making the audience laugh at things that we should not be laughing at.”Sloss, 33, was the only comedian to speak on the record, using his real name, in the Channel 4 documentary about Russell Brand and in the accompanying newspaper investigation which detail the sexual assault allegations made by four women against the British actor and comic. That Sloss was the only performer to acknowledge the comedy scene’s long-running rumors about Brand left him shaken, he said. (Brand has denied the allegations.)In his 2019 HBO special “X,” Sloss describes learning that a female friend of his was raped by another friend, part of a group of guys he had long been buddies with. The special — in which he mostly jokes about his own shortcomings — becomes an impassioned plea for all men to do more to call out and prevent misconduct. (He workshopped it with survivors of assault.) After the Brand investigation, clips from the show went viral.Sloss, who performs at the New York Comedy Festival on Friday, grew up in an erudite household: His mother is a scientist who consults for the U.N. around clean energy, and his father is a programmer who also designs robotics. He started performing in clubs at 17, quickly rising through the ranks at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe to become an international touring star. He lives in Edinburgh with his wife and 21-month-old son, and now, much to his chagrin, does jokes about fatherhood.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.The way you talk about your upbringing, it seems like your family expressed love by roasting each other.Yeah. That’s just a very Scottish thing. The way you talk about yourself is self-deprecating. You have to take yourself down in Scotland, because if you don’t, society will do it for you. Tall poppy syndrome exists here — if you stick your head too far up and you’re too proud. I’ve been brought down by the Scottish public several times over my career.In his special “X,” Sloss talked about the sexual assault of a friend after getting her permission to discuss it. HBOYou found success early.I was marketable: young, white, accent. Arguably good looking. I was confident. And I was decent. But a lot of it was right moment, right time, given opportunities that other people deserved.How did you decide to turn to different material?I think it was my fourth Fringe show when I decided to do darker jokes, stuff that wouldn’t make it on television. And I think every day of that run, I watched about 15 or 20 people leave. That was never fun, but I was fine with it because I’m like, I stand behind everything I’m saying now. I will defend that this is funny.The best standup, for me, is the sort that makes you think. I remember the first time I saw Jim Jefferies do his gun control routine. It’s so funny, but it’s made me think profoundly about it. And I could see it making people in the audience think.You can get away with some of these things because people believe that you have a moral center.Yes. I think there’s something about being vulnerable to people — it’s honesty, and I think they see goodness in that.When I did “Dark,” the feedback was really good. I loved the silences. I loved the challenge of it. How am I going to make people laugh with the death of a 6-year-old disabled girl? How can you pull humor out of that? And the answer is the same way that my family pulled humor out of it. You don’t laugh at the tragedy itself. You acknowledge the tragedy. And while looking around it, you can find things to make fun of, because the most powerful thing in the world is to laugh in the face of death.You talk in “X” about learning the stats on how common, and underprosecuted, sexual assault and rape are after your friend, who gave you permission to discuss it, disclosed what happened to her. Did you wonder why more men don’t learn about that? What made you want to talk about it?Because me and the group of friends, we felt so stupid, man. He admitted it the second we confronted him — which blew our minds. Looking back, there were plenty of signs, which we chose to ignore, because we put it down to banter, like, “Hey, he’s just saying things that we all say.”Whenever “X” goes viral, I hate it, because it destroys the message of the show. They just take that 90-second clip, where it’s me yelling at men. You cannot make men learn anything if you yell at them. And that sucks. It would be so nice if yelling at men worked; we could fix all of the problems. But it never works.So I made sure the show is bringing men in. The whole point is that I’m a deeply flawed man. I have toxic traits; I’ve been toxic in the past. I am completely and utterly imperfect. But that doesn’t make me a predator. I believe most men are good, and I want them to listen to me.When we toured “X,” I was really expecting some backlash from men. I was expecting walkouts. And every single night, without fail, I got DMs, emails, messages from men, like, “I sat beside my wife, I sat beside my daughter, my sister, my girlfriend. And when you started talking, I didn’t realize how ignorant I had been, and I was mortified. And then after the show I spoke to the women in my life. They told me a story which broke my heart.” It was