Eliana Willis

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Weeknd in Concert and ‘Praise Petey’

    HBO airs the concert filmed in Los Angeles and the animated Freeform show wraps up its first season.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Aug. 14-20. Details and times are subject to change.MondayLaurence Olivier and Greer Garson in “Pride and Prejudice.”Everett CollectionPRIDE AND PREJUDICE (1940) 4 p.m. on TCM. Before we were introduced to Colin Firth or Matthew Macfadyen as the moody but endlessly charming Mr. Darcy, there was Laurence Olivier in the role. The story, based on the novel by Jane Austen, follows the Bennet family, who are excited by the prospect of two wealthy and eligible bachelors coming to town. Upon meeting, Elizabeth Bennet (Greer Garson) and Mr. Darcy fall into one of the most memorable enemies-to-lovers arcs of all time.TuesdayTHE LOVE EXPERIMENT 10 p.m. on MTV. If the many dating reality shows that already exist (see: “Love Island,” “Love is Blind,” “The Ultimatum,” “Are You the One?” “Bachelor in Paradise”) don’t tickle your fancy, MTV has a new one. This show is as if you were in a dating app and all the men are actually ready for relationships: the three best friends Marcia, Paige, and Tamara (who are in their 20s and 30s) are put inside a “dating utopia” where they go on dates, test compatibility and do some challenges to try to find their lifelong partners.WednesdayGORDON RAMSAY’S FOOD STARS 9 p.m. on Fox. On this show you can’t just be good at cooking — you also have to be an entrepreneur in the making. As this season wraps up, the three final contestants compete for Gordon Ramsay to make a personal $250,000 investment. Who knows, the person who wins this season could also have six restaurants in Las Vegas, just like Ramsay himself.TEMPTATION ISLAND: SECRETS REVEALED 9 p.m. on USA. Just like “Love Island” has its unseen bits episode or how “Big Brother” lets you watch livestreams inside of the house even when episodes aren’t airing, “Temptation Island” is releasing their own version of that. The finale of the fifth season will air later in August, but before that happens, they are showing bloopers and some interesting moments that happened between couples that were left out of the final edit of the show.Saycon Sengbloh in “The Wonder Years.”ABC/Matt MillerTHE WONDER YEARS 9:30 p.m. on ABC. This remake of the 1980s sitcom about a Black middle-class family in Montgomery, Ala., is wrapping up its second season this week. In the hour long finale, there is a birthday celebration, a trip to Florida and some classic family squabbles.ThursdayTHE WEEKND: LIVE AT SOFI STADIUM (2023) 8 p.m. on HBO. On Netflix you can throw on Taylor Swift’s “Reputation” tour. On Disney+, you can watch the BTS “Permission to Dance” concert. And now, The Weeknd has joined the ranks of many artists to come before him who have released televised versions of their concerts. Filmed in Los Angeles in November 2022, his set includes a pretty intense light show and performances of some of his most famous songs.FridayA still from “Praise Petey.”FreeformPRAISE PETEY 10 p.m. on Freeform. This show could be “Schitt’s Creek” in an alternate, cartoon universe. In this show, Petey learns that she has inherited a small town from her dead father, but it turns out he is still alive and running a cult in the town. The kicker is that both shows star Annie Murphy. The cartoon is wrapping up its first season and has not yet been renewed for a second.Saturday50 FIRST DATES (2004) 6:30 p.m. on TBS. Set in Hawaii, this movie follows Henry (Adam Sandler), a marine veterinarian, as he tries to woo Lucy (Drew Barrymore) every day. The problem? Lucy has short-term memory loss and relives every day over and over, which obviously makes it hard for Henry who has to reintroduce himself to her every single day. The movie is a comedy but a Psychology Today article points out that it is a pretty realistic interpretation of a condition called “anterograde amnesia.”HER NAME WAS GRACE KELLY 7 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). Grace Kelly captured the attention of the world as she lived what seemed to be a real life fairy tale: After starring in popular films, she married Prince Rainier III and became the Princess of Monaco. A car accident in 1982 took her life, but she has remained in the public’s imagination ever since. This documentary features archival footage and home videos of Kelly, with tapes going back to three years old.BRIDESMAIDS (2011) 8 p.m. on Bravo. “I’m ready to party with the best of them” is what Annie (Kristen Wiig) says after she takes an Ambien and a glass of whiskey on the plane ride to the bachelorette party of her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), before wreaking absolute havoc on the flight. (I say the same thing every time I watch this movie.) The story follows Annie as she reaches emotional rock bottom, all while trying to support her childhood best friend during her pre-wedding festivities. The plot almost takes a back seat to the amazing chemistry between Wiig and Rudolph.SundayFROZEN MARATHON 4:35 p.m. on Freeform. As we settle into the mid-August heat, I wouldn’t hate a trip to Arendelle. If you want to be transported to Elsa’s frozen land full of amazingly catchy songs, sisterly drama and, more important, sisterly love, you can catch both FROZEN (2013) and FROZEN II (2019) back to back on Freeform. More

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    Edinburgh Festival Review: ‘Food’ Is an Acquired Taste

