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    ‘Billions’ Season 7, Episode 11: Courting a Centrist Candidate

    Prince and Axe jostle for the attentions of Gov. Nancy Dunlop.Season 7, Episode 11: ‘Axe Global’“So, well, there’s that.” You said it, Axe. The penultimate episode of “Billions” has now come and gone, and with it one of the show’s final opportunities to really blow us away with a patented five-steps-ahead scheme that ends in a sudden twist turning everything on its ear. That is … not what we got.Don’t get me wrong — the five-steps-ahead thing is still alive and well in “Billions”-land. Mike’s story line hinges on how, or whether, to respond to the latest attack from Chuck and company: an all-out legal assault on his private holdings by the Southern District of New York. These are the only companies in which Prince Cap remains invested after Mike orders everything else dissolved to reduce vulnerability to Axe’s financial machinations. He has already voluntarily taken a huge loss as a defensive maneuver; to lose further, from that position, would make him look fatally weak.The information finds its way to the Prince brain trust via the young Southern District prosecutor Amanda Torre, who seems to act on her own out of disgust with Chuck’s vendetta. Given what we come to learn of his plan, though, it seems more likely she’s only playing the informant while still working for the team. (Honestly, the only thing that stops me from saying “She’s in on it” is the trust placed in her intel by Kate, who is no dummy. On the other hand … well, more on that later.)Using a football metaphor as elaborate as it is unnecessary — seriously, guys, the iocane powder scene from “The Princess Bride” would have served perfectly well — Mike games out the various scenarios. Maybe this is the attack, and they should meet it full on. Or maybe Chuck is counting on a big response, so they should hold their fire. Or maybe he expects them to hold their fire, so they should attack. And so on, and so on, and so on.Then Mike realizes that Chuck’s plan is to immerse him in the dilemma of which proverbial cup to drink from. While he and his brightest minds are trying to untangle the legal and financial implications of Chuck’s maneuver, Chuck and Axe are out there advancing the real plan, which involves an assault on the political front.Chuck and Axe are out to woo the popular centrist Democratic politician Nancy Dunlop away from endorsing Mike after he torpedoed her candidacy at that gathering of the rich and powerful in Episode 8. While wounded, she’s not politically dead, and her support — perhaps even as a running mate — would make Mike the heir apparent to the White House, security briefings and all. But, again, she’s not politically dead, and could conceivably win the presidency herself, provided she has the backing of a big-money player like Axe.The results are as disappointing to Chuck, Axe, Wags, Wendy and Taylor as they are scathing about the political establishment. Here’s a woman with strong centrist-Democrat bona fides, described by Chuck as “my beau ideal” of a candidate, openly offering her services to the highest bidder. That turns out to be Mike, who offers her the vice presidency. Their big debate about the first-strike use of nuclear weapons is apparently water under the bridge when political power is on the table.Cynicism really is the order of the day in this episode. In addition to courting Dunlop, Axe takes a run at rehiring his old crew. Wendy and Taylor are on board, obviously, as is the much-missed Mafee. Victor, Dollar Bill and Rian all show up to hear out the offer but decline, dutifully reporting it to Mike after the fact. Tuk and Ben Kim also turn it down, though they know their affection for Axe is too strong to do so in person; as such, they feel no need to flag the communication.That’s their mistake. Dollar Bill and Victor are rewarded for their candor and loyalty, while Ben Kim and Tuk are given the ax for failing to tattle and for lacking the fortitude to decline the offer in person. Such men can’t be trusted. As for Rian, she walks away from both outfits, choosing to quit Prince Cap and travel the world.That leaves the anomaly of Winston (Will Roland). Anchored to Prince Cap by its legal takeover of the algorithm he developed on company time, he extorts a huge payout to adjust it to Mike’s new low-risk parameters. We are left to wonder about the inclusion of this scene, which seems to do little beyond giving the actor Stephen Kunken more time to shine as the truly awful compliance officer Ari Spyros, and allowing Roland to recite some lyrics from Jethro Tull’s “Thick as a Brick.” (“Aqualung” gets all the attention, but real Tull-heads know.) Perhaps this dog will bark in the finale.Whatever may eventually happen with this almost vestigial story line, it doesn’t here. There’s no big prestige to whatever trick the writers Brian Koppelman, David Levien and Beth Schacter are pulling, not in this episode anyway. This one really is as simple as two groups vying for an alliance with a minor character we’ve seen only once, ahead of revealing her pick. Forgive me, but I still have visions of that fabulous shock ending from Season 2’s penultimate episode dancing in my head, a level of scheming, skulduggery and surprise that I want to see again before the curtain closes.We may yet get it. I simply refuse to believe that a show this beautifully bombastic won’t go out with a bang, in a finale with more twists and turns than a Mario Kart racetrack. Keep in mind that while the opposing armies seem pretty firmly established, they have every possibility of fracturing, reconfiguring or turning on themselves. Which leads to the biggest question of all, and no, it’s not whether Chuck and Axe can stop Mike Prince — it’s whether they will be back at each other’s throats if and when they do.Loose changeI don’t know about you, but opening an episode with a David Bowie cover of Bruce Springsteen’s “It’s Hard to Be a Saint in the City” and closing it with Procul Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale” is a guaranteed way to get on my good side.The laugh line of the night goes to this