so many men just coming to the same realization as me.What did you make of the response to the Brand exposé and the fact that you were the only voice from the comedy world speaking in support of women?I didn’t know I was the only one. I’d seen the clip with me in it. But they hadn’t shown me the context [that no one else came forward]. Devastating. I’m still processing it. To be honest with you, I’m still angry.The focus should never have been about me, ever, at any point. The only reason was because I looked brave. And I was only brave by omission. I was only brave because other people were cowards.Let’s be honest: I did the bare minimum. I acknowledged a rumor that we had all heard. So that’s why I thought so many people would do the bare minimum. They didn’t, and then they just continued being like, “I wasn’t asked.” Well, you can still say something now. Like, just because you missed the starting pistol doesn’t mean you don’t finish the race. Join in!You’ve said that becoming a father has made you a better person and a worse comedian.Yes, but that’s true for everyone. I don’t know what it is. I think maybe it’s such a higher level of empathy than you had before that it actually blunts your edges. I mean, I like pushing boundaries. But before I would certainly say callous things just for the sake of saying callous things.I used to have a joke that would split the audience down the middle, and I loved that. And I now realize that it’s because the joke was about harm happening to children. Before I was a parent, I found the joke very, very funny. And now I don’t. And that makes me hate myself, because that means I’m a comedian who’s offended by one of his own jokes. More

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    ‘Sabbath’s Theater’ Review: John Turturro Embodies a Life and a Libido

    Though a tour de force for its actors, an Off Broadway adaptation of Philip Roth’s willfully obscene 1995 novel is too faithful to its source.John Turturro begins the New Group’s “Sabbath’s Theater” with his pants down. He ends it with his pants off. In between, he masturbates on his lover’s grave, wears a pair of pink panties on his head and lingers on an oncology ward discussing outré sexual practices. This suggests a work meant to shock or at the very least goose the viewer. But excepting the performances of Turturro and Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers, the show, for all its full-frontal nudity, is strangely inert. Flaccid? Sure.“Sabbath’s Theater,” now playing at the Signature Center, is an adaptation of Philip Roth’s 1995 novel, which won the National Book Award. It’s the story of Mickey Sabbath (Turturro), a former avant-garde puppeteer who devotes his later decades to adultery and complaint. When his mistress, Drenka (Marvel), dies, Sabbath, suddenly unmoored, leaves his New England home and his marriage, seeking erotic adventure and possibly his death.Scabrous and willfully obscene, the novel is often read as an exemplar of Roth’s late-career efflorescence, a distillation of his preoccupations, libidinal and otherwise. Then again, there are dissenters like Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times, who wrote that the book has “a static and claustrophobic air, resulting in a novel that’s sour instead of manic, nasty instead of funny, lugubrious instead of liberating.” Sabbath is one of Roth’s many navel-gazing heroes. Sabbath’s gaze, however, aims just a little lower.Elizabeth Marvel as Sabbath’s wives and lovers is glorious, enfleshing characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections, our critic writes.Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe problem at the Signature Center — a frequent one for Roth’s characters — is one of fidelity. Here’s the twist: This adaptation, by Turturro, a longtime friend of Roth’s, and the journalist and memoirist Ariel Levy, is simply too faithful, too monogamous. There’s no cheating, no straying, barely a flirtation, which means that the transmutation from book to stage is incomplete. “We didn’t write anything,” Levy told The Times. “It’s only Roth’s writing. Including most of the stage directions. Because you can’t top it.”Maybe so. But novels aren’t plays. And prose isn’t dialogue. Words that live comfortably on the page turn awkward and overly formal in the mouths of the actors. This version, a monologue with interruptions, shifts constantly between dialogue and direct address, the better to maintain Roth’s language. In this container, the drama stagnates, weighed down by Sabbath’s solipsistic gripes. (The adapters, in one decisive excision, have stripped those gripes of racism.)In his youth, Sabbath tells us, he was a guerrilla provocateur, the mastermind of a company called Sabbath’s Indecent Theater. If only some of that formal anarchy had infused this production. Where are the puppets, the street theater tactics? Jo Bonney is a sensitive and inventive director, yet here invention fails her. She offers a mostly spare stage, neatly delineated by Jeff Croiter’s clever lighting design and Alex Basco Koch’s dull projections, and a steady march from scene to scene as Sabbath, already a self-described “degenerate,” degenerates further. Yet