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    An Inscrutable Monarch, Endlessly Scrutinized Onstage and Onscreen

    Queen Elizabeth II was portrayed in plays and highbrow films, in made-for-TV movies and broad comedies and, of course, in “The Crown.” Many sought to answer the question: What was she like?She was the most opaque of celebrities, a silent film star somehow thriving in a TikTok world. If no one except her closest friends and family knew what Queen Elizabeth was really like, that’s exactly how she wanted it.Her regal reserve, her impassive expressions, her resistance to personal revelation — all of it made the queen, who died Thursday at 96, an irresistible object of imaginative speculation. She was an outline of a woman that people could fill in however they fancied. And fill it in they did. Over the years, Elizabeth was a character in an endless stream of feature films, made-for-TV movies and television series — biopics, satires, dramas, comedies, you name it — as well as in the occasional documentary, play, musical and novel.Her life was remarkable for being long, her reign remarkable for encompassing so much history. But no one was beheaded, no one was plotted against, no one was imprisoned in a tower. Dramas about her predecessors in the job — Elizabeth I, Henry V, Henry VIII, Richard II, to name a few — are full of grand plots and high stakes. Dramas about Elizabeth II were more inward-looking, all trying to address the tantalizing and unanswerable question about her: What sort of person was she?In “The Crown,” three actors played Elizabeth at different ages. From left, Claire Foy, Olivia Colman and Imelda Staunton. From left, Alex Bailey/Netflix; Sophie Mutevelian/Netflix; Alex Bailey/NetflixThe actors who have wrestled with that issue are too many to count. “The Crown” alone needed three different women to portray Elizabeth at different eras of her life: Claire Foy in her early life, Olivia Colman in the middle years, and Imelda Staunton as the queen in winter.Here are some additional highlights of the portrayals of Queen Elizabeth on film and onstage, and occasionally in fiction, over the years.As PrincessIn the 2010 film “The King’s Speech,” a very young Princess Elizabeth was played by Freya Wilson, right.The Weinstein Company, via AlamyElizabeth’s early years were marked by two cataclysmic events: her uncle King Edward VIII’s abdication, in 1936, from the throne, which automatically catapulted her fragile father into the job of king and put her next in the line of succession; and World War II, which took place when she was still a teenager.In “The King’s Speech” (2010), the young Princess Elizabeth, played by Freya Wilson, appears briefly in the backdrop of the drama about the efforts of her father, now King George VI, to overcome his stutter and address the nation with confidence and authority when Britain enters the war, in 1939. (The real-life queen was said to have found the movie “moving and enjoyable.”)“A Royal Night Out” (2015) takes place amid the euphoria of V-E Day in London in 1945. Sprung from Buckingham Palace to mingle, incognito, with the ecstatic crowds, Princess Elizabeth (Sarah Gadon) and her younger sister, Princess Margaret (Bel Powley), indulge in a wild night of drinking, dancing, flirting, wading in a fountain and riding a city bus.Some Key Moments in Queen Elizabeth’s ReignCard 1 of 9Becoming queen. More

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    New York City Center Taps Veteran Arts Administrator as Its Next Leader

    Michael S. Rosenberg, the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center, will succeed Arlene Shuler as the City Center president and chief executive.New York City Center, a nonprofit known for its starry short-run musical revivals as well as its contemporary dance programming, is naming a New Jersey arts administrator as its new leader.The City Center board has selected Michael S. Rosenberg, currently the managing director of the McCarter Theater Center in Princeton, N.J., as its next president and chief executive. Rosenberg will start Nov. 1, succeeding Arlene Shuler, who is stepping down after 19 years at the organization.“City Center is a singular performing arts center, not just in New York, but in the U.S., with its combination of dance and musical theater,” Rosenberg said in an interview. “It’s can’t-miss artists and performances, time and time again.”Rosenberg said he had seen multiple programs at City Center over the years, and that he considered a 1988 show he saw there, Bill Irwin’s “Largely New York,” as having significantly influenced his thinking about theater.City Center, which was founded in 1943 by Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and operates in a city-owned neo-Moorish theater in Midtown, is a sizable organization: Its current annual budget is $29 million, and it employs 157 people (some of them part-time).The chairman of the City Center board, Richard E. Witten, said the organization was in strong financial shape and had multiple applicants from which to select Shuler’s