    At the Edinburgh Festival, Geoff Sobelle presents a dinner party as a theatrical spectacle, in which silliness is the end in itself.In an auditorium in Scotland, the American theater artist Geoff Sobelle is hosting a dinner party. The stage is taken up by an enormous square table, laid out with plates and cutlery. Around three of its sides sit twenty-four audience members. At the center of the fourth is the waistcoated figure of Sobelle, who brings wine, hands out menus and takes orders. When one lady requests a baked potato, he produces a bucket full of earth and empties it out onto the table; he plants a seed in the mound, waters it and waits a while before reaching in to pull out a large spud.After several skits in this vein, Sobelle withdraws into himself and proceeds to binge silently: He eats one apple, then another, and then another and another, followed by a bowl of cherry tomatoes, a few radishes and carrots, a concerning quantity of ranch, a number of raw eggs, an entire onion and some bank notes.Sobelle’s one-man show “Food,” which runs at The Studio through Aug. 27 as part of the Edinburgh International Festival, is billed as “a meditation on how and why we eat.” But, aside from a short preamble about the primordial nature of our relationship with grub, there is little attempt to intellectualize. Audiences primed to look for meaning will find none here: Silliness is the end in itself; the enjoyment is in the buildup of nervous energy in the room as Sobelle carries out his buffoonery with the focused determination of a doctor performing lifesaving surgery.Sobelle trained as a magician, and then as a clown, before turning his hand to absurdist theater. In an artistic mission statement on his website, he declares that he sees his body of work as “a colossal practical joke.” This checks out.Midway through the show, Sobelle carefully gathers up the guests’ wine glasses, then returns to his seat and violently pulls away the tablecloth, amid much clattering of plates. Underneath, it turns out, is not a table, but a field of dirt: The set is transformed into one big muddy landscape. A remote control tractor trundles across this terrain, and sheafs of wheat sprout upward in its wake. The trappings of modern civilization materialize; toy trucks are handed to the diners and passed around the perimeter of the dining table-turned-landscape. Sobelle clambers onto the scenery, sticks his hand in it and strikes oil; tall buildings start popping up here and there. We begin to suspect there may be someone underneath the table.The audience was bewildered, but charmed, and for 90 minutes reduced to a state of childlike wonder, reveling in the frisson of anticipation, awkwardness and unease. The immersive setup produced some amusing unscripted moments, like when a theatergoer’s cellphone got swept away as Sobelle removed the tablecloth; his demeanor as he handed it back was a picture of dumb officiousness, both apologetic and vaguely affronted.Sobelle’s comedy of affable idiocy may be witless, but it is also timeless — every bit as primal, one suspects, as our love of eating. (There’s a reason “Mr. Bean” is still so popular around the world.) In drawing much of its mirth from sheer ridiculousness or grotesquerie, “Food” channels a comic sensibility from less exalted sectors of the entertainment world — think provincial circus troupes, or competitive eating championships.In the comparatively rarefied environs of the Edinburgh International Festival, the show’s sensibility feels like an ironic curio. I was reminded of Freddie Mercury’s line about wanting to bring opera to the masses: Sobelle, it seems, is doing the inverse, bringing low culture to the cosmopolitan elite. A perverse kind of altruism, perhaps.FoodThrough Aug. 27 at The Studio, in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More

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    The International Puppet Fringe Festival Draws the World of Puppetry to New York