not too far.As Sabbath says, in the middle of the play and again at the end, “To everyone I have ever horrified, to the appalled who’d consider me a dangerous man, loathsome, degenerate and gross. Not at all! My failure is failing to have gone far enough!” Agreed. I am a highly shockable sort of person. Still I can’t say that I ever felt truly scandalized or even absolutely engaged, most likely because the characters and situations remain unreal, tethered to the page. A brief scene of Sabbath trying to pleasure himself with his arthritic fingers was at least funny.If “Sabbath’s Theater” offers a limited tour of the human psyche, it succeeds as a tour de force for Turturro and for Marvel, too. (Jason Kravits is perfectly capable in a number of roles, most of them thankless.) As Sabbath, Turturro is shifty, kinetic, with a bend in the knees and a shrug in the shoulders, ferocious in his loathing and desire. His performance is vivid, visceral in a way that transcends the prose. Marvel, who is never anything less than glorious, enfleshes characters who might otherwise seem merely male projections. In contrast to Turturro’s arm-waving defiance, she offers an effortless stillness and a great capacity for joy. Her characters are fully human and quietly life-affirming, counterparts to Sabbath’s peculiar death drive.“Sabbath’s Theater,” no longer a book and not quite a play, is best enjoyed as a celebration of its performers. But it’s never as unholy as it wants to be.Sabbath’s TheaterThrough Dec. 17 at the Signature Center, Manhattan; thenewgroup.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    Late Night Celebrates George Santos Sticking Around

    Jimmy Kimmel was selfishly thrilled that the House voted to keep the New York representative in office, saying Santos “will live to scam another day.”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.Santa Came Early for SantosRepresentative George Santos of New York will keep his seat after a Republican-led effort to expel him failed in the House on Wednesday.Late night hosts expressed their gratitude, with Jimmy Kimmel thrilled that Santos “will live to scam another day.”“It’s bittersweet because, on one hand, having a brazen liar like this in Congress is not great for the country or for his district back in New York. But, on the other hand, it’s so good for our monologue. I mean, it’s — it is solid gold, and I really want to thank everybody for keeping him around a little while longer.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You’re telling me, after all the corruption, the fraud, the money laundering, the identity theft, the fake volleyball, the mystery baby, the fake Hannah Montana, the fake Spider-Man, that Congress decided to not expel George Santos? Well, I have only one thing to say to you: Thank you! I need this. He may be a crazy criminal, but compared to all the other criminals, he’s fun!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Santos celebrated his stay of execution by going out to a nice dinner and charging it to some old lady’s credit card.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Trumps on Trial Edition)“Now, in Trump’s New York financial fraud trial, which is going on presently, the court is hearing testimony from Ivanka, Don Jr. and Eric. Or as Trump calls them ‘The pretty one, the smart one, my favorite, Don Jr., and Eric.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I haven’t seen a more likable set of brothers on trial since the Menendez boys.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Both Don Jr. and Eric claim they couldn’t remember much about any of this stuff. Eric repeatedly said, ‘I don’t focus on the financial side of things.’ He said — and this was his real answer — he said, ‘I pour concrete.’ He said that several times, he said, ‘I’m not a money guy, I’m a construction guy.’ He’s a construction guy like the guy in the Village People is a construction guy. He owns a yellow hat.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s actually convenient that all of the Trumps have testified now ’cause they’re going to use the courtroom sketches for their holiday card.” — JIMMY FALLON“Then Eric Trump took the stand and also claimed ignorance. He had to — he was under oath.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Their father was not there to cheer his sons on. Donald Trump — really, Donald Trump not showing up to watch his kids testify in a fraud trial is the Trump family version of not showing up for their school play.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn his last night guest-hosting “The Daily Show,” Charlamagne Tha God spoke with Doug Melville, the author of “Invisible Generals,” about documenting the untold stories of America’s first Black generals.Also, Check This OutTracey Emin at her studio in Margate, England. “I think people weren’t sure that I was sincere,” she said. “And I hope now maybe they’ll see that I am.”Charlie Gates for The New York TimesArtist Tracey Emin returns to New York with her first solo show in seven years, “Lovers Grave.” More

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    Somewhat Guiltily, Ukrainians Miss Matthew Perry

