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    ‘Dodi & Diana’ Review: Two Relationships, Linked in the Stars

    A husband and wife who may be the “astrological doubles” of Princess Diana and Dodi Fayed head toward a crisis in this new play by Kareem Fahmy.In an expensive hotel room touched with old-fashioned elegance, a husband and wife growing ever antsier in each other’s company keep the floor-length drapes drawn against the City of Light. It is the tail end of August 2022, they are New Yorkers spending just three days in Paris, but the astrologer who prescribed the trip has ordered them to remain inside.“Stay in the room with the curtains shut until Jupiter completes its transit,” he told them. “No communication with the outside world. No email. No phones. No TV.”Jason, an investment banker with a disciple’s faith in his planetary adviser, is anxiously eager to follow the instructions, though he makes an exception for chatting up the bellhop, who he’s hoping will bring him some drugs. Samira, Jason’s actor wife, is semi-willing to obey the rules, but not to the extent of ignoring her phone, which she uses on the sly, trading messages with her rep about a career-changing new screen role.She is understandably skeptical of the notion that she and Jason are “the astrological doubles of Diana Spencer and Dodi Fayed” — though that is apparently why they have been sent to the Ritz Paris, where they are awaiting a convergence in the 72 hours before the 25th anniversary of the Paris car crash that killed the Princess of Wales and her boyfriend, the son of the hotel’s owner.In “Dodi & Diana,” Kareem Fahmy’s new two-hander at Here, car crash is the rather crass operative metaphor — as in, Samira and Jason’s relationship of seven years is headed for a smashup. From the start, it’s evident that something is badly wrong with the would-be intimacy between them, and it becomes increasingly clear that they have very different dreams.For one thing, Jason (Peter Mark Kendall) wants loads of babies, and Samira (Rosaline Elbay) wants to keep building toward stardom while she’s still young enough to get the gigs. Already she’s reached the stage where she’s a little bit famous, and recently she and Jason endured an excruciating episode with the tabloids — a private horror involving him that made lurid headlines only because of her nascent celebrity.“The more famous you get,” he says, “the more our lives become a minefield.”Directed by Adrienne Campbell-Holt for her company, Colt Coeur, “Dodi & Diana” is a sort of pre-mortem of a relationship — a much longer romance than the princess and Fayed enjoyed, yet with assorted elements in common: not just fame and wealth, seductive even at sub-stratospheric levels, but also race, bigotry and otherness. Fayed was born in Alexandria, Egypt; Samira in the United States, to Egyptian immigrant parents. She and Jason, who is white and Canadian, never have found a comfortable, trusting way to live with their racial and cultural differences.As characters, Diana and Dodi exist for most of the play in voice-over, between scenes, when lighting (by Eric Norbury) and sound design (by Hidenori Nakajo) evoke their visit to Paris in August 1997: the pop of flashbulbs, the sweep of headlights, the roar of engines going too fast.Eventually, Diana (Elbay) and Dodi (Kendall) materialize — glamorously, aside from a jarring clip in her hair — in the hotel room. (The set is by Alexander Woodward, the costumes by Dina El-Aziz.) It’s the high point of the play, partly because of a question that the persecuted Dodi asks Diana — about the paparazzi, or the British people, or both: “Do you intend to defend me to them?” Shades of Sussexes to come.Any parallel between the play’s two couples is forced, though. One relationship is intrinsically compelling, even in this imagined version of it, while the other has too little heft to hold our interest. Whether Samira and Jason stay together is a question without urgency.So the car-crash metaphor feels unseemly — borrowed from the horrific deaths of real people, but for what?Dodi & DianaThrough Oct. 29 at Here, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    Two Soho Rep Directors to Leave at End of 2022-23 Season

    Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, who have directed the company with Cynthia Flowers since 2019, will depart to focus more on their own creative output.Soho Rep, the 65-seat Off Off Broadway theater in Lower Manhattan that has long been a home for experimental, formally inventive work, will see a leadership change as Sarah Benson and Meropi Peponides, two of its three directors, step down at the end of the 2022-23 season.Both Benson and Peponides, who have led the theater alongside Cynthia Flowers since a shared directorship was put into place in 2019, said they were leaving Soho Rep in part to focus more on their own creative work. Benson said she wanted to do more directing, while Peponides said she planned to dedicate more time to Radical Evolution, a producing collective she co-founded in 2011 that focuses on exploring the complexities of the mixed-identity existence.“It came time to make a choice about where to devote my time and energy,” Peponides said. “Doing both was becoming trickier and trickier.”A search committee, led by Soho Rep’s board chair, Victoria Meakin, and the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, has been formed to appoint two new directors, Soho Rep said. Peponides and Benson will remain in their roles through the end of the season next summer.Benson, 44, has been with the theater for 15 years, serving as artistic director from 2007 until 2019, when Soho Rep adopted the shared leadership model. During her tenure, she directed the world premieres of Jackie Sibblies Drury’s searing comedy-drama “Fairview,” a co-commission by Soho Rep that won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Jacobs-Jenkins’s formally inventive comedy “An Octoroon”; and Lucas Hnath’s black comedy “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney.”Peponides, 38, started at the theater as a producer in 2014, producing 18 new plays over her eight years and overseeing Soho Rep’s writer-director lab that is led by the playwrights William Burke and Drury.Under Benson, Peponides and Flowers’s leadership, Soho Rep has worked to improve pay equity through Project Number One, a job creation program developed early in the pandemic that brings artists into the organization each season as salaried staff members with benefits. Two of the three plays in the theater’s 2022-23 season, “Public Obscenities” by Shayok Misha Chowdhury and “The Whitney Album” by Jillian Walker, were written by artists who were in the first class of Project Number One.“We had three world premiere commissions in this year’s season,” Peponides said. “A huge part of the work Sarah and I have been seeding over the past several years is now coming to fruition, so this felt like the moment to step aside and hand it over while it was in great shape.” More