successor. “We saw a lot of people in the process, and Michael stood out repeatedly,” Witten said.Rosenberg, 54, has been at the McCarter since 2018. He previously spent nearly a decade as the managing director of the La Jolla Playhouse, a San Diego theater with an outsize history of developing Broadway-bound musicals.City Center is best known for two annual programs: Encores!, which is a series of minimally staged, concert-style productions of older Broadway musicals, many of which have been forgotten or abandoned because — for one reason or another — they have been considered unrevivable, and Fall for Dance, an affordably priced festival of international dance companies.Encores! is in the early stages of its own transition — Lear deBessonet took over the program during the pandemic, and her first season of in-person programming was bumpy: The initial two shows, “The Tap Dance Kid” and “The Life,” were not particularly well-received, prompting hand-wringing about whether Encores! was in trouble. But then deBessonet directed a rapturously received revival of “Into the Woods” that quickly transferred to Broadway, where it has been both popular and successful. The program also has a new music director, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, and a producing creative director, Clint Ramos, who is working with deBessonet.Both Rosenberg and Witten said they were fully supportive of the Encores! program. “Not every show was a critical hit, but it was a successful year in terms of what was planned and what Lear hoped to do, and it wound up with a bang,” Witten said. “We’re very excited about the upcoming year.”Before the pandemic, City Center also ran an Encores! offshoot — Encores! Off Center — that revisited Off Broadway musicals; that program has not yet returned, and Rosenberg said its future had not been decided, but that “it’s another interesting way of opening up the canon and having more projects from which to choose.”City Center has already outlined plans for a 2022-23 season that is more robust than the one that just ended, which was slimmer than usual because of the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. The next season will include a wide array of dance, including the first Fall for Dance Festival featuring international companies since 2019, as well as work from Twyla Tharp, Alvin Ailey, the National Ballet of Canada, Dance Theater of Harlem, Ballet Hispánico and many more.The theater programming will include a fund-raising run of the musical “Parade,” starring Ben Platt and Micaela Diamond. And then, next spring, Encores! will feature revivals of “Light in the Piazza,” “Dear World” and “Oliver!” More

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    41 TV Shows to Watch This Fall

    Noteworthy premieres include new seasons of buzzy hits (“Abbott Elementary,” “The Handmaid’s Tale”), reboots and revivals (“Quantum Leap,” “Willow”) and more.The fall television season got off to an early start this year with the arrival of the dueling franchise extensions and hopeful blockbusters, “House of the Dragon” on HBO and “The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power” on Amazon Prime Video. But TV’s vast landscape offers a lot more than expensively produced, effects-laden fantasy. From the relatable delights of “Abbott Elementary” to the highly specific hilarity of “Documentary Now!,” here are some noteworthy fall premieres, arranged in chronological order.All dates are subject to change.THE SERPENT QUEEN The story of Catherine de’ Medici, the 16th-century queen of France, in a satirical, talking-to-the-camera 21st-century telling, with Samantha Morton and Liv Hill as Catherine and a large cast, including Charles Dance, Colm Meaney and Ludivine Sagnier, as the clerics and aristocrats who underestimate her at their peril. Starz, Sept. 11.THE JENNIFER HUDSON SHOW The success of daytime talk-show hosts is notoriously hard to predict, and whether Hudson will have the right skill set and personality for the role is about to be seen. But she immediately becomes the most talented singer and actress in the field, for what that’s worth. Syndicated, Sept. 12.THE HANDMAID’S TALE This bleak allegory and nonlinear-TV pioneer — the first streaming show to win an Emmy for outstanding drama series — soldiers into its fifth season, with June (Elisabeth Moss) quickly coming down from the cathartic high of Season 4’s bloody conclusion. Hulu, Sept. 14.Elisabeth Moss in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” returning for its fifth season on Sept. 14.HuluATLANTA After a third season, ending in May, that was quietly received — and that dropped more than half of the show’s previous broadcast audience — Donald Glover’s prickly comedy quickly returns for a fourth and final go-round. FX, Sept. 15.THE U.S. AND THE HOLOCAUST Ken Burns, directing with Lynn Novick and Sarah Botstein, devotes six hours to an uncomfortable chapter of American history with an alarmingly familiar backdrop of racism and xenophobia. PBS, Sept. 18.QUANTUM LEAP Raymond Lee (the sympathetic diner owner in “Kevin