    Even as the war’s devastation rages on, Ukrainians have found space to mourn an actor who brought them comfort and laughter.It was the middle of the night in Ukraine, and Natalia Sosnytska couldn’t sleep. So she opened the Instagram app on her phone — and saw that the actor Matthew Perry had died.She broke down in tears, she said, then immediately felt embarrassed.“We need to remember those dying here in Ukraine daily, but maybe also those who inspire us,” she said, trying to come to terms with her layered emotions.She was hardly alone. Mr. Perry’s death last Saturday resonated with the many Ukrainians who had watched “Friends,” which was shown on broadcast television in the country and was popular especially with younger people.On the day that Mr. Perry’s death was reported by Ukraine’s mainstream news outlets and discussed on social media, the news in Ukraine was difficult, as usual: Russia had bombed the southern city of Kherson, and nine Ukrainian civilians, including children, had been found shot to death in the occupied town of Volnovakha. Yet Ukrainians found space in their hearts for sadness about the death of an actor who had touched their lives.“It is almost the same age as Ukrainian independence,” Maryna Synhaivska, the deputy director of the Ukrinform news agency, said of “Friends,” which began in 1994, three years after Ukraine split from the Soviet Union.“I was growing up with him, same as many Ukrainians,” Ms. Synhaivska said of Mr. Perry and Chandler Bing, his character on the show. “I am senselessly saddened by this news, and I can say that tens of thousands of people read it.”The series’ success in Ukraine was partly down to the high quality of its translation. It was dubbed into Ukrainian rather than Russian, and linguists have highlighted how well its American slang was rendered. Ukrainian viewers were also able to watch each new episode almost at the same time as viewers in the United States.Ms. Sosnytska, who is 32, named a community center that she opened in 2017 for young people in her hometown, Kostiantynivka, in eastern Ukraine, after the show.The space was intended to be a place where like-minded people could get together and have fun, but they struggled to settle on a name they all liked. She had watched every season of “Friends” no less than 10 times, she said, and her friends liked it, too. So they called the center Druzi — “friends” in Ukrainian — and the sign on the building mimicked the show’s title font.The community center Druzi before the full scale invasion in Kostiantynivka, Donetsk region, Ukraine.via Natalia SosnytskaThese days, the city is near the front line, where life is highly dangerous, and the community center sits empty, surrounded by bomb craters.Ms. Sosnytska said that when she heard the news of Mr. Perry’s death, “I understood that I just need to watch one more time.”The series has been a source of solace for some Ukrainian fans during the many months of war.Anastasiya Nigmatulina, 28, a beautician in Vinnytsia, a city in central Ukraine, said she had watched the show over and over since the war started. “It helps me to feel better,” she said.Her husband is a soldier, and she worries about him often. He is home on leave now with her and their 5-year-old daughter, but will return to the front soon. There were many times when Ms. Nigmatulina “felt scared and stressed, but this series supported me,” she said.“And particularly Chandler Bing, played by Matthew Perry,” she added. “I feel like I lost a close friend.”“Friends” also helped some in the country learn Ukrainian, just as it has aided people around the world in learning English.“I talk and hear how I am using the words from specific episodes, from that brilliant Ukrainian translation we had,” said Yulia Po, 38, a Crimea native who grew up in a Russian-speaking environment and said she had learned Ukrainian thanks to “Friends.”As a 13-year-old coming home after school, she recalled, she would have just enough time to fry herself potatoes and get comfortable with a plate in front of the television before the show aired.She left Crimea after Russia occupied it in 2014, now refuses to speak Russian on principle, and has not been home or seen her parents since leaving, she said. “So I have a lot of emotions for this show,” Ms. Po said, adding, “Back then, when I escaped Crimea, I was depressed and I watched it and watched it, and it helped.”Last weekend, when she learned that Mr. Perry had died, she felt a slight sadness.“This is just a humane emotion to feel sad — there is always a space for it,” Ms. Po said. “He was with me for a long time and gave me many reasons to laugh.” More

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    ‘I Need That’ Review: It’s Always Messy in New Jersey