exchange between Mafee and Chuck, an odd couple if ever there was one, after Mafee repeatedly asks permission to smoke up during one of their meetings, claiming it sharpens his mind. “My doctor says I have a paradoxical reaction to weed,” he explains. “Your doctor says that,” Chuck replies, deadpan. “I mean, she’s not technically a doctor,” Mafee admits. “More of a spirit walker.”I’m broadly sympathetic with Mafee’s claim regarding the mind-expanding power of the devil’s lettuce, but “spirit walker”? He’d have been better off just saying, “The guy behind the counter at the gray-market shop where I bought it said it’s good for creativity.”I won’t soon forget Ari reciting “Jerusalem” to a deeply confused Winston and Kate during their meeting. I had no idea how badly I needed to hear Kunken proclaim “Bring me my chariot of fire” until I was actually hearing it.There’s a weird optics thing going on with Prince’s brain trust, right? Other than Prince himself, every member — Scooter, Philip, Kate, Bradford, even their informant Amanda — is a person of color. The Chuck/Axe/Wendy/Wags/Taylor alliance is as white as the surface of a mirror on Wags’s coffee table.That said, there are no doubt many cards yet to be played, and it would not surprise me at all if one or more of Mike’s minions is secretly plotting his downfall. As I alluded to earlier, my money is on Kate. Even aside from her co-signing of the possible double agent Amanda, her becoming this evil this quickly feels like a smoke screen for something else.On the other hand, Scooter betraying his liege lord at last would have an even more poetic ring to it. Philip seems like a true believer in the mission of making loads of money at this point, but in the past he’s been wise to what a weasel Mike really is, and in this episode he rather pointedly asks Scooter if he ever questions Mike’s will. As for Bradford, I don’t see him shivving his boss, but I also can’t imagine him sticking around if it seems he’s backing the losing horse.The point is that Mike’s support network does not seem as firm to me as it does to him. Doesn’t he learn this to his detriment in this very episode? His wife, Andy, leaves him for the mountain-climbing boyfriend he deliberately sacrificed on the altar of his own ambitions before Axe secured the guy’s liberation.Come to think of it, Mike’s near-total lack of emotional response to the apparent end of his marriage (campaign appearances aside) strikes me as a weakness in and of itself. Any man so fixated on a political prize that he breezes past rejection by the love of his life is vulnerable to attack from beyond his range of focus. Axe sneaking behind his back to free the mountain climber — and thus put the kibosh on the Princes’ marriage while the man was picking out tuxedos for his launch party — is in fact, a case in point.Tough to believe it took the show this long to set a scene in Rao’s, as it does for Axe and Dunlop’s big sales-pitch meeting. Perhaps they were saving the big guns for the final act.When Mike hears he has been invited to Camp David, he replies, “Boom,” with a subtle accompanying explosive sound effect. I’d say the show has made its stakes pretty clear. More

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    Movement and Memory: Dance Love and Dance Rejection in Ireland

    Michael Keegan-Dolan has collaborated with his partner Rachel Poirier on “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” coming to St. Ann’s Warehouse.“For some reason I wanted to be a dancer,” Michael Keegan-Dolan said of his younger self. “And then I realized I was really bad at it.” Keegan-Dolan, a choreographer and director, was talking on a video call from his home in Dingle, a remote spot on the southwest coast of Ireland where he lives with the dancer Rachel Poirier, and where his dance company Teac Damsa is based. “I was this kind of tragic character.”Sitting next to him, Poirier chuckled. “I didn’t see him dance then,” she said, “so thank God I don’t need to comment.”Keegan-Dolan’s dance-theater work “How to Be a Dancer in 72,000 Easy Lessons,” which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse on Saturday, springs from the tension between this thing he loved beyond all others — dance — and the realities of his body.In a mix of stories and dance, he and Poirier trace the dogged efforts of a young Irishman, based on Keegan-Dolan, now 54, coming of age in the 1980s and ’90s, struggling to find his place in the world of dance. It plays out against a backdrop of ingrained ideas about masculinity, I.R.A. violence and his feelings of being an unwelcome outsider in England, where he went to advance his training.“I was a kind of tragic character,” Keegan-Dolan said of wanting to dance but not being much good at it. Poirier didn’t see him perform back then, she said, “so thank God I don’t have to comment.” With the couple is their dog Chamalo.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesIn ballet school Keegan-Dolan was told that his pigeon-toed feet were hopelessly untrainable. In the show he recalls being asked by a teacher, with as much kindness as she can muster, “Is there anything else you might like to do with your life?” He can’t think of anything.His salvation, it turned out, would be choreography, and through it, theater. After his last appearance onstage as a dancer in 1994, he turned to making dances and eventually rose to acclaim as a choreographer, first in opera and later in ensemble works of his own.In 1997 he founded Fabulous Beast Dance Theater in the Irish Midlands, which, after its relocation to Dingle, became Teac Damsa. (The name means “house of dance” in Gaelic.) With those companies Keegan-Dolan has explored themes from Irish history and myth in well-received works that combine live music, theater and dance, like “The Bull,” “Rian,” a reimagined “Swan Lake,” and “Mám,” recently presented at Sadler’s Wells.In “How to Be a Dancer” he turns his lens inward. There are just two characters, the Dance Man and the Dancer, played by Keegan-Dolan and Poirier.The work’s intimate scale is partly a product of circumstance. “How to Be a Dancer” was created during the pandemic and rehearsed at a theater down the road from Keegan-Dolan and Poirier’s house. (It premiered in 2022 at the Gate Theater in Dublin.)For Susan Feldman, the artistic director at St. Ann’s, the small scale offered an opportunity. “I’ve been aware of Michael for many years,” she said in an interview, “and I’ve seen many of his works, but our space isn’t really conducive to presenting large dance pieces.”Feldman was struck by the honesty and humor of the show. “I was really interested that it would be him dancing,” Feldman said of Keegan-Dolan, who hasn’t performed in decades and appears in a series of wigs. “At first I didn’t even realize it was him.”Keegan-Dolan turns his lens inward in “How to Be a Dancer,” which he developed in Dingle during the pandemic.Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe material that makes up “How to be a Dancer” began to emerge before the pandemic, Keegan-Dolan said, but the period of forced inactivity gave him time to look back on memories that had dogged him for years. The number in the title comes from yoga practices that hold that 72,000 channels, known as nadis, circulate energy through the body.The stories in the show draw upon the kinds of memories — small revelations, as well as shameful or painful experiences — that help shape our inner lives. Keegan-Dolan describes sitting in his home in Dublin, the youngest in a large family, watching Gene Kelly on television as his mother ironed. And how he felt when he took his first dance class, at 18, towering over the barre in rugby sweats in a room full of “9-year-old girls in pink leotards,” he says. He should feel ridiculous, he adds, “but instead I feel like I am in exactly the right place.”After moving to London in the ’80s, a period of deadly bombings by the Irish Republican Army, he remembers being called a terrorist and worse. Often he reframes such painful experiences as absurdist comedy. But the sting is still there.Onstage, the stories roll out of him like well-worn yarns. And like all such tales, they contain some fabrication. “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story,” Keegan-Dolan said. He is a natural storyteller, lively and funny, “un peu cabot” (a bit of a show-off), as Poirier put it in her native French.The storytelling is layered with snippets of movement and dance, as when Poirier and Keegan-Dolan re-enact a happy-awkward dance at an Irish disco in the ’80s, while bullies hurl insults from the sidelines. “I wait for him to go,” Keegan-Dolan says of one of them, “and when he’s gone I start dancing again.” Nothing can deter his joy in movement — not even the fear of being punched in the face.Keegan-Dolan, a natural storyteller, said, “I like the idea that you can change a memory, like you can change a story.”Finbarr O’Reilly for The New York TimesThe more technical dancing in the show is left to Poirier, who has danced with the Rambert dance company and the Merce Cunningham Repertory Understudy Group among other troupes. She is the dancer he would have liked to have been, Keegan-Dolan said — along with Rudolf Nureyev, Fred Astaire and Jacques d’Amboise.The climax of the piece is a 15-minute solo performed by Poirier that the pair choreographed together to Ravel’s “Boléro.” Here, the memories that rise to the surface are hers.“There are bits of steps hanging there, dance memories,” Poirier said, “and the feeling of what it’s like to be a dancer, all the struggles and the lack of money, and the greatness and the poetry that comes with doing the job we do.”And even as she pushes through exhaustion, the freedom and force of her movements, sustained by Ravel’s music, suggest something about the power of dance, the thing that has kept Keegan-Dolan in its thrall all these years.“It connects you to a part of yourself that is otherwise totally inaccessible,” he said. “And you don’t even have to be good at it.” More

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    Late Night Sums Up Sidney Powell’s Plea Deal

    The former Trump lawyer could testify against the ex-president in one of his cases — “and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about,” Seth Meyers marveled.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.Get Out of Jail Free PleaSidney Powell, a former lawyer for Donald Trump, pleaded guilty in the Georgia election interference case, agreeing to testify against other defendants, possibly including the former president. Powell, who will avoid prison time, will also have to pay a $9,000 fine and write a letter of apology to the people of Georgia.On Thursday, Seth Meyers said it was still shocking to him that “when discussing a former president, I have to say ‘one of the four criminal cases’ — and you don’t even know which one I’m talking about.”“It could be the election interference case, the stolen documents case, the hush money case, the Georgia case, or, because the news is so insane, there could be some other criminal case you totally forgot about, like the investigation into what the hell he’s hiding under that bulky jacket. Looks like a grandpa trying to sneak a bunch of kids into an R-rated movie.” — SETH MEYERS“Being Trump’s craziest lawyer is like being the most divorced dad at an Embassy Suites.” — MICHAEL KOSTA, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“As part of the deal, Powell gets six years’ probation and appears to be cooperating with prosecutors in their case against the others, which includes Trump. Oh, man, the Chicken McNuggets are coming home to roost, aren’t they?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Just a letter? This woman actively tried to steal an election. The least she could do is apologize door to door like a sex offender.” — RONNY CHIENG, guest co-host of “The Daily Show”“She got treason down to an apology letter. Like, that’s an amazing negotiation. Is she still practicing? Because I might want to hire her.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just Don’t Edition)“After failing to get elected speaker of the House twice this week, congressman Jim Jordan said that he’s not dropping out and will keep running. When Jordan said that he was running a third time, even Nike was like, ‘Just don’t.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yep, Jordan wants to be speaker of the house so that he doesn’t have to go back to his old job of being the villain in ‘Scooby-Doo.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Republican congressman Carlos Giménez said yesterday that his office has received robocalls encouraging him to vote for Ohio congressman Jim Jordan. But then he remembered he actually saved Jordan’s number as ‘Scam Likely.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Kimmel got an interview with the “Bachelor in Paradise” star Sam Jeffries, who left the show after an extended bout of constipation.Also, Check This OutLayla Mohammadi in “The Persian Version.”Yiget Eken/Sony Pictures ClassicsMaryam Keshavarz’s semi-autobiographical film “The Persian Version” is about a rising Iranian American director and her tumultuous family life. More