Can F**k Himself”) plays a new time-jumping do-gooder in this reboot of the early-90s sci-fi series. The Quantum Leap project is restarted and the original hero, Sam Beckett, is still missing, so a Scott Bakula guest appearance seems pretty much preordained. NBC, Sept. 19.PARIS POLICE 1900 In the spirit of “Babylon Berlin,” this period policier sets standard crime drama against a vivid historical backdrop: the Dreyfus affair, organized and violent antisemitism, the rise of the pioneering lawyer Jeanne Chauvin (Eugenie Derouand) and the sometimes deadly career of the Parisian courtesan Marguerite Steinheil (Evelyne Brochu). MHz Choice, Sept. 20.REBOOT Steven Levitan, who grabbed the network-sitcom brass ring with “Just Shoot Me!” and “Modern Family,” indulges in some gentle self-parody. Judy Greer, Keegan-Michael Key and Johnny Knoxville play the cast of a hacky early-aughts family comedy who reunite for a new version written by a young woman (Rachel Bloom of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”) who is strangely obsessed with the original show. Hulu, Sept. 20.ABBOTT ELEMENTARY Quinta Brunson’s sitcom about struggling teachers at a Philadelphia elementary school, a breakout hit in the spring and an Emmy nominee for best comedy series, embarks on its second season. ABC, Sept. 21.Lisa Ann Walter, left, and Sheryl Lee Ralph in “Abbott Elementary,” returning for its second season on Sept. 21, on ABC.Scott Everett White/ABCANDOR Tony Gilroy has more on his résumé than a writing credit for “Rogue One,” and it looks as if his new “Star Wars” series might incorporate some of the real-world grit he displayed a feel for in the Bourne movies. That would be a good thing, though don’t tell it to your friend with the lightsaber collection. Disney+, Sept. 21.REASONABLE DOUBT Kerry Washington is an executive producer and a director of this legal melodrama created by Raamla Mohamed, who was a writer and producer on Washington’s breakthrough series, “Scandal.” Emayatzy Corinealdi plays a high-rent, high-stress Los Angeles lawyer whose conscience begins to bite her in the first scripted series from Disney’s Onyx Collective brand for creators of color. Hulu, Sept. 27.THE DARK HEART Gustav Möller, director of the Swedish film “The Guilty” (remade in America starring Jake Gyllenhaal), oversaw this five-part thriller inspired by real events. A woman who manages a civilian search team for missing persons takes on the case of a landowner and lumber baron who alienated a lot of people, including his ambitious daughter, before he disappeared. Topic, Sept. 29.SO HELP ME TODD A quirky-funny mystery series — in the long lineage of “Monk” — starring Marcia Gay Harden as a Type-A lawyer and Skylar Astin as her son, who’s better at investigating than he is at adulting. CBS, Sept. 29.Marcia Gay Harden stars in “So Help Me Todd,” premiering Sept. 29 on CBS.Michael Courtney/CBSANNE RICE’S INTERVIEW WITH THE VAMPIRE AMC takes its first step toward an Anne Rice universe, under the aegis of the veteran producer Mark Johnson (“Better Call Saul”). Jacob Anderson, the eunuch warrior Grey Worm in “Game of Thrones,” plays Louis, the Brad Pitt role from the movie version; Sam Reid steps in for Tom Cruise as Lestat; and the newcomer Bailey Bass, soon to be seen in several “Avatar” sequels, replaces Kirsten Dunst as the child vampire, Claudia. AMC, Oct. 2.EAST NEW YORK William Finkelstein, a creator of this cop drama, spent the 1990s and early 2000s writing and producing for a good roster of shows: “L.A. Law,” “Murder One,” “Brooklyn South,” “Law & Order” and “NYPD Blue.” On the other hand, he also created “Cop Rock” with Steven Bochco. Amanda Warren (the mayor in “The Leftovers”) plays a new precinct boss in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the title, heading a cast that includes Jimmy Smits, Richard Kind and Ruben Santiago-Hudson. CBS, Oct. 2.THE WALKING DEAD There was a time — and it was only six years ago — when “The Walking Dead” was drawing more than 12 million viewers an episode and the death of a major character was Monday morning news. Now more important as intellectual property than as weekly storytelling, the original series shuffles to the finish line with its final eight episodes. AMC, Oct. 2.Norman Reedus in AMC’s “The Walking Dead,” returning for its final season on Oct. 2.Jace Downs/AMCMAKING BLACK AMERICA: THROUGH THE GRAPEVINE Henry Louis Gates Jr. explores the codes, networks and private societies that Black Americans have created “behind the veil” of the color line in a four-part documentary series. PBS, Oct. 4.ALASKA DAILY Tom McCarthy, who made one of the best newspaper dramas of our time in the film “Spotlight,” created this series about an abrasive reporter (Hilary Swank) who gets canceled in New York and takes a job in Anchorage, lured by a story about the deaths of Indigenous women. The presence of Jeff Perry as her new boss probably isn’t the only thing that will remind you of the shows of the ABC stalwart Shonda Rhimes. ABC, Oct. 6.A FRIEND OF THE FAMILY Anna Paquin and Colin Hanks star in this