    Danny DeVito returns to Broadway in a Theresa Rebeck comedy about a lonely old man lost in a houseful of junk.Even before the lights dim at the start of “I Need That,” the new Theresa Rebeck play at the American Airlines Theater, the show curtain and what’s in front of it offer plenty of exposition. The curtain is painted to depict the street grid of a neat New Jersey town, with neat houses on neat lots. But, uh-oh, creeping out from beneath it, on the floor of the stage, are boxes and bins overflowing with junk: ancient copies of Popular Science, bruised holiday decorations, stacks of old clothes, a sad single sneaker.So we know before the curtain rises on what one character describes as a “hellhole” of a home that we’ll be dealing with hoarding — and the orderly world that is horrified by it. Making the point even sharper is the entrance of the star, Danny DeVito, as Sam, the impish, 80-ish widower who lives there. Well, it’s not so much an entrance as a disclosure. Only after a series of knocks at the door wakes him up do we realize that amid the clutter submerging almost every surface of this once-handsome living room is Sam himself, indistinguishable from the trash.Alas, the busy set, by Alexander Dodge, leaves little for the rest of the play to do. Hyper-competently, like a good three-camera sitcom, Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s production for the Roundabout Theater Company, which opened on Thursday, will inch out Sam’s story — as well as that of his daughter, Amelia, and his old pal Foster. It will calibrate the requisite unsurprising surprises. It will cut its laughs with pathos and plump for a tear at the end.That’s no small feat, of course. Rebeck has a keen feeling for structure and the larger movements of storytelling. This is her 21st major New York production, and fifth on Broadway, since 1992. (She is also the creator of the TV series “Smash,” so she obviously knows plenty about sustaining conflict.) And there’s certainly pleasure to be had when an expert like DeVito, for 15 seasons a star of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” gets his mouth around a morsel of fragrant patois (he describes a worthless bottle cap as a meaningful souvenir “from my yout’”) or a juicy monologue. At one point he plays all sides of a game of Sorry!, complete with vicious kibitzing and gloating.But in the same way the monologue leans too heavily on foul-mouthed-grandpa laughs, the play overall, within its neat architecture, feels cluttered and obvious. Amelia, played by DeVito’s daughter Lucy, arrives in a flurry to tell her father that town authorities will condemn and evict him if he doesn’t get the mess — which is both a firetrap and an eyesore — under control. (A neighbor lady has reported the dishevelment.) Foster (Ray Anthony Thomas) offers to help clean up, but something always stops Sam in his tracks. “I’m organizing,” he insists. “I’m being selective.”Lucy DeVito, center, is a fine comic actor, hitting every joke and clapback with a clean thwack. Ray Anthony Thomas, left, plays a friend who offers to help clean up.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAt around this point you realize that the play, having set Sam up as a mild hoarder — he doesn’t buy new things; his kitchen and bathrooms are clean — has not given him much to do but dither amusingly as he tries to decide what to part with. “It’s like ‘Sophie’s Choice,’” he whines. Nor much for Amelia to do but push back. (To her it’s more like “the end of ‘Carrie,’ where the house is so full of terrible things it just sucks itself into the earth.”) Eventually one of them will win, or this being a comedy, probably both.But because whatever will happen cannot do so until the last few of the play’s 100 minutes, most of what Rebeck offers is filler. Both Amelia and Foster are given grudges and secrets to pass the time. At least Amelia’s feel real enough, perhaps because Lucy DeVito, in her Broadway debut, is no nepo baby; she’s a fine comic actor, hitting every joke and clapback with a clean thwack. But Thomas is unable to make Foster more than a codger-comedy contrivance, despite or because of a tacked-on sad story and a not-very-credible interest in Sam’s trash.It’s hard to imagine what more one could make of an upbeat play about hoarding. The condition is not funny. Some hoarders suffer from obsessive-compulsive disorder; more show strong indications of depression. To avoid a psychiatric rabbit hole, Rebeck has not only made Sam a sprite instead of a slug but also given him sympathetic, almost sensible, reasons for clinging to his stuff. (He misses his wife.) In a disposable society, hostile to aging, in which anything or anyone no longer obviously useful belongs in the landfill, he believes in hanging on. (He keeps refilling the same water bottle from 1976.) His hoarding isn’t a condition, it’s a protest.Though his only previous Broadway appearance was in the 2017 revival of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” Danny DeVito commands interest without having to do much, and rewards it with funny readings of even unfunny lines. Yet despite his likability, the only parts of “I Need That” that feel authentic are those, near the end, in which the nonissue of Sam’s hoarding is momentarily swept offstage to make space for a few minutes of real father-daughter drama. To this, the DeVitos bring a vibrant understanding — part pride, part dismay, all mess — of what it means to be related. Sometimes what’s neat just isn’t as compelling as what’s not.I Need ThatThrough Dec. 30 at American Airlines Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Pal Joey’ Review: Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildering

    Joey is still a heel in this major revision of the 1940 antihero musical, but he’s now a Black artist trying to find his true voice.It’s not often that the standout star of a show is its music supervisor, arranger or orchestrator, but in the gala presentation of “Pal Joey” at New York City Center through Sunday, all three are one man, Daryl Waters. More than the authors of the ambitious, bewildering revival’s new book, Waters, who has served similar roles on musicals as varied as “Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk,” “After Midnight,” “The Cher Show” and “New York, New York,” makes a clear case in beautiful sound for its investigation into the melting pot of American music.That the rest of the revival (really a new creature, made from spare parts) is more suggestive than convincing is no crime; there has never been a satisfactory “Pal Joey.” Though the 1940 original featured some soon-to-be standards by Rodgers and Hart — “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered” chief among them — its book by John O’Hara, based on his epistolary novel and New Yorker stories, didn’t match them in tone or dramatic serviceability.Back then, the problem was thought to be the nature of Joey himself, a greasy heel trying to scheme his way from itinerant crooner to supper club smoothie. Along the way he picked up and discarded an innocent named Linda English, traded sex for financial support with a socialite named Vera Simpson and generally ruined everything he touched with his grifty hands. The New York Times critic Brooks Atkinson concluded that the show was distasteful because you couldn’t “draw sweet water from a foul well.”But the rise and triumph of the antihero show, with protagonists like J. Pierrepont Finch, Sweeney Todd and Evan Hansen, has since proved such characters ripe for musicalization. The problem faced by the various would-be saviors of “Pal Joey” — there were Broadway revivals in 1952, 1963, 1976 and 2008 — is rather what new throughline to impose and how to make the best use of its songs.In choosing to alter the racial frame of the story, the current version’s adapters, Richard LaGravenese and Daniel Koa Beaty, have made a powerful and promising intervention. Their Joey (Ephraim Sykes) is Black, with the tortured soul of a true artist. The Chicago club in which he sings is now a Black establishment, run by Lucille Wallace (Loretta Devine), a former star of Harlem nightspots. Linda (Aisha Jackson) is a Black singer, too, but one who prefers radio to live performance so as to be “judged by what people hear, not by what they see.”Sykes as Joey and Elizabeth Stanley as the socialite Vera Simpson, who financially supports Joey.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat is all worth exploring, and sometimes succeeds in snapping the tired old setups into vivid life. Because Vera (Elizabeth Stanley) is still white, her dalliance with Joey takes on new overtones and evokes new dangers. Though Joey remains acquisitive of both women and wealth, and Sykes, a Tony nominee for “Ain’t Too Proud,” is excellent at making his cunning charismatic, he is no longer shallow. Instead he’s deep, trying to find a way to render his true voice in a white world. Ancestral spirits who, according to the script, represent “soul, authenticity, power and freedom,” encourage him through percussive sound and movement; the often-astonishing choreography, part tap, part stomp, part African dance, is by Savion Glover.Interesting as all this is, or could be with further time and elaboration, race was the wrong problem to solve in “Pal Joey.” What really never worked, and still does not, is the way the songs hang with the story. Innovators though they were, Rodgers and Hart had only just begun to explore, as Rodgers would continue to do much more deeply with Oscar Hammerstein II, how to make song an expression of narrative itself, not just a character sketch or appliquéd decoration. In particular, Hart’s delightful lyrics (“I’m vexed again./Perplexed again./Thank God I can be oversexed again”) kept pulling focus from the show’s heart of darkness with their sparky wit.The new “Pal Joey” doubles down on that problem. Not counting two reprises, it features all or parts of 21 songs, only seven of which were written for “Pal Joey.” (Another eight of the originals were cut.) Because the added songs come from a variety of other shows, mostly “The Boys From Syracuse” and “Babes in Arms,” these are naturally even more decorative and disengaged than the originals. It does nothing to turn the vanishingly minor Melba Snyder — a society reporter who sings (and strips to) the great but obviously shoehorned “Zip” — into Melvin Snyder (Brooks Ashmanskas), who bravely does the same. You still have no idea why the character is there.Sykes, Aisha Jackson and ensemble members in the gala production, which features Savion Glover’s often-astonishing choreography.