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    Stand-Up Sets Where You Can Choose Your Own Adventure

    Two specials let audiences click to determine which jokes they hear. It’s both an innovative way to add meaning and a further fragmenting of the culture.In his new special, the comic Danny Jolles grouses about the magician David Blaine, famous for stunts like burying himself alive or holding his breath for 17 minutes. Jolles describes him as an insufferable psychopath: “At some point we have to take a stand. He’s not doing magic. He’s just trying to kill himself.”You only see this quip if you click the phrase “I hate David Blaine” that pops up onscreen at the start of his bit. If you choose the alternative, “I love David Blaine,” then you get Jolles praising Blaine as the greatest living human and bemoaning those who take him for granted. “Everyone’s like, What is David Blaine doing today? The impossible. And everyone just moved on.”Jolles’s “You Choose” is part of an adventurous new trend toward interactivity in specials, with the potential to be the most dystopian comedy innovation since the laugh track. Such a high-tech development is not as bizarrely futuristic as the hologram of Keenan Thompson that performed at the Laugh Factory in Chicago last weekend, but it could be more consequential.In his 2019 Netflix special “Lobby Baby,” Seth Meyers tiptoed into giving viewers control over the final edit, allowing them the option of clicking a box and skipping over political material. But two new specials — the one by Jolles, which premiered Thursday on YouTube, and Vishnu Akella’s “For You,” which became available on his site over the summer — are more comprehensive experiments.Vishnu Akella’s special “For You” digs into viewers’ pop culture knowledge and demographics for its interactive approach.Every time Jolles introduces a subject, two choices appear at the bottom of the screen. Which one you take dictates the joke in a way that enables you to avoid opinions you might disagree with. Akella uses a similar device, though it asks less about your opinions than your knowledge of references or your demographic. As a result, boomers will get different punch lines (not to mention larger fonts) than millennials will.These specials are the culmination of two worrying hallmarks of the culture today: how fragmentation incentivizes pandering to niches or fandoms, and the cheap, double-edged appeal of interactivity, a useful artistic tool that often becomes a crassly commercial one. These comics are not only aware of all this, but they also adopt the posture of a skeptic more than an evangelist. Their specials are sly enough to satirize themselves.As is so often the case, David Letterman got there first. In the early 1980s, he often simultaneously spoofed and exploited the overhyping of technological innovation, particularly in themed episodes like “the custom-made show,” written by Chris Elliott and Matt Wickline. It began with a populist introduction: Letterman said he was taking power away from network executives and giving it to the people, letting them decide everything from what he would wear to the order of guests. The studio audience’s response to multiple-choice questions, recorded by an “applause meter,” was the key metric. Of course, the crowd’s choices gave Letterman a chance to sarcastically marvel about the wonders of democracy.It’s asking too much of these young comics to display Letterman’s light touch, but also, our current internet age demands a blunter tone. This reveals itself less in the onstage jokes by Akella than in what comes in between — the questions for the viewer and the onscreen text that riffs on them. If you click on Gen Z when asked about your age, the script will ridicule you for easily giving up data to TikTok.Akella tells subtle jokes that mock the stupidity of generational stereotypes while emphasizing the illusion of choice. At one point, he gives you the option to cancel him if his joke offends you, but if you click on the box to do it, he questions the entire framework of “cancel culture.” This is smart stuff, the form perfectly integrated into the content.His fundamental theme is how social media pigeonholes us and mines our data, a condescending phenomenon that treats us less like human beings than abstractions made up of marketable information. Before the closer, a message informed me that it was removing references I wouldn’t get and adding “palatable jokes about race so you can feel like an ally.” Onstage, Akella tells us he feels sad that his generation is being treated like lab rats, and I believe him. There’s a sense of constraint and even anxiety about his stand-up persona. His voice only becomes comically vivid in the impersonal text onscreen.Phillip OrtizJolles is a more experienced performer, and his first special, also released on YouTube, displayed an endearing puppyish charm. His new, pricklier show deconstructs that persona, telling the audience right from the start how he ingratiates himself, before asking them how they want their takes delivered.In her fascinating recent New Yorker article on the choose-your-own-adventure books, Leslie Jamison made the case for a sympathetic reading of their appeal rooted in the freedom to go back and change course, or as she put it, “the revocability of it all.”Jolles taps into this by making it easy for the viewer to rewind bits to see alternative versions (much more so than Akella). But he also pointedly creates polar opposite perspectives. These contrasting views are clearly designed to make a point, but doing so shoehorns him into an argumentative posture that doesn’t always fit his comedy.In taking an extreme position, Jolles can seem like he’s doing a bad Bill Burr impression. Usually, one of his takes is funnier than the other. Is that the one he actually believes? I’m not sure, though I suspect that deep down he’s a die-hard David Blaine fan.Jolles isn’t trying to appeal to both sides, but to show how comedians manufacture opinions to fit the joke — that everything is performance. He says he supports transgender rights, then undercuts himself by saying he knows that position will get applause. He illustrates how artists manipulate audiences with camera trickery and mentions that he doesn’t like outrage over comments made many years ago. None of this is real, he says, before adding, “Why would you trust me?”He’s onto something. Comedy audiences overestimate authenticity, a trait easily faked. But there’s also a touch of the juvenile Holden Caulfield rolling his eyes about phonies here.If comedians adjust material to make a better joke, does that invalidate everything they say? If art relies on dishonesty, does that mean there’s no truth to be found in it? This is the kind of casual nihilism that crosses comedic genres, showing up in the misanthropic cynicism of Tim Dillon and the artful irony of Bo Burnham. It’s often its own kind of pandering.To answer the question posed by Jolles, people trust comedians for all kinds of reasons, but primarily because jokes, well told, are powerful. They can lighten a day or destroy your confidence. They express taboo thoughts, offer insights and reveal the world, even when built on fabrications. The comic Rich Hall struck a sensible balance when he wrote in his new memoir, “All jokes are manipulative, and audiences laugh when you reach a truthful kernel with the lie.”Even if you don’t reach it, trying matters. So does the kind of ambition behind those attempts. The sturdiest connections built with audiences don’t occur when you give them exactly what they want, but something they didn’t know they wanted. There’s no stopping technology, but for artists to use it well, they must look beyond the screen. Deep down, people like to be challenged. And in the long run, the audience trusts comics when comics trust the audience. More