    This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival surveys puppetry traditions from around the globe, and celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer Ralph Lee.Forget the sunglasses, the baseball caps, the featherweight clothing. Heat or no heat, it’s time to choose a fantastical mask and a wild costume and head to the Lower East Side to join a Wednesday evening parade. Hades himself will welcome you.The occasion? It’s Halloween in August, the theme of the third International Puppet Fringe Festival NYC, which officially begins with this open-to-all procession on Suffolk Street. This year’s festival, which arrives with more than 50 performances, as well as cabarets, craft workshops, panels, open mics and films, celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee.Lee, who died in May, invented one of New York’s most popular puppet revels — the Village Halloween Parade — and Wednesday’s street stroll will feature not only his Greek god of the underworld but also his Fat Devil and Yama, the Chinese Lord of Death. Such creations underscore one of the festival’s core principles: that puppetry is more than child’s play.“People have this misconception that it is just for, like, birthday parties or children’s television shows,” said Manuel Antonio Morán, the artistic director of the festival, which is produced by Teatro SEA, the Latino theater that he founded; his own agency, Grupo Morán; and the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural and Educational Center, where Puppet Fringe performances will run through Sunday. “Yes, it is for that, too,” he said in an interview, but in many countries, it’s “part of the folklore, it’s part of the tradition.”A donkey puppet is another part of the musical “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesFolklore and mythology continually inspired Lee, who collaborated on this year’s festival despite his declining health. His work, including incarnations of the ghost of Henry Hudson, a mermaid and Coney Island sideshow characters, will appear in Brendan Schweda’s “Barnacle Bill the Husband,” one of a special group of brief, intimate works for small audiences. On Saturday, the festival will host a round-table discussion with Lee’s troupe, the Mettawee River Theater Company. But the greatest breadth of his creativity will be on display in two exhibitions: “Theater Unmasked: Photographic Glimpses of Ralph Lee’s Work,” on view through Sunday, and “Myths, Legends and Spectacle: Masks and Puppets of Ralph Lee,” which is on display through Aug. 31. (The festival’s exhibitions and outdoor performances are free; indoor shows are $20 each, and day passes $75.)“What I want people to experience while they’re here is that the world is whatever you decide to make it for yourself,” said Matthew Sorensen, who curated the shows of Lee’s work.The more than 60 pieces in “Myths, Legends and Spectacle” cover six decades and range in tone from the fiercely haunting raffia-haired mask of a Japanese demon from the play “The Mask of Kitamura” (1983) to the 11-foot-tall, sweetly smiling Grandmother Earth puppet from “Nanabozho,” a staging of a Native American tale (1980). And everywhere, Lee gave castoffs new life: Piano keys serve as puppet teeth, and can lids as eyes. An open mailbox becomes the head and jaws of a dragon; the ribs of a baby carriage form its body.This exhibition “opens up people’s ideas about materials,” said Casey Compton, Lee’s widow and frequent artistic collaborator, as she helped install the show. Many, she added, illustrate Lee’s method of taking “what’s just right there” and “exploring what it can do.”This year’s International Puppet Fringe Festival celebrates the legacy of the master puppeteer and theater artist Ralph Lee, pictured here in 1998 alongside some of his creations.Sara KrulwichBeyond Lee’s creations, an innovative approach to materials also distinguishes the other festival offerings, like “Sapientia,” a 10th-century play by Hroswitha of Gandersheim, sometimes called the West’s first female playwright. The title character, a Christian, opposes the pagan emperor Hadrian, who responds by torturing her young daughters. Scapegoat Carnivale, a Montreal-based theater company, stages the play as satirical object theater: Hadrian is portrayed by an espresso pot, Sapientia by a hand mirror and the children, who in the story are miraculously spared pain, by teacups. The torture devices include an iron and a George Foreman grill.“The objects are able to kind of deconstruct and reveal almost the absurdity, but also support the miraculous nature” of the play, said Mia van Leeuwen, who worked on the adaptation and directed it.Another humble substance stars throughout the Puppet Fringe: paper. “You can bind it together, you can rip it, you can make a pop-up of it, you can chew it up and spit it out,” said Yael Rasooly, an Israeli puppeteer who does all of those in her slightly macabre solo show “Paper Cut.” Rasooly, who will also teach a puppetry master class at the festival, portrays a secretary whose Hollywood fantasy world is made up of old movie magazine cutouts.A more joyful exploration of paper’s possibilities unfolds in “The Paper Play,” which the Taiwanese company Puppet Beings Theater will present outdoors at the festival and indoors in a separate performance on Sunday at Flushing Town Hall in Queens. Consisting of two parts — one a gentle fable and the other a celebration of its medium’s transformative powers — this American premiere exemplifies the Puppet Fringe’s less spooky side.Behind the scenes at the International Puppet Fringe Festival.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesThe family-friendly fare also includes four productions from Teatro SEA. In “The Crazy Adventures of Don Quixote,” a musical Morán wrote with Radamés Gavé, don’t be surprised to see Cervantes’s 17th-century characters duel with “Star Wars”-style light sabers. They will also speak both English and Spanish, a bilingual approach adopted by all Teatro SEA puppetry shows. Another production, the Swedish Cottage Marionette Theater’s urbanized “Little Red’s Hood,” will be performed once in Spanish and once in Mandarin.“From the beginning, I’ve been wanting to be a very inclusive festival,” said Morán, who founded the biennial Puppet Fringe in 2018. (The second edition was held in 2021 because of the pandemic.) That has meant featuring shows in different languages, producers from minority groups and female puppeteers like Heather Henson, who has curated two festival short-film programs from Handmade Puppet Dreams, her company’s collection of works by independent artists: “Frights and Delights,” featuring fanciful ghosts and monsters, and “Kidscapes,” a series for children.Puppetry “is very cross-disciplinary,” said Henson, who noted that her father, the renowned puppeteer Jim Henson, often produced art that “would have never worked on the stage.” Jump cuts, extreme close-ups and scene dissolves can make puppet films more exciting — or unsettling.But however audiences experience puppetry, its power often derives from the extraordinary interplay between human agency and physical artworks.“There’s lots of corny words for it, like magic,” said Compton. “But it is very special, when those elements come together, and there’s a life that can be shared.” Ralph Lee, she added, “was always going for that.” More

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    Tom Jones, Half of Record-Setting ‘Fantasticks’ Team, Dies at 95