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    ‘Free Your Mind’ Does Little to Challenge the Brain

    A huge new performance space in Manchester, England, opened with a show that trumpets the building’s possibilities, but doesn’t push any boundaries.There was a sense of momentous occasion on Wednesday at the opening of the new Aviva Studios performance space in Manchester, England. Political and cultural figures made sweeping declarations: This was Britain’s most significant cultural project since the Tate Modern opened in London over 20 years ago; the largest government investment in the arts since forever; the most important new theater space in Europe; and a generator of work, well-being and regeneration in Britain’s underserved north.“It’s a big day not just for Manchester, but for the U.K.,” said Lucy Frazer, Britain’s culture secretary, at a news conference several hours before the opening performance of “Free Your Mind,” a large-scale spectacle directed by Danny Boyle that inaugurated the building.The 144,000-square-foot Aviva Studios (named for an insurance company that gave around 35 million pounds, or $43 million, to the project) is the new home of Factory International, the organization that produces the Manchester International Festival. The building was designed with multipurpose and multidisciplinary intent by Ellen van Loon from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, the Dutch firm founded by Rem Koolhaas, costing “around £240 million,” or $290 million, according to a spokesman for the venue.There is a conventional 1,600-seat theater (“the Hall”) and a 700-foot long, 226-foot high performance space (“the Warehouse”) that can accommodate 5,000 people. The spaces can be used individually, combined or divided to create several distinct, acoustically isolated performance areas.The seats in the theater can be taken out for gigs; the floors can flood and drain; you could hang 100 cars from the ceiling of the Warehouse. “We want people to imagine seemingly impossible things,” said John McGrath, Factory International’s artistic director, during a tour of the building.The massive 144,000-square-foot space hopes to revitalize the arts scene in Manchester.Marco Cappelletti, via OMA and Factory InternationalLiving up to these ambitions in an opening show is a tall order, even for Boyle, the Academy Award-winning film director (“Trainspotting,” “Slumdog Millionaire”) who masterminded the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics. For “Free Your Mind,” he teamed up with the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy, the composer Michael “Mikey J.” Asante, the designer Es Devlin and the writer Sabrina Mahfouz to create a show loosely based on the “Matrix” movies, with their prescient themes of artificial intelligence taking over human life.At the news conference, Boyle talked about using “The Matrix” (directed by the Wachowski siblings) and its sequels as a widely available cultural reference, and “Free Your Mind” is mostly interesting as a statement of intent. It’s accessible, fun, visually spectacular and entirely unchallenging. But on the evidence of opening night, the show draws an impressively young, hip and diverse audience.“Free Your Mind” opens in the Hall, with a lecture delivered via an old-fashioned television screen and new-fashioned technology by the mathematician Alan Turing, who developed an early vision of modern computing. There is a quick history of Manchester as the home of the machine, and a question asked early: “Should we be worried that machines could think?”Dancers in trench coats appear, moving with robotic jerkiness and Neo (Corey Owens), the hero of “The Matrix,” emerges from the front row and is confronted by a dark-glasses-wearing, sinister group, before the scene changes to a cluster of faceless figures encased in stretchy white fabric that is attached to the ceiling. As they move in a circle, the tubes of fabric entwine like a maypole; visually arresting and oddly old-fashioned, reminiscent of the choreographer Alwin Nikolais’s experiments with form and fabric in the 1950s and 1960s.The show begins with a monologue delivered by an avatar of the mathematician Alan Turing, which the visual effects company Union VFX created from a photograph.Tristram KentonThe show’s movements are directed by the hip-hop choreographer Kenrick “H2O” Sandy.Tristram KentonThese figures are presumably the humans whose energy is being harvested by an evil artificial intelligence: the truth revealed by the omniscient Morpheus to Neo in “The Matrix.” A series of episodes move us through a meeting between Neo and the female warrior Trinity (Nicey Belgrave), confrontations with the police and the machine Agents who guard the Matrix, and the trial of the first robot to kill a human.Sandy’s movement language, drawn from hip-hop and street dance vocabularies, is boldly graphic, and he adeptly moves the 50-dancer cast in crisp, cascading formations, but there is little subtlety or variety either here or in Asante’s serviceable atmosphere-creating score. (The sound system, however, is fab, as is Lucy Carter’s lighting.) The only standout dance moment comes in part two, when Sandy himself, as Morpheus, performs a compelling solo of sweeping, martial arts-inflected motion, legs kicking