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    ‘House of the Dragon’: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke on Forgiveness and Favorite Drinks

    In a joint interview, Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.This interview includes spoilers for the first eight episodes of “House of the Dragon.”By the time Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke debuted, in the sixth episode, in HBO’s fantasy smash “House of the Dragon,” you had seen them before. Well, their characters, anyway.D’Arcy and Cooke play Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and Queen Alicent Hightower, childhood friends driven apart by a power struggle over who will inherit the Iron Throne from King Viserys (Paddy Considine), Rhaenyra’s father and Alicent’s husband.But because of the story’s unusual structure — the show covers decades in its first season, during which Rhaenyra and Alicent grow up and have children of their own — their roles were played by the younger performers Milly Alcock and Emily Carey in the first five episodes. As the time for the cast switch-over drew closer, D’Arcy grew more and more nervous.“I found that bit the most pressurized point of the whole job so far,” D’Arcy said during a conference call from London earlier this week. “The audience only gets to meet you in a state of grief, having just lost the person they spent five hours with. The closer we got to inflicting that on people, the more stressed I felt.”Cooke looks at it a bit differently. “Those were the halcyon days,” she said. “We weren’t confronted with millions and millions of people watching our performances week after week. Usually, you do a film, it comes out, it goes away.”“No one watches it!” D’Arcy chimed in, prompting raucous laughter from both actors — a common occurrence in the conversation.“No one watches it” is certainly not a problem faced by “Dragon,” a “Game of Thrones” prequel that has thus far has lived up to the blockbuster success of its predecessor. The complicated relationship between D’Arcy’s and Cooke’s characters is the primary engine of the story, and that centrality, along with a series of charming promotional videos and appearances, has made the actors among the show’s most popular performers. Even D’Arcy’s favorite drink order — “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” — now has its own online fan base.Return to Westeros in ‘House of the Dragon’HBO’s long-awaited “Game of Thrones” prequel series is here.The Princess and the Queen: Emma D’Arcy and Olivia Cooke, who play the grown-up versions of Rhaenyra Targaryen and Alicent Hightower, talked about the forces that drive their characters apart — and pull them together.A Man’s Decline: By the eighth episode of the season, Viserys no longer looks like a proud Targaryen king. Paddy Considine discussed the character’s transformation and its meaning.The New Littlefinger?: Larys Strong, a shadowy character, burns bright as a major player in the show. Here’s his back story.A Rogue Prince: Daemon Targaryen, portrayed by Matt Smith, is an agent of chaos. But “he’s got a strange moral compass of his own,” the actor said.Seeing how well the two actors get along, it is easy to forget that they play bitter enemies. At the end of the show’s most recent episode, there was a hint that the cold war between their characters might finally thaw. But given the dying king’s garbled prophecy and the patriarchal system that seems determined to divide Rhaenyra and Alicent, their renewed peace appears to be in peril.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Rhaenyra and Alicent have been estranged for the duration of your time on the show, but there’s a moment near the end of this week’s episode when their former closeness seems to have been rekindled.OLIVIA COOKE Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible. They’ve not seen each other for such a long time, since Alicent attacked Rhaenyra [during Episode 7]. Alicent has been alone in that castle with all these men, and she’s probably been festering and thinking about that for a very, very long time.EMMA D’ARCY We had an amazing conversation, in advance of shooting the episode, about it being sort of set in a hospice [for the dying King Viserys]. Proximity to death can alter your chain of priorities; it offers a canvas for forgiveness where there wasn’t one previously. Going in, we really wanted to make sure that that moment at the end felt honest, that we could buy that these two people get there. It’s not an “all is forgiven” moment, but it’s a gesture to forgiveness.COOKE They’re really seeing each other for the first time since they were children — probably since the first time Rhaenyra found out that Alicent was marrying her dad. It’s unification in grief, and recognizing each other’s inner child in this loss.It feels like a small moment of freedom for two characters who’ve been forced into their roles by the men in their lives.COOKE These characters are being watched all the time. They’re always operating under the constraints of this straitjacket and learning how to maneuver within it. In this episode, it’s about taking chances and jumping on an opportunity Alicent may never get again — desperation for a friend and ally.D’ARCY It’s no coincidence that the male figures with power within this court have created conditions where Alicent and Rhaenyra’s relationship becomes untenable. It’s no coincidence that patriarchal structures look to divide and conquer strong female relationships. They would be the ultimate allies because there’s no one else who can truly understand what it is to be the oppressed party. Patriarchal structural oppression operates in such a multiplicitous and slimy way. That understanding can’t be conjured in someone who doesn’t live through it.In a scene earlier this season, Alicent physically attacked Rhaenyra. “Even in fury, there is still a desire to be as close to one another as possible,” Cooke said.HBOMilly and Emily have discussed the possible presence of a sublimated romantic or sexual spark between Rhaenyra and Alicent. Does that motivate the characters, even as adults?COOKE I don’t know if Alicent knows what it feels like to feel those things now. There’s layers and layers of repression; sexuality and lust are probably a prehistoric, sedimentary layer by now. From Alicent’s point of view, I don’t think she’s that self-aware, in terms of what she’s feeling, to know what’s propelling her to reach out to Rhaenyra again.D’ARCY That sort of erotic energy is very present in their early relationship. I think Rhaenyra is primarily motivated by a deep desire to be known and seen. The hurt and pain is so dominant that I don’t know if there’s a space, at this point, for a conscious interaction with sexual lust, but she definitely yearns for the old physical intimacy that they shared. It’s different from what she shares with her current husband and her children. A different form of contact.Olivia, I’ve seen a lot of debate over the end of this episode, when Viserys mistakes Alicent for Rhaenyra and tells her about his ancestor Aegon the Conqueror’s prophecy of a messianic “Prince That Was Promised.” She mistakenly believes Viserys is referring to their son, Aegon. Does she fully believe it, or is she hearing what she wants to hear?COOKE We spoke a lot about this. There was a massive amount of relief when Alicent told Rhaenyra, “You will make a great queen.” She’s so over the fighting and having this ball of bitterness and anxiety in her stomach: Just let it go, Rhaenyra is the heir, this is fine.When Viserys says that, I genuinely think she thinks he’s talking about Aegon, her son. And I think she’s furious. She’s like, “After all that?” But Viserys is on his deathbed; that’s what he requested, and so she must follow it through. Whether that’s unconscious wishful thinking, I don’t know, but that’s how I played it.Emma, this is shifting gears pretty dramatically, but there’s a video clip of you telling Olivia that your favorite drink is “a Negroni Sbagliato with prosecco in it” that went viral on TikTok and Twitter and inspired a number of articles. Is this something you’re aware of?D’ARCY I thought it’d be quite funny to be drinking one right now, but I’m not. [Laughs.] I keep thinking I should tell my mum that I’ve become a meme in the hope that she’ll be happy for me, but I’d have to explain what a meme is, and I’ve decided it’s too much effort.I feel so embarrassed. Because in those interviews, when we’ve been at it for six hours, I’m honestly only trying to make Olivia laugh.COOKE [Laughs.] Is that right?D’ARCY No, I’m obviously doing Campari’s next campaign.COOKE I’d be like, “Ten million pounds, please!”Speaking not as your characters but as yourselves: Whom would you side with? Alicent or Rhaenyra?COOKE It’s funny: The whole point of this story is that these two women have been split apart and people have been forced to take sides. Now the whole internet is doing the exact same thing, even though “House of the Dragon” is supposed to be a cautionary tale. I’d like to think that I wouldn’t pit either of them against each other. [Pause.] But yeah, probably Rhaenyra. [Both laugh.]D’ARCY I don’t know the answer to that. I’m married to my uncle. Who’s to say? More

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    Dark Clouds Over London Stages