    He wrote the book and lyrics to a little show that opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and became “the longest-running musical in the universe.”Tom Jones, who wrote the book and lyrics for a modest musical called “The Fantasticks” that opened in 1960 in Greenwich Village and ran for an astonishing 42 years, propelled in part by its wistful opening song, “Try to Remember,” died on Friday at his home in Sharon, Conn. He was 95.His son Michael said the cause was cancer.Mr. Jones and his frequent collaborator, Harvey Schmidt, first worked together when they were students at the University of Texas, Mr. Jones in the drama department’s directing program, Mr. Schmidt studying art but indulging his musical inclinations on the side.They kept in touch after graduating, writing songs together by mail after they were drafted during the Korean War. Mr. Jones got out first and tried his luck in New York, failing to find work as a director but writing for the revues being staged by the impresario Julius Monk and fiddling with a musical with another composer, John Donald Robb.Mr. Jones and Mr. Robb called that show, which was loosely based on a comedy by the French playwright Edmond Rostand, “Joy Comes to Deadhorse,” and in 1956 they staged it at the University of New Mexico, where Mr. Robb was a dean. It was a big-cast production that included a small squadron of dancers.The two men had different reactions to their production. “I felt it was basically wrong,” Mr. Jones wrote in an unpublished memoir. “He felt it was basically right. So we split.”Mr. Jones, left, with his frequent collaborator, Harvey Schmidt, and the British actress Stephanie Voss, promoting “The Fantasticks” in London in 1961.Evening Standard/Hulton Archive, via Getty ImagesMr. Jones kept working on the piece, now with Mr. Schmidt, who had arrived in New York after leaving the military and was having some success as a commercial artist. They were still envisioning it as a big Broadway musical, but in 1959, when a friend was looking for a one-act musical for a summer festival at Barnard College, they did a radical revision. Instead of trying to imitate Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mr. Jones wrote, “we decided to break all the rules.”“We didn’t understand them anyway,” he added.Their pared-down musical, about two young lovers and their seemingly feuding fathers, used a narrator, minimalist staging and other touches that bucked the formula of a big Broadway musical.Among those who saw it at Barnard was the producer Lore Noto, who brought it to the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village, where it opened in May 1960. The cast included Jerry Orbach, early in his storied career, as El Gallo, the narrator, who delivers “Try to Remember.”It also included, in a smaller role, one Thomas Bruce — who was actually Mr. Jones. He said he didn’t use his own name because he wanted to head off accusations that “The Fantasticks” was a vanity production.Mr. Jones wrote that the opening night performance, attended by critics, was rocky, and at the after-party all involved awaited the reviews with trepidation. They came in around midnight; Word Baker, the director, related them to the assembled group, beginning with the mixed review from Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times.“All we could hear, any of us, were the bad parts,” Mr. Jones wrote.Walter Kerr in The New York Herald Tribune also said both positive and negative things, while some of the other New York papers raved.In any case, the show had a resilience that no one back then could have predicted. It continued to run at Sullivan Street for more than 17,000 performances, finally closing in 2002 as the longest-running musical in history. (“The Mousetrap,” the Agatha Christie play, has been running longer in London, but not continuously in the same theater.)Mr. Jones, right, with Mr. Schmidt in 1999. They worked together on several musicals, including “I Do! I Do!” and “110 in the Shade.”Ray Fisher/Getty ImagesMr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt, who died in 2018, went on to collaborate on other shows. Mr. Jones wrote the lyrics for Mr. Schmidt’s music for “110 in the Shade,” which opened on Broadway in 1963 and ran for 330 performances, and he wrote the book and lyrics for “I Do! I Do!,” another collaboration with Mr. Schmidt, which ran for a year and a half on Broadway in the mid-1960s.Each of those shows earned the men Tony Award nominations. Ed Ames’s version of “My Cup Runneth Over,” a song from “I Do! I Do!,” peaked at No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1967 and received Grammy Award nominations.But “The Fantasticks” overshadowed everything else. After its initial long run, a revival that opened in 2006 in Midtown Manhattan ran for more than 4,300 performances, with Mr. Jones again in the opening night cast in the same secondary role. As in the original production, actors cycled through the various roles in the revival, which continued for more than a decade. In 2010, Mr. Jones, then 82, returned to the cast briefly to mark the 50th anniversary of the original show’s opening.In 2006, an interviewer for American Theater Wing, introducing Mr. Jones, described “The Fantasticks” as “the longest-running musical in the universe.”“I don’t know about Saturn,” Mr. Jones replied.Thomas Collins Jones was born on Feb. 17, 1928, in Littlefield, Texas. His father, William, was a turkey farmer, and his mother, Jessie (Bellomy) Jones, was a homemaker.He grew up in Coleman, Texas, where he got a job as an usher at a movie theater, which morphed into a role as master of ceremonies for a weekly talent show held on Wednesday nights between features.As Mr. Jones put it in his memoir, “sometime during my sophomore year at Coleman High School, I became a ‘character’” — wearing bow ties and a straw hat to school, smoking a pipe, signing his articles for the school newspaper “T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”“Even now, nearly 70 years later, I can’t help but stop and wonder what the hell I thought I was doing,” he wrote. “Even more, I wonder at the fact that the other kids — farmers mostly, and ranchers and 4-H girls — took it all in their stride.”In 1945, when he enrolled in the drama department at the University of Texas, “for the first time, there were other people actually like me.”“Here, marvel of marvels,” he wrote, “everybody was T. Collins Jones, Esquire.”He earned a bachelor’s degree and, in 1951, a master’s degree at the university, and soon after was drafted. By happenstance — and passing a typing test — he managed to avoid being sent to fight in Korea; instead he was assigned to administrative work in a counterintelligence unit.There, he proposed that he write a manual on how to conduct covert operations. (“The Army loves manuals,” he wrote in the memoir. “More than machine guns. More than medals.”) Superiors liked the idea, and he worked on that until he was discharged after the war ended in 1953.In the American Theater Wing interview, Mr. Jones recounted the story of “Try to Remember,” the signature song from “The Fantasticks.” Mr. Schmidt had come up with the music in just a few minutes during an idle moment in a rehearsal hall. Mr. Jones heard an opportunity.“I thought, well, it would be fun to take this simple, long-line song and then play with lots of assonance and near sounds and near rhymes and inner rhymes and sort of encrust it verbally on top of this flowing, basically folklike, simple melody,” he said. “That took me weeks to do. It took him 20 seconds and me three weeks.”His lyrics still echo across the decades:Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen life was slow and oh, so mellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen grass was green and grain was yellow.Try to remember the kind of SeptemberWhen you were a tender and callow fellow.Try to remember and if you rememberThen follow, follow.Mr. Jones’s first marriage, to Eleanor Wright, ended in divorce. His second marriage was to the choreographer Janet Watson, who died in 2016. Michael Jones and another son from that marriage, Sam, survive him.Mr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt seemed to have a knack for long runs. “I Do! I Do!” has had countless other productions since it was on Broadway, including one in Minneapolis that ran from 1971 to 1993, with the same two actors, David Anders and Susan Goeppinger, in the same roles the whole time.Among the other shows on which Mr. Jones and Mr. Schmidt collaborated was “Celebration,” which ran for three months on Broadway in 1969 and which Mr. Jones also directed. They created a musical version of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town,” but when Mary Martin, who had originated the female role in “I Do! I Do!” on Broadway and was to star, became ill, the project was derailed.In a 2002 interview with The Times, Mr. Jones said that though he wasn’t displeased that “The Fantasticks” had dominated his career, he regretted that it overshadowed some of the other work he and Mr. Schmidt had done.“It’s nice to be remembered for anything,” he said. “I do hope and believe that there is going to come a time, probably after we’re dead, when someone will say, ‘What are these other weirdo titles?’ and they’ll say, ‘This is strange; this is interesting stuff.’” More

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    Baratunde Thurston Eats His Feelings (With Ice Cream)