high as his body arches backward.In the intermission, Matrix-agent figures were suspended around the huge lobby and bar space (rather more effectively Matrix-y than anything onstage), and white rabbit-headed figures danced with audience members. (A reference to the message, “Follow the white rabbit,” that appears on Neo’s computer screen in the movie, but surely also to the Jefferson Airplane song, “White Rabbit,” with its lyrics about mind-bending pills.)Part two, in the Warehouse, is more abstract, with Devlin’s spectacular set as the star: a huge cocoon of white Manchester cotton rounding out the angles of the space and enclosing the audience, mostly standing on each side of an enormous catwalk. Long narrow screens above this stage offer a montage of Manchester cultural history — footage of millworkers, British soap operas, references to pop bands like Joy Division — then show an incessant stream of images that blur into a kind of visual wallpaper as one scene after another plays out beneath.The show’s sets are by the designer Es Devlin.Tristram KentonPart two of “Free Your Mind” plays out on an extended catwalk in a part of Aviva Studios called the Warehouse.Tristram KentonThis section is presumably our present in which data, rather than energy, is being harvested from us humans. Amazon packages are delivered, Twitter ticks, the Apple logo and Google are referenced in Gareth Pugh’s costumes; dancers move while unable to take their eyes off their phones. Finally we get the battle between Neo and Smith, with a re-enactment of the famous bullet-stopping sequence in the original film, before a group finale to Asante’s portentous chords. The final image is of the screens, showing human figures effaced by vertical lines of code. (Oh dear.)The audience, which clearly knew and loved “The Matrix,” didn’t seem depressed by that, and gave the show a rousing ovation. “Free Your Mind” is a good night out and a decent demonstration of the new building’s capacities, even if its muddled mix of pure-dance display and clumsy propositions don’t say much about what it means to be human. Something stranger and more genuinely boundary-pushing would have been a welcome opening salvo from the often-visionary minds at Factory International. Perhaps that’s next.Free Your MindThrough Nov. 5 at Aviva Studios, in Manchester, England; factoryinternational.org. More

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    ‘The Vanishing Elephant’ Review: Bringing ‘a Thing of Wonder’ to Life

    This alluring spectacle at Stage 42, which aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older, makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and human beings.Can magic illuminate a life that was far from magical?Cahoots NI, a children’s theater company from Belfast, Northern Ireland, incorporates illusions into “The Vanishing Elephant,” a show that aims to dazzle audiences 8 and older while also exposing them to the harsh realities of wildlife captivity and human suffering. Although the results are sometimes mixed, this alluring spectacle makes powerful statements about the rights of both animals and people.Presented by the New Victory Theater at Stage 42 (the theater’s regular home is undergoing renovation), the production introduces its title character’s birth in Bengal, on the Indian subcontinent, with a sparkling special effect: a hand-held transparent box fills with light, revealing a mechanized shadow puppet that raises its trunk beguilingly. Written by Charles Way, the play does not mention the period, but adult theatergoers will recognize this as the era of Britain’s crushing rule of India.While the elephant is still very young, hunters tear her from her mother. Even though she wins the love of Opu, a young villager (played as a boy by Adi Chugh and as an aging man by Cliff Samara), he can’t stop a trainer (Madhav Vasantha) from treating her roughly. Opu, who names the elephant Janu, is in many ways her counterpart: a lonely, misunderstood orphan adopted by foreigners (in his case, an English couple). Only he and, later, another child realize that Janu is “a thing of wonder.”That also describes her onstage. Helen Foan, of the company Foan & Fortune, designed the life-size puppets that portray Janu after the opening scene. Gray-suited puppeteers essentially disappear as they manipulate these segmented forms, creating the impression that a real elephant, with sad eyes and a dusty trunk, is moving just feet away.Onstage, gray-suited puppeteers manipulate the elephant’s body, creating the impression that a real animal is moving just feet away from the audience.Melissa GordonThe cast members, who also narrate, execute their roles and Jayachandran Palazhy’s choreographed movement expertly, though it feels jarring to see Opu’s adoptive father, an imperious colonialist, be played by a Black man. The same actor, Ola Teniola, later gives a stirring performance as Jarrett, a harried American circus worker who takes charge of Janu after a wealthy woman (Shanara Gabrielle) transports her to the United States. Forced to train the elephant, now renamed Jenny, for the brutalities of the big top, Jarrett finally declares: “You aren’t meant to be here. Like I was never meant to be here.”Using skillful sleight of hand, cast members set up the circus, appearing to pull tall poles and an entire ladder from a small case. In a departure from Jenny’s sad situation, the surrounding music and crowd noise build a festive atmosphere. (Aoife Kavanagh is the production’s sound designer; she and MD Pallavi are its composers.) Circuses, of course, can be jubilant events, but the production, which is directed by Paul Bosco Mc Eneaney, veers toward contrived romanticism when it depicts a saintly Jenny putting her tormentors’ safety above her own.Inspired by the tale of the real elephant that Harry Houdini made disappear in his New York act in 1918, the show finally places Jenny onstage with that famous magician. Her arduous journey, and those of the play’s Black trainer and South Asian characters, would seem to invite somber reflection about freedom and its loss rather than a Bollywood-style finale. The rousing music and joyful choreography threaten to make Jenny vanish again, just when she’s become indelible.The Vanishing ElephantThrough Oct. 29 at Stage 42, Manhattan; newvictory.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Recaps Biden’s Big Day in Israel