    Productions of “John Gabriel Borkman” and “Blues for an Alabama Sky” conjure bleak atmospheres in two playhouses.LONDON — Loss and defeat hang heavy over two recent London theater openings: They are entirely different in content but share an emphasis on despair.In “Blues for an Alabama Sky,” the American play from Pearl Cleage now in a revelatory production at the National Theater, inhabitants of 1930s New York yearn for a better, kinder life elsewhere. (The show runs through Nov. 5.) The Bridge Theater revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “John Gabriel Borkman,” on view until Nov. 26, gives us a title character who speaks excitedly of the “new life” he seeks, though his attempts to forge a fresh start lead only to death.Of the two shows, “Blues” is especially powerful, in what must be the staging of a playwright’s dreams: a starry production at a prestigious playhouse from a director, the fast-rising Lynette Linton, fully attuned to the work’s soulful rhythms. Premiered in Atlanta in 1995 and revived there in 2015, the play focuses on three people sharing adjacent Harlem apartments in a building that, in Frankie Bradshaw’s expansive design, reaches the full height of the auditorium.The neediest of the trio is Angel (Samira Wiley), a nightclub singer who has lost her job and her boyfriend, and has taken seriously to the bottle. “What kind of dreams am I going to have?” she asks her roommate, Guy (Giles Terera), a gay costume designer whom Angel calls “Big Daddy.” (The play often recalls Tennessee Williams, and you can easily see Angel as a Black variant on Maggie the Cat and also Blanche DuBois.)Guy’s response is to look toward Paris, a city that is home to the expatriate Black entertainer Josephine Baker: If that legendary American-born performer can find her way in Europe, so can Guy. Early on, he raises a champagne glass from Manhattan to the new career that surely awaits him designing for the Folies Bergère. That events don’t necessarily turn out as people hope is a given. Fate deals Angel an entirely separate hand, and Guy’s reveries about La Bakaire, as he refers to Baker, are pulled up short by racism and homophobia closer to home.Adekoluejo’s character in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement.Marc BrennerAcross the hall from Angel and Guy lives the more practical Delia (the wonderful Ronke Adekoluejo), who offers to teach Angel to type: Secretarial skills will provide useful employment while Angel, reeling from her dismissal from her nighttime job, gets back on her feet.As sensible and focused as her neighbors are mercurial, Delia, in her indrawn way, is a pioneer. She is on the front line of a nascent American abortion rights movement and is working to open a clinic nearby. “I’m not trying to make a revolution,” she says. “I’m just trying to give women in Harlem the chance to plan their families.”Complicating matters are the men who come into these women’s lives. Delia enters into a relationship with Sam (a warmhearted Sule Rimi), a doctor who supports her quest for female empowerment but would really rather take her out for a night on the town. Angel, in turn, catches the eye of the churchgoing Leland (Osy Ikhile), an Alabama native who offers care and comfort but doesn’t have much time for the flamboyant effeminacy of Angel’s beloved Guy.Will Angel forsake her deep friendship for romance? Wiley, a Juilliard-trained actress and established TV name, expertly catches the shifting moods of a restless soul who is of two minds about the virtues of domesticity; she also lends a terrific singing voice to those snatches of the blues that punctuate the production. Terera is in full command as the changeable Guy, a dreamer who is flighty one minute, fully alert the next, and who knows all too well that his sexuality is viewed as an “abomination.”Guy sees the world around him as “tawdry and tainted” and can’t wait to sail first-class to freedom in France, although we never find out if his wishes are fulfilled. We’re left wishing a gentler future for the play’s central characters, whose openheartedness may, with luck, see them through the obstacles that lie in their way.It’s difficult to think quite so generously about John Gabriel Borkman, the disgraced former bank chief executive who gives Ibsen’s 1896 play its title. But Lucinda Coxon’s vigorous new version, presented without intermission in a fleet staging by Nicholas Hytner, invests the title character with a fantasy life that borders on madness. Back home after serving a five-year prison sentence for fraud, he spends his time rehearsing past grievances and rhapsodizing about rebuilding his life.Simon Russell Beale and Lia Williams in “John Gabriel Borkman” at the Bridge Theater.Manuel HarlanIt’s possible in the production’s spartan contemporary setting — Borkman’s wife, Gunhild (a blistering Clare Higgins), is watching daytime TV as the play begins — to see the title character as a Nordic variant of Bernie Madoff, or other moneymen who met a grievous end. Rich in rhetoric, Borkman compares himself to “a great wounded eagle watching the vultures scavenge my plans.”In fact, as the character is played by the great Simon Russell Beale (a Tony winner in June for “The Lehman Trilogy”), I was reminded of Shakespeare’s Lear, a onetime role for Beale. There’s a Shakespearean grandeur to the deluded Borkman as he staggers shaggy-haired into the snow, speechifying to the night sky like Lear cast out into the storm.And just as Lear recognizes too late the depth of his youngest daughter’s love, Borkman comes belatedly to an awareness that it was his sister-in-law Ella (a coolly furious Lia Williams) who loved him fully. The two face off in the upper floor of the Borkman house in a prolonged confrontation that is the highlight of the play. “You killed love in me. Can you even understand what I’m saying to you?” Ella says in an emotional outburst that Borkman dismisses as “hysterics.”The Borkmans’ son, Erhart (Sebastian de Souza), is a student who has taken up with a flamboyantly dressed older woman, Fanny (Ony Uhiara), much to the chagrin of his family. Fanny speaks of whisking the young man off to Rome with the same enthusiasm that Guy, in “Blues,” speaks tantalizingly of Paris: Anything, you get the feeling, would be preferable to the wintry drear that is their daily lot.“Be happy!” Ella says when she wishes Erhart farewell, “as happy as you can!” In Ibsen’s compellingly grim world, that’s probably not very happy at all.Blues for an Alabama Sky. Directed by Lynette Linton. National Theater, through Nov. 5.John Gabriel Borkman. Directed by Nicholas Hytner. Bridge Theater, through Nov. 26. More

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    Late Night Confirms Alex Jones Is a Loser