    The host and executive producer of “America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” talks about revolutionary librarians, vibe-setting music and the city he thinks is underestimated.The writer and cultural critic Baratunde Thurston wasn’t exactly a shoo-in for the PBS nature series that now bears his name.“I was known for race and technology and comedy,” he said in a video interview from his home in Los Angeles. “I had been at ‘The Daily Show.’ I was a very progressive political pot stirrer on the internet.”Still, Thurston — who hikes and surfs and still remembers his Boy Scout knots — was like, “Yo, they’re trying to have a Black person host a show about the outdoors,” he said. “I’ve never seen that show.”“America Outdoors With Baratunde Thurston” begins its second season on Sept. 6, and while there’s plenty of flora, fauna and water to behold, the focus is on the people who live, work and play in it. And Thurston gets to tag along: swimming and jet skiing on the Suwannee River in Georgia and Florida, riding with cowboys in Oregon, harvesting ice in Maine, even turkey hunting in New Mexico.Not that he bagged anything. “I think the turkeys got a memo that there was a newbie out on the hills,” he said while elaborating on Black men’s support groups and the healing powers of Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams. “They weren’t trying to go out in a blaze of videotaped glory.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1Public LibrariesLibrarians are heroes, and libraries are some of our last truly democratic public spaces, literally open to all. I first encountered the ferocious power that is a librarian in the early 2000s. With the Patriot Act and surveillance, librarians were on the forefront of fighting for our liberties.2Jeni’s Ice CreamThe Blackout Chocolate Cake flavor, oh my God. It’s chocolate within chocolate within chocolate. It makes me go a little crazy because you can’t just have a scoop. But if you’re feeling like maybe your society is tending toward fascism, Jeni’s ice cream can help you process that feeling.3Hydro FlaskI’m deeply committed to my water bottle. I can’t be having four-ounce, plastic, single-use bottles. If I check into a hotel and they don’t have a refilling station, I’m like, “Just so you know, I judge places based on this.”4Kings CornerOur culture doesn’t have many spaces for men to be vulnerable out loud or with each other. And for Black men, at times it can be even tougher. We carry a lot. And some of what we carry that is overly burdensome is the image of us that’s been promoted throughout the world: that we are always tough, that we are violent, that we can’t show emotion. Kings Corner is a safe space for us to check in with each other, to hold ourselves high and hold ourselves accountable. We have cried so much.5Being in WaterEvery Thanksgiving we would go to a body of water — the Chesapeake Bay, the Outer Banks, the eastern shore of Maryland. When my mom was dying in Portland, Ore., my sister and I took her out to Astoria Beach as the kind of last hurrah. Every time I’m near the ocean, I have to touch it.6Lofi Study BeatsLofi has emerged as the Muzak of now. To take old-school hip-hop and slow it down or to remix things — it’s about vibe setting. There’s one I watch that’s like, what if 1990s hip-hop stars all hung out together in a diner? It’s got Tupac and Biggie and Nas all chilling. It helps me open up when I’m in a creative space.7CompostingComposting is cocktails with soil and dirt and leaves and grass — you make a mix and you get something delicious out of it. Composting takes allegedly useless things and turns them into useful things. That action becomes symbolic when you apply it to human beings.8Old FashionedsIt is not my first experience of a cocktail, but it’s the first experience that made me say, “Oh. Yeah.” It blew my mind when I learned you could make an old fashioned with rye, as is classic, or bourbon or scotch or gin or tequila or rum. Just spirit plus sugar and bitter. That’s it. People muddling cherries in them are committing a sacrilege.9Washington, D.C.It is so much more than the seat of the federal government. Despite economic development and gentrification and displacement, it’s still a very Black city. There is a texture to D.C. — to the architecture, to the physical layout, to the fashion, to the street names and signs. It loves New Balance to a totally unreasonable degree and has go-go music that has never really achieved escape velocity from the planet of D.C. No one in Los Angeles has ever or will ever rock go-go music, and that makes it even more special.10adrienne maree brownShe is this extraordinarily intelligent and experienced political organizer, and she is spiritually aware and developed and enlightened. She appreciates the power of rest and self-care in the midst of a struggle. She reminds me of my mother. More

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    ‘Big Brother’ Expels Luke Valentine For Using Racial Slur

    “Well, I’m in trouble now,” Luke Valentine said after using a slur for Black people in a conversation on the reality show.“Big Brother,” CBS’s long-running reality competition, has kicked off a contestant for using a racial slur.The contestant, Luke Valentine, used a slur for Black people this week while chatting with other men in the compound where houseguests are filmed 24 hours a day as they compete for a large cash prize. Valentine is white, and one of the other men in the conversation is Black.The incident, broadcast during the show’s live online feed, was addressed on Thursday night’s episode, in which highlights from the feed are interspersed with contestants’ reflections on recent events in the house.“It’s been an emotional 24 hours in the ‘Big Brother’ house as the houseguests learned that one of their own broke the ‘Big Brother’ code of conduct and was removed from the game,” the show’s longtime host, Julie Chen Moonves, said during the episode.After Valentine, an illustrator from Florida, used the slur, he immediately apologized to the three other men in the room and tried to backtrack. Clearly shocked, two of the men quickly left. Jared Fields, who is Black, mostly stayed quiet but responded to Valentine by saying that the slur can make white people more uncomfortable than Black people.“Well, I’m in trouble now,” Valentine said to Fields.In an interview aired on Thursday’s episode, Fields said: “My nonreaction in the moment, being the only Black male in this house, I don’t know what to say. Anything I say or do can come across wrong or aggressive.”“I don’t associate ignorance with malice,” he later added.On an Instagram account that is followed by verified accounts of other “Big Brother” contestants, Valentine posted an apology to his story, along with a photo of himself and a prayer hands emoji. “Luke made a big mistake,” it read, “please forgive him.”Andy Herren, the show’s Season 15 winner, said CBS did the right thing by expelling Valentine. “YEARS of problematic behavior and language in the Big Brother house going unpunished led to fans and former houseguests speaking up,” Herren posted on X, formerly known as Twitter. He added, “This is huge and will change things moving forward!”“Big Brother,” now in its 25th season, has a history of racism among its contestants.In 2019, shortly before winning Season 21, Jackson Michie was asked on live television to answer for accusations that some of his behavior during the season had been racist and sexist. He defended himself in the moment but later apologized, admitting blame. Aaryn Gries, a Season 15 contestant, was questioned by Chen Moonves after being filmed making racist and homophobic remarks.Black contestants have also struggled to advance on “Big Brother,” often getting voted out early. The show’s first Black winner, Xavier Prather, was not crowned until Season 23. The next season featured the show’s first Black female winner, Taylor Hale.“It was something I was cognizant of,” Prather told The New York Times this year. “I am a 6-2, 200-pound athletic Black man — I can’t approach the game the same way that a slim, 5-10 white man can, because we’re perceived differently.”“To assume that I could approach the game the same way would be to assume that I could approach life the same way,” he continued. “‘Big Brother’ is literally a reflection of our society.”Calum Marsh More