    Kimmel joked that President Biden and Israel “go way back”: “You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.”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.Biden in WartimePresident Joe Biden flew to Israel on Wednesday, meeting with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.Jimmy Kimmel noted that White House officials say Biden prefers to meet other world leaders face to face, particularly in times of crisis — “which is a nice way of saying he still doesn’t know how to Zoom.”“It’s very rare for an American president to fly into a combat zone. They say the last time Biden was in this much danger, he was rolling with Corn Pop.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“President Biden arrived this morning in Israel, making him the first president to visit Israel during a time of war — which is pretty dangerous, but he should be OK once he makes it down the stairs.” — SETH MEYERS“The president gave a surprisingly strong speech. He told the Israeli people the United States stands with them. He condemned the disgusting attacks by Hamas and cautioned Israel to learn from the mistakes we made after 9/11. This kind of thing is where Biden really shines. He and Israel go way back. You know how Moses parted the Red Sea? Joe was the guy who dared him to do it.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wow, wise words from President Biden. Anytime an American president admits a mistake, it’s a big deal. So, Israel, please learn from us — don’t stay in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, tops.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Worse Than the First Edition)“Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan failed to secure enough votes today in the second round of voting to become House speaker and received only 199 votes. That’s worse than he did yesterday! If they keep doing votes, he’s eventually going to get to zero, and then he’ll fade away like Marty McFly in a family photo.” — SETH MEYERS“That’s like retaking the S.A.T. and finding out you got dumber somehow.” — JIMMY FALLON“But he’s not giving up. He’s going to keep on going until he loses unanimously.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingTwo “Tonight Show” audience members competed in a challenge on Wednesday to paint a portrait of Jimmy Fallon on a giant pumpkin as quickly as possible.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightBilly Porter will promote his upcoming album, “Black Mona Lisa,” on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutAdèle Haenel on the grounds of PS21 in Chatham, N.Y., where she was appearing in “L’Étang.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe French actress Adèle Haenel is in New York this week, performing with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne “L’Étang.” More

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    Burt Young, ‘Rocky’ Actor Who Played Complex Tough Guys, Dies at 83

    A former boxer from the streets of Queens, he became a scene stealer with his portrayals of mobsters, cops and working men with soul.Burt Young, a burly Queens-bred actor who leveraged a weary gravitas and bare-knuckled demeanor to build a prolific career as a Hollywood tough guy in films like “Chinatown,” “Once Upon a Time in America” and, most notably, “Rocky,” for which he was nominated for an Academy Award, died on Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 83.His death was confirmed by his daughter, Anne Morea Steingieser.With his bulldog build and his doleful countenance, Mr. Young amassed more than 160 film and television credits. He often played a mob boss, a street-smart detective or a bedraggled working man.But even when he played a villain, he was no mere heavy. Despite his background as a Marine and a professional boxer, Mr. Young brought layers of complexity to his work. The acting teacher Lee Strasberg, who once coached him, called Mr. Young a “library of emotions.”With his no-nonsense approach, he found a kindred spirit in another Hollywood tough guy, the filmmaker Sam Peckinpah, who directed him in “The Killer Elite” (1975), starring James Caan, and “Convoy” (1978), starring Kris Kristofferson and Ali MacGraw.“Both were mavericks and outlaws, with a deep respect for art,” his daughter said in a phone interview. “They understood each other because of the intensity and honesty Peckinpah demanded. He had no tolerance for lack of authenticity.”Throughout the early 1970s, Mr. Young made memorable appearances on television shows like “M*A*S*H” and in movies like the mob comedy “The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight” (1971) and “Cinderella Liberty” (1973), a drama about a sailor (James Caan) who falls in love with a prostitute (Marsha Mason).He also proved a scene stealer in a powerful, if brief, appearance in “Chinatown” (1974), Roman Polanski’s neo-noir masterpiece, as a cuckolded Los Angeles fisherman who becomes entangled in a tale of incest and murder.His true breakout came two years later, with “Rocky,” the story of a low-level hood and club boxer (Sylvester Stallone) who gets an unlikely bout with the heavyweight champion, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers). Mr. Young played the combustible Paulie, a butcher friend of Rocky’s and the brother of Adrian (Talia Shire), the introverted woman who becomes Rocky’s girlfriend.Although “Rocky” would propel Mr. Stallone, who also wrote the screenplay, to stardom, Mr. Young often said that he had been the bigger name in Hollywood before the project began. “I was the only actor that didn’t audition in the first ‘Rocky,’” he said in a 2017 interview with The Rumpus, a culture website. “And I got the most money for it.”Mr. Young remembered his first meeting with Mr. Stallone, in a studio commissary. “He kneels down next to me,” he recalled. “He says, ‘Mr. Young, I’m Sylvester Stallone. I wrote Rocky,’” — and then, Mr. Young said, he added, “You’ve got to do it, please.”