    Stephen Colbert was grateful that “by the grace of God, sometimes bad things happen to Alex Jones” on Wednesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The Biggest LoserA jury in Connecticut ordered Alex Jones to pay nearly $1 billion in damages to families of eight Sandy Hook victims and one F.B.I. agent on Wednesday.Stephen Colbert couldn’t contain his glee on Wednesday night’s “Late Show.”“And tonight I come to you with a spring in my step, a song in my heart, emotionally and spiritually refreshed. Because, you know how as humans, we have to accept the fact that sometimes bad things happen to good people? Well, by the grace of God, sometimes bad things happen to Alex Jones.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s a lot of money! You heard that right — billion with a capital ‘Byeee.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I guess the good guys just won the Infowars, is what happened there.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Walker on Eggshells Edition)“The latest on Herschel is that abortion that the mother of one of his sons said he paid for, she said she had to badger him to even get the money. She said she told him, ‘Listen, both of us did this. We both know how babies are made,’ which I’m not so sure Herschel does. Because I’m not so sure Herschel knows how bread is made.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Maybe Herschel doesn’t even know what ‘pro life’ means. Maybe he was like, ‘I was a pro football player — this is my life. Pro life!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Aah, so he’s cool with abortion as long as it doesn’t cost him. So he’s socially liberal, fiscally conservative, complete a-hole.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The election in Georgia is now less than a month away. Walker doesn’t intend to pull out. Pulling out isn’t his thing.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingCamila Cabello and Jimmy Fallon guessed song titles using only emojis for clues on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightTrevor Noah will surely talk about signing off from “The Daily Show” during his Thursday appearance on “The Tonight Show.”Also, Check This Out“All I’m interested in is freedom as a performer, and I don’t get that opportunity very often,” Jamie Lee Curtis said. “But the times I’ve been able to be free, I’m on fire.”Ryan Pfluger for The New York TimesJamie Lee Curtis’s 44-year career has afforded her the freedom to choose roles she’s happy to return to and new ones she can sink her teeth into. More