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesOn the other hand, the giant and varied new tunestack — including standards like “Where or When,” “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon” — gives Waters some gorgeous raw material to work with. It’s a mystery to me how he creates so many conflicting kinds of sound, representing different strands of American popular music, from just four players onstage (including the devastating trumpeter Alphonso Horne) and five offstage. Sometimes the original songs are barely recognizable in their new clothing; at other times they have the uncanny familiarity of a post-facelift face that makes you want to say: You look different.Satisfying as that then-and-now duality is in theory, it adds to a rather large list of confusing and incomplete choices overall. What does it mean that Vera almost outdoes the Black characters in the use of scat singing and melismatic riffs? (Stanley is pushing way too hard.) Why does the relationship between Vera and Joey provoke racist threats while Lucille’s with a white gangster (Jeb Brown) provokes nothing but laughs? (Devine is a welcome source of humor and good spirits in the otherwise nearly humorless production.) Why is Linda barely integrated into the action, performing most of her songs (rendered modestly by Jackson) in the no-context of a recording booth?And though the roughness of the sound (many lyrics were unintelligible as of Wednesday night) and the longueurs of the staging (by Tony Goldwyn and, again, Glover) can be written off to the usual City Center problem of under-rehearsal, a show with such evidently large ambitions — Emilio Sosa’s glamorous early-1940s costumes, a monumental under-the-el set by Derek McLane, lit moodily by Jon Goldman — needs to be more than intriguing. It needs to be coherent.You can certainly count on coherence from the songs themselves, no matter how randomly they sometimes seem to have been placed in one Rodgers and Hart show instead of another. Even completely shorn of plot relevance, they are evergreen for a reason. Though this “Pal Joey” rightfully questions the appropriation of Black voices in American popular song — referring to the King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman, and the King of Swing, Benny Goodman, Joey says, “Awful lot of Kings out there playing our music” — it’s strange to build that argument on the back of these standards. If they’re the problem, why celebrate them, and make them sound so good in the process?Pal JoeyThrough Nov. 5 at New York City Center, Manhattan; nycitycenter.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    in Television

    LeVar Burton’s New ‘Sound Detectives’ Podcast Urges Children to Listen

    The actor is engaging young audiences again with “Sound Detectives,” a comic mystery podcast that teaches the art of listening.LeVar Burton has spent much of his career encouraging children to read. Now he is urging them to listen — really listen.They can develop that skill, along with an ear for mysteries, in “Sound Detectives,” a new podcast for audiences of elementary-school age that is part whodunit, part science exploration and part comic adventure. Co-produced by SiriusXM’s Stitcher Studios and LeVar Burton Entertainment, “Sound Detectives” features Burton as a fictionalized version of himself, an inventor with the same name.“In a certain sense, ‘LeVar Burton’ has reached iconic status,” Burton said in a phone conversation. “And it’s fun for me to lean into that.” He added, “It’s also an opportunity for me to introduce ‘LeVar’ to another generation.”Many adults recognize Burton as the actor who played Kunta Kinte in “Roots” and Geordi La Forge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” More recently, fans pushed for him to be named the host of “Jeopardy!,” a role for which he very publicly campaigned. But to large numbers of today’s parents, he is most familiar from their own childhoods as the host of the Emmy-winning public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.“LeVar Burton Reads,” his literary podcast for adults, has been downloaded more than 54 million times, according to SiriusXM.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesThe LeVar Burton of the 10-part “Sound Detectives,” which debuted on Wednesday — SiriusXM will release a new episode every week thereafter — is an audiophile planning to open a magnificent institution, the Museum of Sound. But he discovers that sounds are becoming separated from their sources and going missing.To resolve the crisis, he hires a Philip Marlowe-style sleuth, Detective Hunch, and sends him an assistant in the form of one of his own inventions: Audie, a 3-foot-5-inch-tall walking, talking ear. In each episode, Hunch and Audie must analyze an errant sound, identify it and return it to its origins, while also trying to unmask the Sound Swindler, the human culprit who is causing the disappearances.