“He’s trying to twist my arm,” Mr. Young said.The film, a gritty and often somber human drama directed by John G. Avildsen, was a far cry from its sometimes cartoonish sequels, all but one of them directed by Mr. Stallone, in which Mr. Young also appeared. “It really wasn’t a fighting story, it was a love story, about someone standing up,” he said of the first movie in a 2006 interview with Bright Lights Film Journal. “Not even winning, just standing up.”“Rocky” became a 1970s landmark. It received 10 Academy Award nominations, including Mr. Young’s for best supporting actor, and won three Oscars, including for best picture.“I made him a rough guy with a sensitivity,” Mr. Young later said of Paulie. “He’s really a marshmallow, even though he yells a lot.”Mr. Young as Paulie in the original “Rocky.” The character was prone to volcanic eruptions, which including smashing up his sister’s house with a baseball bat.Everett CollectionBurt Young — he adopted that name as an actor; sources differ on his name at birth — was born on April 30, 1940, in Queens. His father was a sheet-metal worker, an iceman and eventually a high school shop teacher and dean.Growing up in a working-class neighborhood in the Corona section of Queens, Mr. Young got an early taste of the streets. “My dad, trying to make me a gentler kid, sent me to Bryant High School in Astoria, away from my Corona pals,” he wrote in the foreword to “Corona: The Early Years,” (2015), by Jason D. Antos and Constantine E. Theodosiou.“Soon, however, I got thrown out, and it was on to St. Ann’s Academy in Manhattan, getting booted out after one term,” he continued. “Finally, it was the Marines at 16, my pop fibbing my age to get me in.”He started boxing in the Marine Corps and went on to a successful, if relatively brief, professional career under Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer and manager who shepherded the careers of Floyd Patterson and Mike Tyson. He had a win-loss record of about 17-1 — his own accounts varied — when he quit the ring.In his late 20s, he was laying carpets and doing other odd jobs when he became infatuated with a woman who tended bar, and who told him that she dreamed of studying acting with Mr. Strasberg. “I didn’t know who Lee Strasberg was,” he told Bright Lights. “I thought it was a girl.”Mr. Young set up a meeting for the two of them with Mr. Strasberg, the father of method acting, and ended up studying with him for two years. “Acting had everything I was fishing for,” he recalled. “In my life till then, I’d used tension to hold myself upright. Lee’s great gift to me was relaxation.”His many other film credits ranged from “Last Exit to Brooklyn” (1989), a harrowing adaptation of the scandalous 1964 novel by Hubert Selby Jr. about lost souls from the underside of midcentury Brooklyn, to the 1986 Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School.” Mr. Young also wrote and starred in “Uncle Joe Shannon” (1978), the story of a jazz trumpeter whose life implodes before he finds redemption.In addition to his daughter, Mr. Young is survived by a brother, Robert, and a grandson. His wife, Gloria, died in 1974.Mr. Young, second from left, performed onstage with Robert De Niro, center, and Ralph Macchio, third from right, in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” which opened at the Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986.Ron Galella Collection, via Getty ImagesMr. Young also had a long career in theater, including a role alongside Robert De Niro and Ralph Macchio in “Cuba and His Teddy Bear,” a play about a drug dealer and his son that opened at the Off Broadway Public Theater in Manhattan in 1986 and later moved to Broadway.Mel Gussow of The New York Times praised Mr. Young’s humor-laced performance as Mr. De Niro’s partner and lackey. He singled out one scene for praise in which Mr. Young, he wrote, was “sheepishly pulling up the wide waistband of his loud shorts while insisting that he is not fat but has ‘big bones.’”Mr. Young was an avid painter who sold his work, and whose moody portraits showed the influence of Picasso and Matisse. “I don’t think you can put me in a bottle as an actor or an artist,” he said in a 2016 video interview. “Perhaps the acting, I’m a little more structured.”In acting, he added, he zeroed in on precise emotional cues to express, say, greed or anger — to “fatten up” his characters.Little wonder, then, that his Paulie in “Rocky” leaped off the screen with volcanic eruptions — tossing his sister’s Thanksgiving turkey into an alley in a fit of rage, smashing up her house with a baseball bat.“Paulie was a pretty ugly guy many times,” he said. But, he added, “they miscast me.“I’m a lovable son of a gun. It’s just that I go astray here and there.” More

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    The Passion of Adèle Haenel, an Artist of Fierce Political Conviction

    Haenel, working with the choreographer-director Gisèle Vienne in “L’Étang,” is trying to “pierce through the surface of things.”The actress Adèle Haenel bristled when asked what drew her to radical art and politics. “The term ‘radical’ is used as a way to discredit protest discourse,” said Haenel, who is best known in the United States for the 2019 art-house hit “Portrait of a Lady on Fire.” That was also one of the last feature films she worked on. Since then, she has opted to dramatically alter the course of her life and career.Over the past few years, Haenel, 34, has become one of the most visible and committed faces of the #MeToo movement in France. In May, she wrote an open letter published in the influential French culture weekly Télérama to explain her absence from movie screens: “I decided to politicize my retirement from cinema to denounce the general complacency of the profession toward sexual aggressors and more generally the way in which this sphere collaborates with the mortal, ecocidal, racist order of the world such as it is.”She has, she told me, “a political understanding of the world, and my actions are consistent with it as much as possible. Calling someone radical is a way to say ‘She’s hysterical, she’s angry.’ I prefer coherent to radical.”I said that I had used the word in a positive way — to suggest bold choices that steered clear of the artistic mainstream. “I’m not annoyed with you,” Haenel said. “I’m reacting strongly, but it’s just to make myself clear.”Making herself clear is important to Haenel, who has an intense focus and frequently looked to the side as we talked, as if to better organize her thoughts away from an interlocutor’s gaze. She sometimes wrote down points she wanted to come back to later — and she did return to them.We were talking in a house on the bucolic campus of PS21: Performance Spaces for the 21st Century, in Chatham, N.Y., where Haenel was appearing in the director-choreographer Gisèle Vienne’s show “L’Étang.” The show comes next to New York City for performances at New York Live Arts, Saturday through Monday, as part of the Dance Reflections festival.By American theatrical standards, “L’Étang” (“The Pond”) is pretty close to radical, though. Based on a short play by the Swiss-German writer Robert Walser, the dance-theater piece locks Haenel and Julie Shanahan, a longtime member of Pina Bausch’s Tanztheater Wuppertal ensemble, in a helix of escalating tension performed in often excruciatingly slow motion, a tempo familiar to those who saw Vienne’s hypnotic “Crowd” last year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.Haenel takes on multiple roles, most notably that of Fritz, an adolescent who fakes suicide to attract his mother’s attention, and his two siblings; Shanahan plays their parents. The atmosphere is somewhat hallucinatory — Vienne has cited David Lynch among her influences — but it requires consummate precision, both physical and emotional.“We worked a lot on trying to pierce through the surface of things, and that’s not something you can do alone,” Haenel said. “Among the people onstage, we tried to better understand what’s implied, to understand a person’s feelings. You start anticipating when a person is going to stop moving. That’s a kind of communication I feel very strongly with Julie. We don’t need to talk about it endlessly; I just feel how long she’s going to take to do something.”For Vienne, effort is an integral part of the process. “What I do is very technical from a choreographic and interpretive standpoint,” she said in Chatham. “This virtuosity is the result of a long physical and theoretical training — sociology, philosophy and politics are important to understanding what we’re in the process of building, and the formal choices we make as we create the piece.”This rigor and commitment suit Haenel, as she passionately pursues a path in which artistic goals are intertwined with politics and life, a dedication that coalesces in her work with Vienne.The two met in 2018, when they were on the admissions committee for the National Theater of Brittany’s acting school. Haenel participated in a workshop with prospective students led by Vienne. “I loved it,” she said. “The improvisation was related to her show ‘Crowd’ and involved developing slow motion as a new sense, like seeing or hearing, that would allow you to live or experience things differently.”Making herself clear: Haenel, who has retired from the movie business, has collaborated with Vienne on a few projects. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang,’” Haenel said, “is the issue of violence.”Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesThe pair further explored that theme in “L’Étang,” which became their first official collaboration and, after a Covid 19-imposed delay, premiered in 2021. Over the course of our conversation, Haenel often circled back to what she referred to as de-hierarchization. In the show, for example, words, movement, music, sound and lighting all contribute to communicating information, feelings and emotions. This undermines the traditional place of text at the top of the theatrical pyramid, and makes us reconsider what carries meaning onstage.And “L’Étang” subverts the usual link between the performers’ body language and the way text is delivered — especially since the voices are often electronically distorted. (Adrien Michel did the sophisticated sound design.)“It’s about the friction between text and subtext,” Haenel said. She brought up an especially intense scene in which she and Shanahan are face to face. They barely move, but the effect is one of terrifying brutality. “Julie actually speaks very calmly, but for us it’s a crazy scene of aggression because there is a negation of the body language,” Haenel said, adding that something they explored with Vienne was dissociation. “We’ve achieved a level where we can have a body that looks almost stoned with a speeded-up voice.”The impact is intended to be as much political as it is aesthetic. “At the heart of ‘L’Étang’ is the issue of violence,” Haenel said, “and this violence is not about saying tough things, but about turning someone else’s speech into silence.”Haenel and Vienne’s partnership has bloomed since 2018. In August, they premiered a new show, “Extra Life,” also starring Theo Livesey and Katia Petrowick, at the prestigious Ruhrtriennale festival in Germany. They are also involved with public readings of work by Monique Wittig, the lesbian philosopher and activist who died in 2003 and has been enjoying a revival in France over the past few years. While in New York for “L’Étang,” Haenel is participating in a Wittig event on Wednesday at the Albertine bookstore, which its organizers conceived in collaboration with Vienne.“Talking about Monique Wittig is a political act of active memory creation,” said Haenel, who is trying to get new English translations of Wittig’s work off the ground. “I’d love to help her be read again in the United States, to be studied more.”Digging deep with Vienne and championing Wittig are of a piece for Haenel. “I’ve always tried to engage in a thinking process,” she said. “The idea is not so much to become better, but not to become calcified in an antiquated relationship to the world. What’s at stake is not whether that relationship is truer or not — I find the idea of a criteria of truth super-problematic — but whether it’s more alive or not. At least for me.” More