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    in Theater

    Angela Lansbury, TV’s Favorite Sleuth on ‘Murder She Wrote,’ Dies at 96

    She was a Hollywood and Broadway sensation, but she captured the biggest audience of her career as the TV sleuth Jessica Fletcher.The New York Times sat down with Angela Lansbury in 2010 to discuss her life and accomplishments on the stage and screen. She spoke with us with the understanding the interview would be published only after her death.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAngela Lansbury, a formidable actress who captivated Hollywood in her youth, became a Broadway musical sensation in middle age and then drew millions of fans as a widowed mystery writer on the long-running television series “Murder, She Wrote,” died on Tuesday at her home in Los Angeles. She was 96.Her death was announced in a statement by her family.Ms. Lansbury was the winner of five competitive Tony Awards for her starring performances on the New York stage, from “Mame” in 1966 to “Blithe Spirit” in 2009, when she was 83, a testament to her extraordinary stamina. She also received a special Tony for lifetime achievement at this year’s ceremony. Yet she appeared on Broadway only from time to time over a seven-decade career in film, theater and television in which there were also years when nothing seemed to be coming up roses.Ms. Lansbury as Madame Arcati in the 2009 production of “Blithe Spirit” with, from left, Jayne Atkinson, Christine Ebersole and Rupert Everett. The role won Ms. Lansbury her fifth Tony.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe English-born daughter of an Irish actress, she was just 18 when she landed her first movie role, as Charles Boyer’s cheeky Cockney servant in the thriller “Gaslight” (1944), a precocious debut that brought her a contract with MGM and an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actress. She received a second Oscar nomination in 1946, for her supporting performance as a dance-hall girl in “The Picture of Dorian Gray.”It was a giddy start for a young woman who at 14 had fled wartime London with her mother and had only recently graduated from New York’s Feagin School of Dramatic Art. Ms. Lansbury imagined she might have a future as a leading lady, but, she said in a New York Times interview in 2009, she was not comfortable trying to climb that ladder.“I wasn’t very good at being a starlet,” she said. “I didn’t want to pose for cheesecake photos and that kind of thing.”It might also have been a matter of bones. Her full, round face was not well suited for the dramatic lighting of the time, which favored the more angular looks of stars like Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn. In any event, she appeared in many a forgettable film before breaking out as the glamorous, madcap aunt in “Mame” on Broadway.MGM regularly cast her as an older woman, or a nasty one. Of the 11 movies she made after “Dorian Gray,” perhaps her most notable role was in “State of the Union” (1948), with Ms. Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, in which she played a newspaper magnate trying to get her married lover elected president.With the expiration of her MGM contract in 1951, Ms. Lansbury joined the national touring productions of two stage plays, “Remains to Be Seen” and “Affairs of State.” But when she returned to the movies as a freelance actress, she again found herself cast as either of two types: as she put it, “bitches on wheels and people’s mothers.”Ms. Lansbury with Roddy McDowall in the Disney musical fantasy “Bedknobs and Broomsticks.” She played a witch.DisneyShe was Elvis Presley’s possessive mother in “Blue Hawaii” (1961). She was Laurence Harvey’s sinister mother in “The Manchurian Candidate” (1962), a role that won her a third supporting actress Oscar nomination. (Though she was only three years Mr. Harvey’s senior, her maternal authority was entirely convincing when she told him, “You are to shoot the presidential nominee through the head.”) She played a woman who kills her husband in “Please Murder Me” (1956) and an overbearing mother in “The Reluctant Debutante” (1958). And so it went.On to BroadwayMs. Lansbury made her Broadway debut in 1957 in “Hotel Paradiso,” a translation of a 19th-century French farce. Good reviews encouraged her to try more theater work. She returned to Broadway in 1960 as the alcoholic single mother of a pregnant teenager in “A Taste of Honey.”In 1964 she was cast as a corrupt mayor in the Arthur Laurents-Stephen Sondheim musical “Anyone Can Whistle.” A notorious failure, it closed after only 12 previews and nine performances, but it showed she could summon the right stuff for live musical performance. “I had a little, high soprano, and they wanted a belter,” she said in 2009. “So I learned how to belt.”Ms. Lansbury with Frankie Michaels in “Mame.” More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Audrey Hepburn, were said to be under consideration for the role.via Angela LansburyMs. Lansbury was anything but a shoo-in for the coveted lead in “Mame,” the Jerry Herman musical adaptation of Patrick Dennis’s novel “Auntie Mame,” which had already been adapted into a stage play and a movie — both starring Rosalind Russell, and both great successes.Ms. Russell did not want to play Mame again. Mary Martin was cast but opted out. More than a dozen other actresses, including Judy Garland, Doris Day and Ms. Hepburn, were said to be under consideration. But Ms. Lansbury was one of the few willing to audition for the role in front of the show’s creative and financial principals.In a Life magazine cover article about the show and her part in it, she recalled that there had been many distracting interruptions by men in dark glasses, compelling her to sing the songs over again. “Then they said, ‘Goodbye, thank you.’ That was all,” she said.Back home in Malibu, Calif., with her husband, Peter Shaw, an MGM executive, and their teenage children, Anthony and Deirdre, she waited for months for a call from the East. Finally, she flew to New York and confronted the producers.