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    in Television

    ‘Billions’ Season 7 Premiere Recap: Axe Is Back

    A certain redheaded maniac returns to the scene for the series’s concluding season. Let the final showdowns begin.Season 7, Episode 1: ‘Tower of London’He’s back.Bobby Axelrod, the hard-charging, take-no-prisoners billionaire who served as the antagonist-cum-co-protagonist for the first five seasons of “Billions,” returns at the end of the show’s seventh and final season premiere. Like a demon out of an esoteric’s grimoire, Axe (Damian Lewis) been summoned by three of his closest associates — Wendy (Maggie Siff), Wags (David Costabile) and Taylor (Asia Kate Dillon) — to rise from legally mandated oblivion in order to defeat a devil far worse than the devil we know.That devil is Mike Prince (Corey Stoll), who served as the stand-in during the show’s sixth season for the role once played by Axelrod. A breed apart from his predecessor, he spent the bulk of Season 6 as something of a do-gooder … to an extent.Prince created a universal basic income program known as Mike Money — but the program was paid for by untaxed cryptocurrency, which believe it or not was once viewed as the wave of the financial future. He tried to bring the Olympics to New York City — though as any resident of a host city can tell you, that’s stretching the definition of “do-gooding” quite a bit, given the tax incentives and indigent sweeps typically preceding the Games.Most important of all, though? Mike Prince is running for President of the United States of America, sooner rather than later. (Perhaps because this is now the show’s final season, his timeline has been accelerated from 2028 to, gulp, 2024.) As he tells Wendy in the episode’s quietly chilling opening scene, he is doing so because he believes only he has the gimlet eye and the force of will required to save the dying nation from itself. If the people scream for mercy as he rescues them? Let them scream, he says. He knows best.In a maneuver that places Wendy at the center of the action in a way she hasn’t been in years, the premiere casts her as the Christopher Walken character in “The Dead Zone” — the person who sees most clearly that Prince is literally a Hitler-quoting clear and present danger to the republic and the world at large. Even as she strings him along, promising to performance-coach him all the way into the White House, she has decided to work toward his downfall.She’s hardly alone in that. In order to clear the decks for his coming campaign, Prince has stepped back from the day-to-day operations of Prince Capital. He’s got not one but two major-domos, Wags and Scooter (Daniel Breaker), to serve as his eyes, ears and voice. He has the absurdly intimidating and unflappable Kate (Dola Rashad) to serve as his legal mind. And as far as he’s concerned, he has his successors, the young(ish) brainiacs Taylor and Philip (Toney Goins) to run the place in his stead, ensuring that the money keeps rolling in.But Taylor and Philip don’t see this as a promotion. They see it as the deliberate dismantling of Taylor Mason Carbon, the independent in-house shop they had dedicated to E.S.G. (environmental, social, and governance) investments. You know, the kind of do-gooding Mike Prince was once interested in?For Prince, though, having a separate carve-out within his empire indicates that the empire itself doesn’t care about these issues, and he cannot allow himself to be seen as someone who doesn’t care. By sunsetting Taylor and Philip’s shingle and putting them, his smartest people, in charge of the whole operation, Prince hopes he can kill two birds with one stone.But all the while, Wendy — terrified of Prince’s dark potential after a chilling tête-à-tête in which the depths of his egomania are revealed — is mounting a counteroffensive. Though Axe’s best bud, Wags, and his merciless lawyer Orrin Bach (Glenn Fleshler) plead ignorance as to Bobby’s whereabouts, Wags nevertheless gets a message to his old master. Axe then relays his willingness to entertain their request for help via a trade pattern only an old associate like Taylor’s pal Mafee (Dan Soder) can spot. (With the help of the best legal weed New York money can buy, naturally.)So, in a meeting before the bright lights of the Tower of London, Wendy and Wags and Taylor — and we in the audience — are reunited with the redheaded stepchild of the series. Never one to let a 1970s New Hollywood Cinema movie reference go unstated, Bobby Axelrod compares the crew here assembled to Luke, Leia, and Chewbacca, leaving himself as both the Han Solo and the Millennium Falcon. Let the war against the emperor commence!But there’s a second front opening up in the war on Prince. Though he’s both down and disgraced, to the point where his adolescent children no longer want to be seen eating with him in public, Chuck Rhoades is by no means out. At the end of last season, he accepted exile from the legal community and extensive legal troubles of his own as the cost of helping his colleague, Attorney General Dave Mahar of New York (Sakina Jaffrey), take Prince down.But c’mon, this is Chuck we’re talking about here. You think he’s going to sit idly by as his reputation is dragged through the mud to the point where his own kids are embarrassed by him? With the help of the obnoxious journalist Lucien Porter (Matthew Lawler), he becomes the beneficiary of a P.R. campaign in the press that paints him to be a Robin Hood figure — the lone man willing to stand up to the billionaire class with deeds rather than mere words, and who paid for it by losing his government jobs