“Sound Detectives” is the real LeVar Burton’s first podcast for children, but he stressed that he did not see it as a long-awaited return to young people’s entertainment. “I don’t feel like I’ve ever left it,” he said. Burton, 66, who has remained active in children’s literacy through founding Skybrary, a digital library of e-books and videos, said he had not ruled out a young listener’s version of “LeVar Burton Reads,” his SiriusXM literary podcast. (According to the company, it has been downloaded more than 54 million times since its premiere six years ago.)But what appealed to him about “Sound Detectives” was that he did not have the burden of being the podcast’s sole maker or its star. The independent producers Joanna Sokolowski and Julia Smith (Smith is also the producer of “LeVar Burton Reads”) created the podcast and developed it with Burton before pitching it to Sirius XM. “Sound Detectives” focuses more on the private eye — and the accompanying ear — than on the famous voice that gives them their missions.To large numbers of today’s parents, Burton is most familiar as the host of the public television series “Reading Rainbow,” which explored books for young readers from 1983 to 2006.PBSBurton also admired the plan for each episode’s end: Once the missing sound is returned, young listeners hear an on-location interview with real experts who deal with it in their work.The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said, and “it introduces them to parts of the world that they might not have yet been exposed to. And those are the key precepts that were the drivers to ‘Reading Rainbow.’”“Sound Detectives” visits places like Yellowstone National Park, the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the streets of Bangalore (now Bengaluru), India. When creating the missing-sound mystery for each half-hour episode, Smith and Sokolowski said in a video interview that they sometimes started with a site they found intriguing, and at other times with a sound. The sounds they chose can be challenging to identify; one example was recorded on Mars.“We hadn’t heard of another show that was dealing exclusively with sound as, like, the main narrative driver for a podcast,” Sokolowski said. “And it just seemed like a wonderful way to not only engage kids in the format, but also in the method and delivery and style and every aspect of the show.”Although the podcast industry is undergoing retrenchment, “Sound Detectives” is entering a children’s market that seems nowhere near saturation, said Megan Lazovick, a vice president at Edison Research, an analytics company in Somerville, N.J.Edison’s first national study of the children’s market (conducted recently with the advocacy organization Kids Listen) found that 29 percent of children ages 6 to 12 had listened to a podcast the previous month. That figure rose to 42 percent if their parents had also listened to one.Lazovick predicted that Burton’s association with “Sound Detectives” would be a big draw for parents. She mentioned how the new “Disney Frozen: Forces of Nature” podcast capitalized on the popularity of the “Frozen” film and its offshoots. “In the kids’ space, bringing in brands that are already trusted is sort of a no-brainer,” she said.Adam Sachs, SiriusXM’s senior vice president for entertainment, comedy and podcast programming, said that Burton was also a “huge factor” in the company’s commitment to the project.“Not only is he just a great podcast talent to work with, and we have a great track record with him,” Sachs said, “but he also has so much experience working in the kids’ content space that this sort of felt like the perfect opportunity for us to dip our toe in.” (SiriusXM declined to disclose the budget for “Sound Detectives.”)The podcast “appeals to the innate curiosity in a child about the world around them,” Burton said.Ariel Fisher for The New York TimesSokolowski, who has a background in documentaries (among them, the films “Ovarian Psycos” and “Very Semi-Serious”), and Smith, who has experience in comedy (including the podcasts “Judge John Hodgman” and “Bubble”), are both parents who wanted “Sound Detectives” to be as layered as possible. In addition to investigating physics and acoustics, the podcast includes information on auditory biology (even most adults probably aren’t aware that the ears influence taste) and one episode that examines how deaf people experience sound as vibration.The two women, who wrote the scripts with Isabelle Redman Dolce, also decided that the dialogue would be partly improvised.“I like the energy that it brings, and the ideas that will sort of come forth that would probably never emerge in any other way,” Smith said. They sought actors with improv experience, and Vinny Thomas, who voices Detective Hunch, proved to be an authority on animal characteristics (like the fact that whale sharks lead solitary lives).“Hunch is kind of like an eccentric uncle,” Thomas said, “and what eccentric uncle isn’t a know-it-all?”Jessica McKenna, who portrays the ever-curious Audie, improvised song interludes as well as lines, using her skills to collaborate with the composer Adam Deibert on the jazzy “Sound Detectives” theme. “It’s a really goofy niche I’ve carved out for myself,” she said.In addition to being an ear, Audie personifies a child who is maybe “solving the case before the adult,” Sokolowski said.The creators of “Sound Detectives,” who have built a podcast website with related sleuthing activities, intend young listeners to become just as engaged as Audie in the season-long investigation.“One of the attractive exercises that we’re engaging in here is getting kids to listen critically to the world, right?” Burton said. “To use their powers of discernment, which is one of my favorite words.” More