“I am going back to California,” she recalled telling them, “and unless you tell me — let’s face it, I have prostrated myself — now, yes or no, that’s the end of it.” That afternoon, she got an official yes.Her performance made her a genuine star at last. The show opened in New York on May 24, 1966, and the columnist Rex Reed reported in The Times that on the night he attended, “when the people got tired of whistling and clapping like thunder, they stood up in the newly refurbished seats in the Winter Garden and screamed.” He likened Ms. Lansbury to “a happy caterpillar turning, after years of being thumb-nosed by Hollywood in endless roles as baggy-faced frumps, into a gilt-edged butterfly.”Ms. Lansbury in 1966. In 2013, she received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.”Sam Falk/The New York TimesTo Ms. Lansbury’s disappointment, though, Lucille Ball was chosen for the film version of “Mame,” which was not a success.Ms. Lansbury won her second Tony for best actress as the 75-year-old Countess Aurelia in “Dear World,” a 1969 musical adaptation of “The Madwoman of Chaillot.” The production itself was not well received and closed after 132 performances. For a while, though, it held the distinction of charging the highest ticket prices on Broadway: $12.50 for the best seats (the equivalent of about $105 today).She then returned to Hollywood, where she played an aging German aristocrat in “Something for Everyone” (1970), a rare cinematic effort from the Broadway producer and director Harold Prince, and a witch in the Disney movie “Bedknobs and Broomsticks” (1971).But this was a tumultuous time for her and her family. Their Malibu house was destroyed in a brush fire. Her son and daughter were using hard drugs. She and Mr. Shaw decided to leave California for the coast of County Cork, Ireland, where they built a home based on traditional farmhouse design.It was the sanctuary they had hoped for: Ms. Lansbury became a serious gardener, and her children overcame their drug problems. Anthony became an actor and then a television director, with credits including numerous episodes of “Murder, She Wrote”; Deirdre eventually married Enzo Battarra, a restaurateur, and became his business partner.With Len Cariou in “Sweeney Todd.” Ms. Lansbury won a Tony Award for her performance as the baker Mrs. Lovett.Martha SwopeOver the next decade Ms. Lansbury worked mostly on the stage, in London and New York. She starred as Mama Rose in a revival of “Gypsy,” which opened in London and won her a third Tony when it reached Broadway in 1974. She won yet another for her performance as Mrs. Lovett, the baker with a grisly source of meat for her pies, in Mr. Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “Sweeney Todd,” with Len Cariou in the title role, which opened in March 1979 and ran for 557 performances.Success on the London stage closed a circle for Ms. Lansbury.Angela Brigid Lansbury was born in London on Oct. 16, 1925, and grew up there in upper-middle-class comfort, the daughter of Moyna MacGill, an Irish actress, and Edgar Lansbury, a timber merchant and politician who was the son of a Labour Party leader, George Lansbury. Her father died of stomach cancer when she was 9; her grandfather died five years later, and that loss, together with the Blitz, prompted her mother to move to the United States with Angela, her half sister and her twin younger brothers.“We left everything behind,” Ms. Lansbury recalled. “Suddenly, we just weren’t there anymore.”Ms. Lansbury as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the hugely successful CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”CBSA Surprise HitFor all her stage success, Ms. Lansbury would capture the biggest audience of her career in 1984, when she was cast as the mystery writer and amateur sleuth Jessica Fletcher on the CBS series “Murder, She Wrote.”It was widely believed that the series, whose protagonist was a bicycle-riding widow living in a small town in Maine, had little chance against sexier competition like the action crime drama “Knight Rider” on NBC. The conventional wisdom was that advertisers would not go after the older audience the show was likely to attract.“We were getting condolences even before we went on the air,” Richard Levinson, one of the show’s creators, recalled. “At best, we hoped that it would be a marginal success.” Instead, the show became a huge hit. In its second season it outdrew Steven Spielberg’s highly anticipated anthology series, “Amazing Stories,” by more than two million viewers a week, and it went on to run until 1996.“What appealed to me about Jessica Fletcher,” Ms. Lansbury said in an interview with The Times early in the show’s second season, “is that I could do what I do best and have little chance to play — a sincere, down-to-earth woman.”She received 12 successive Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Jessica Fletcher, but she never won.Ms. Lansbury remained active on television (she returned to her signature role in four made-for-television “Murder, She Wrote” films) and in movies, notably the Disney animated hit “Beauty and the Beast” (1991), in which she was the voice of the talking teapot Mrs. Potts. And there were more Broadway performances to come. Neither arthritis nor hip and knee replacements could keep her off the stage for very long.She starred with Marian Seldes in the Terrence McNally comedy “Deuce” in 2007 and played the eccentric medium Madame Arcati in the 2009 revival of Noël Coward’s “Blithe Spirit,” earning Tony No. 5. Her lifetime achievement award brought the total to six — a total matched only by Audra McDonald and Julie Harris (including Ms. Harris’s own lifetime achievement award). Ms. Lansbury received another nomination for her performance later that year as Madame Armfeldt in a revival of the Sondheim musical “A Little Night Music.”Though she never won an Oscar or an Emmy, Ms. Lansbury received an honorary award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 2013 for creating “some of cinema’s most memorable characters” and “inspiring generations of actors.” A year later, she was made a dame by Queen Elizabeth II.Ms. Lansbury and the MGM executive Peter Shaw. They married in 1949.via Angela LansburyMr. Shaw, her husband, died in 2003. An earlier marriage to Richard Cromwell, an American actor, ended in divorce after less than a year. Ms. Lansbury is survived by her sons, Anthony and David; her daughter, Deirdre; a brother, Edgar; three grandchildren; and five great-grandchildren.While many older actresses complained about a shortage of roles, Ms. Lansbury never lacked for work and seldom turned it down.She did opt out of a big chance to return to Broadway for the 2017-18 season, in a revival of “The Chalk Garden,” saying she had decided to spend more time with her family rather than face a long, lonely stretch of living in New York. But other good roles continued to catch her fancy, including the rich, imperious Aunt March in the BBC mini-series “Little Women” and the nice lady who sells magical balloons in the film “Mary Poppins Returns.” Both were released in 2018.“I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she told Katie Couric of CBS in 2009. “So when something comes along and is presented to me, and I think ‘Gee, I could have some fun doing that,’ or ‘I think I could bring something to that,’ I’ll do it.”Ms. Lansbury in 2009. “I really don’t know how to relax to the degree that I could just stop,” she said that year.Fred R. Conrad/The New York TimesBut, she added, there was one thing she was still missing after all those years: “I’d like to do one great movie before I pass along the way. I don’t know what it’ll be, but I think there’s one out there somewhere.” More