not once but twice.The resulting turnaround in the public imagination might well be Chuck’s masterstroke to date. Suddenly this old-money Yalie’s fever dreams of being championed by the socialist likes of Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez don’t seem so far-fetched. Sure, it irks Dave, who all but tells him their nonaggression pact is off by episode’s end. But to Chuck’s mind, she didn’t tell him what her full plan was, so why should he return the favor?All of a sudden “Billions” has a sense of urgency it hasn’t had since the really monomaniacal days of the Chuck/Axe conflict. Keep in mind that this episode begins with a five-months-later flash-forward in which an enraged, borderline psychotic Prince storms into his place of business, tracks down Wendy and shatters the glass walls of her office, demanding to know what it is that makes her so sure he shouldn’t be president. In that act, he answers his own question.Considering the time of its creation — pre-Brexit, pre-Trump, pre-Bernie and A.O.C., pre-Covid — “Billions” has been fairly adept at keeping pace with the times. The one-two punch of Clancy Brown’s good-old-boy attorney general Jock Jeffcoat and Danny Strong’s sleazeball treasury secretary Todd Krakow demonstrated the series’s deftness at reflecting its surroundings. But it’s inarguable that the political and economic reality of America and the wider world has gotten weirder, faster, than even Hollywood’s brightest minds could conceive.So kudos to the “Billions” team for drilling down on perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn from the past seven years: The mega-rich are freaks, and belong no closer to the levers of power than a chimpanzee to the controls of a Ferris wheel. Aligning virtually all the characters we like against the embodiment of all the cultural trends we don’t — from naked oligarchy to progressive lip service — is unbelievably shrewd. That this season is airing as the working writers and actors who make “Billions” possible man the picket lines against Hollywood’s ruling class makes it all the more pointed and poignant.Long one of the most purely entertaining shows on television, “Billions” has always preferred to let its message about the robber barons who rule our world play out amid the beats of a well-made financial thriller over the more direct and unmissable approach preferred by heavy-handed satires like “Succession” and “The White Lotus.” If what we’re seeing in this premiere holds true for the series’s remaining episodes, though, the show seems to have well and truly gotten religion at last. It will spend its final hours depicting our heroes, and many of our villains too, battling to prevent a dictatorial billionaire from becoming the leader of the free world.Loose changeWith his clipped American accent, crisp body language and twinkling eyes that radiate both mirth and malevolence in equal measure, Lewis’s Bobby Axelrod is legit one of the great character creations of the Peak TV era. I’m so glad to have him back.For that matter, Giamatti has always made Chuck’s contradictory blend of for-the-good-of-the-Republic earnestness and knife-in-the-back craftiness sing. And hey, let’s also give props to Siff’s investment of Wendy with hard-earned arrogance and Stoll’s portrayal of Prince as the kind of maniacally self-confident weirdo you only find in finance, tech, politics or an unholy amalgam of all three.My fave real-world cameos in this episode: the billionaire Mark Cuban and the former Obama/Clinton communications director Jennifer Palmieri. I’ve never been quite sure what to make of the show’s visits by the actual rich and powerful, given how I feel about their equivalents within the series, but it’s undeniable that they’re part of that old “Billions” charm.Another special shoutout must be reserved for Kelly AuCoin’s gleefully profane “Dollar Bill” Stearn. Though Taylor and Philip dislike Dollar Bill’s attitude (the feeling is mutual), they recognize that he’s the kind of earner they need to boost company profits, and thus keep Prince happy, while they secretly work to thwart their boss’s ambitions.The funniest bit about Dollar Bill’s return? The only guy who’s happy to see him is Victor (Louis Cancelmi), the only trader with even fewer scruples than Dollar Bill himself.“Billions” showrunners and music supervisors, hear my plea: It is not too late to score an epic scene with the appropriately named pre-“Dark Side of the Moon” Pink Floyd psych-rock juggernaut “Careful with That Axe, Eugene.” Granted, you might have to insert a character named Eugene to balance the “Axe” part, but I’ve come to trust in your ingenuity.As a fan of professional wrestling, or as I like to call it, “The Sport of Kings,” I found it very funny to hear Cuban refer to himself as “a Terry Funk guy.” The Funker, if you’re not aware, is the god of hardcore wrestling, the subgenre that involves barbed wire, razor blades, and gallons of very real blood. No wonder this dude helped run the Shark Tank.Male nerds of a certain vintage have long resigned themselves to the idea that there are two types of guys in the world: Luke Skywalkers (noble, incorruptible babyfaces) and Han Solos (roguish, unpredictable antiheroes). It’s revealing that even as he’s being called in to defeat the show’s Darth Vader equivalent, Axe refers to himself as Han rather than Luke.While we’re on the subject, this means Taylor is Luke (the chosen one gifted with special mind powers), Wendy is Leia (the steely commander who’s also a pale brunette knockout), and Wags is Chewie (the sidekick defined by his specific brand of hirsuteness). More