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    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel Responds to Trump Lashing Out at Late Night

    “I didn’t even see it, that’s how badly his social media platform is doing,” Kimmel said of Trump’s Truth Social rant about late night hosts.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The Truth Is ElsewhereOn Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel relayed that former President Donald Trump “took a break yesterday from disparaging the FBI to go after” Kimmel and his fellow late night talk show hosts on Truth Social.“I didn’t even see it, that’s how badly his social media platform is doing,” Kimmel said.“He wrote, ‘It was my great honor to have destroyed the ratings of late night comedy shows. There is nothing funny about the shows, the three hosts have very little talent, and when Jimmy Fallon apologized for having humanized Trump and his ratings soared, the radical left forced him to apologize. That was effectively the end of “The Tonight Show”’ — which I’m pretty sure is still on, right?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“If anyone knows talent, it’s Donald Trump. He has walked backstage unannounced while young women were changing at some of the biggest talent competitions in the whole world.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And as far as ratings go, on behalf of my fellow late night talk show hosts — Jimmy, Stephen, Seth and I — we’ve been on for a total of 58 seasons and counting; your presidency got canceled after one.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (The Big 8-0 Edition)“Right after the midterms, there’s going to be another big day: It’s going to be Joe Biden’s birthday, when he’ll turn 80 years old, making him the first president to become an octogenarian while in office. The White House has a little bit of a problem here, because ‘oldest president ever’ is not the kind of record you want to be setting. It’s right up there with Grover Cleveland’s record for longest presidential fingernails.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“According to administration sources, you shouldn’t expect a blowout birthday bash, which is just what you’d say when you’re planning a surprise party! Oh, it’s going to be hot. There’s going to be a senior citizen throw-down! We’re talking Ensure stands, low-cut shawls, and shots, shots, shots: Covid, flu and shingles.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“White House officials are reportedly planning to downplay President Biden’s upcoming 80th birthday. Well, good luck with that, ’cause everything about Biden screams ‘birthday week.’ [imitating Biden] ‘Monday, I’m going bowling with my college buds; Tuesday, shots; Wednesday, Dave & Buster’s, then we’re all flying to Ibiza!’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingSeth Meyers sent up Fox News’s annual “Halloween fearmongering” by adding some newfound holiday threats to the list such as “Mike and Ike are trying to adopt.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightJon Gray, Pierre Serrao, and Lester Walker of the Bronx-based collective Ghetto Gastro will appear on “The Daily Show” on Wednesday to talk about their new book, “Black Power Kitchen.”Also, Check This OutMelissa Etheridge, left, and Jill Sobule. In the 1990s, Etheridge made a splash with the hits “Come to My Window” and “I’m the Only One.” That same decade, Sobule released “I Kissed a Girl.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesSinger-songwriters Melissa Etheridge and Jill Sobule are bringing their respective lives and musical careers to the stage in two new shows this week in New York. More