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    in Theater

    At the Edinburgh Festival, Wrestling With Identity

    In plays from Scotland, Korea and Switzerland, theater companies explored questions of belonging, with varying degrees of success.Questions of nationhood, identity and belonging loom large in three politically themed productions at this year’s Edinburgh International Festival. The tagline for this year’s edition is “community over chaos,” and there was plenty of both in “Thrown,” a National Theater of Scotland production running at the Traverse Theater through Aug. 27.Written by Nat McCleary and directed by Johnny McKnight, it’s a sentimental comedy about five women from Glasgow who travel to the Scottish countryside to compete in a backhold wrestling tournament. In this folk sport, indigenous to Scotland, competitors are initially locked into a clamp-like hug, before trying to wrestle each other to the ground. It dates back more than a thousand years, and the escapade is a kind of pilgrimage for the characters as they seek to connect with their national heritage. Along the way they playfully dissect what it means to be Scottish, reeling off some serviceable — if not terribly original — gags about haggis, kilts and “Braveheart.”Personality clashes emerge. Jo (Adiza Shardow), who is mixed race, and Chantelle (Chloe-Ann Taylor), who is white, are both working class and have been best pals since their school days, whereas Imogen (Efé Agwele), who is Black, was expensively educated and is new on the scene. When Imogen encourages Jo to take a greater interest in racial politics, this puts a strain on Jo and Chantelle’s friendship. Chantelle resents Imogen for boiling everything down to race and vents her frustration at being seen as privileged, simply because she is white. Imogen, in turn, points out that her affluent upbringing has not protected her from racism. They are both right, of course, and their circular squabbling brings home the absurdity of pitting different types of oppression against each other.Lesley Hart is boisterously engaging as the group’s intense coach, Pam, but the star of the show is Maureen Carr, who plays Helen, the most unlikely of the five wrestlers. Diminutive in stature and older than the rest of the gang, she is a fish out of water who Carr plays with winning geniality. Helen provides moral support to Pam when she reveals her struggles with her gender identity and delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Pam explains that the play’s title denotes the feeling helplessness in the split second when you realize you’re about to lose a wrestling match. The sport is a metaphor for personal struggle, and the team, of course, is a metaphor for the Scottish nation. It’s heartwarming stuff, but heavy-handedly allegorical.Maureen Carter, right, who plays Helen, is the standout actor of the show. She delivers the play’s defining monologue: a positive message of unity through celebrating difference.Julie Howden“Dusk,” a show that the Brazilian theater maker Christiane Jatahy developed with the Swiss company Comédie de Genève, is more intellectually ambitious, but similarly flawed. Its protagonist, a young undocumented migrant called Graça (Julia Bernat), takes a job with a French-speaking theater troupe that is working on a stage adaptation of the Lars Von Trier movie “Dogville.”Graça claims to have fled Brazil as a political refugee, and the troupe’s members believe they are doing a good turn by hiring her, but relations sour when troubling stories emerge about her history. The women in the group become nasty as they suspect Graça has designs on their partners, and one male colleague, a naturalized citizen, takes against her because she reminds him of his own past experience as a hated outsider. The dynamic tips into exploitation and abuse, both psychological and sexual.Jatahy is known for work that blends the conventions of theater and cinema. Here, the onstage action is recorded by a camcorder synced up to a large screen displaying close-up footage in real time. This is occasionally interspersed with prerecorded footage that differs jarringly from what’s happening on the stage. The intention is to discombobulate the audience, and it does. The trouble, however, is that the big screen ultimately overshadows the actors’ in-the-flesh presence, as the eye is continually drawn upward. One might as well be at the movies.In “Dusk,” directed by Christiane Jatahy, close-up footage of the actors is displayed in real time on a screen at the back of the stage.Magali DougadosRunning at the Royal Lyceum Theater through Aug. 27, “Dusk” is a provocative and pointedly bleak allegory of liberal hypocrisy. The central concept is strong, but the play is let down by overkill, especially in not one, but two, graphic depictions of sexual violence. When, after the second, the fictional troupe’s director (played by Matthieu Sampeur) earnestly agonizes over the ethics of storytelling, we detect a none-too-subtle attempt to pre-empt criticisms that “Dusk” trades too heavily on shock value. (Reader, it does.)The final 30 minutes of this 90-minute production are spent laboring the message of the first hour, culminating in a catastrophically unnecessary audience-facing lecture from Graça on xenophobia, gendered violence and the rise of the far right. The applause at the end of the show was damningly restrained.A refreshing antidote to that production’s audiovisual clutter came in an exquisite production of Euripides’ “Trojan Women,” by the National Changgeuk Company of Korea. (The final performance of its three-show run is Aug. 11.) Set in the immediate aftermath of the decade-long Trojan War, it portrays the women of Troy as they await their imminent subjugation by the Greeks, who, having killed the Trojan menfolk, intend to take the women as wives or slaves.The National Changgeuk Company of Korea production of “Trojan Women” directed by Ong Keng Sen.Jess ShurteThe director, Ong King Sen, and the playwright Bae Sam-sik, have done a fine job of reimagining this tale, which is mostly told through the medium of Pansori, a Korean genre of musical storytelling in which singing is accompanied by drumming. The propulsive pounding of the drum lends the songs a certain martial quality, which combines with the mournful tones of a zither and the singers’ plaintive laments to produce a powerful blend of sorrow and defiance. Kim Kum-mi delivers a vocal performance of remarkable intensity as the Trojan queen Hecuba, and Yi So-yeon is arresting as the fey clairvoyant Cassandra.The splendid set, by Cho Myung-hee is all the more imposing for its elegant simplicity. The Trojan women emerge, clad in white, from a strange, otherworldly tunnel flanked by two golden staircases; at various points, the structure is brought to life with elaborate lighting effects to evoke fire and sea.Euripides’s play dates from 415 B.C., but its enduring resonance is all too obvious as we look around the world today and reflect, for example, on the anniversary of the genocide by ISIS of the Yazidi people of Syria and Iraq — and the subsequent sexual enslavement of hundreds of Yazidi women — which began nine years ago this month; or the mounting evidence of sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Ukraine.Hecuba’s howl of anguish — “Destiny is drunk, the gods are blind!” — is a lament for the ages, a visceral and succinct protest against the abject cruelty of war.Edinburgh International FestivalThrough Aug. 28 at various venues in Edinburgh; eif.co.uk. More