true-crime mini-series as the parents of the actress Jan Broberg, who was kidnapped when she was 12 and again when she was 14 by the same family friend (played by Jake Lacy). The bizarre story has also been told in the 2017 feature documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight.” Peacock, Oct. 6.Jake Lacy and Anna Paquin in the Peacock mini-series “A Friend of the Family.”PeacockPENNYWORTH: THE ORIGIN OF BATMAN’S BUTLER This stylish “Batman” prequel series, about the former special-forces soldier who will one day be Bruce Wayne’s butler (as the show’s awkward new title makes clear), leaves Epix for a platform closer to its DC Comics roots. Season 3 also mostly leaves behind the alt-history British civil war that occupied the first two installments, jumping ahead five years and introducing superheroes. HBO Max, Oct. 6.LET THE RIGHT ONE IN John Ajvide Lindqvist’s ultra-bleak 2004 novel about a child vampire keeps circulating through the culture: It has inspired films, plays, a comic book and a TV pilot, with Thomas Kretschmann, that wasn’t picked up. Now the story makes it to TV with Demián Bichir as the father of the girl vampire (Madison Taylor Baez) who’s forever 12. Showtime, online Oct. 7, cable Oct. 9.THE MIDNIGHT CLUB The latest from Mike Flanagan, whose atmospheric horror series (“The Haunting of Hill House,” “Midnight Mass”) have won a following on Netflix. Heather Langenkamp plays the doctor at a hospice where the patients like to tell one another scary stories. Netflix, Oct. 7.BECOMING FREDERICK DOUGLASS The documentarian Stanley Nelson (“Attica,” “Freedom Riders”) fills in some important chapters in his epic yet quotidian history of Black life in America with this film and with “Harriet Tubman: Visions of Freedom” (Oct. 4), both directed by Nelson and Nicole London. PBS, Oct. 11.CHAINSAW MAN Anticipation is running high in the anime world for the MAPPA animation studio’s adaptation of “Chainsaw Man,” a dark-comic, body-horror manga about a young devil hunter with a deadly appendage. Crunchyroll, Oct. 11.SHERWOOD The cast of this BBC mystery series is a lengthy British-TV who’s who: David Morrissey, Lesley Manville, Claire Rushbrook, Philip Jackson, Joanne Froggatt, Terence Maynard, Kevin Doyle, Robert Glenister, Clare Holman, Lorraine Ashbourne, Adeel Akhtar, Pip Torrens and Mark Addy, among others. Morrissey is the detective investigating a bow-and-arrow murder in Robin Hood’s old Nottinghamshire haunts that brings up hatreds from a 1980s miners’ strike. BritBox, Oct. 11.THE WINCHESTERS Jensen Ackles returns to the “Supernatural” universe, reassuming his role as the monster hunter Dean Winchester in this prequel series. This time Dean, in a supporting role, is tracking down the real story of the younger days of his mother and father (Meg Donnelly and Drake Rodger), which sounds like a good strategy for avoiding pesky continuity questions. CW, Oct. 11Drake Rodger and Meg Donnelly in “The Winchesters,” premiering Oct. 11 on the CW.Matt Miller/CWDOCUMENTARY NOW! One of TV’s greatest pleasures returns after a more than three-year hiatus. The fourth season, hosted, as always, by Dame Helen Mirren, will include sendups of “My Octopus Teacher,” “The September Issue,” “When We Were Kings” and Werner Herzog’s “Burden of Dreams.” IFC, Oct. 19.FROM SCRATCH Zoe Saldana stars in a mini-series that crosses cultures — a Black American woman falls in love with a Sicilian chef during her Wanderjahr in Italy — and genres, mixing picturesque Euroromance and sorrowful survivor’s tale. Netflix, Oct. 21.THE PERIPHERAL Scott B. Smith, who wrote the screenplay (based on his own novel) of the excellent 1998 thriller “A Simple Plan,” is the creator and showrunner of this series based on a dystopian, alternate-futures mystery by William Gibson; Chloë Grace Moretz stars; and Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan are among the executive producers. That’s an awful lot of bleak-noir experience. Amazon Prime Video, Oct. 21.GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES Del Toro takes on the Alfred Hitchcock role, playing master of ceremonies for an eight-episode horror anthology. (A previous title included the words “Guillermo del Toro Presents.”) The first season’s directors include Jennifer Kent (“The Babadook”), Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”) and Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”). Netflix, Oct. 25.SHERMAN’S SHOWCASE Diallo Riddle and Bashir Salahuddin’s consistently clever, stealthily sophisticated, unabashedly nostalgic sendup of old-school variety shows finally returns for a second season. IFC, Oct. 26.Bashir Salahuddin, foreground, in “Sherman’s Showcase,” returning for its second season on Oct. 26, on IFC.Michael Moriatis/IFCTRUE CRIME STORY: INDEFENSIBLE Back for a second season, the comedian Jena Friedman applies the adversarial techniques of topical late-night humor to the true-crime genre, in 20-minute episodes that are less investigations — the facts of the cases are generally pretty plain, at least in Friedman’s eyes — than expressions of darkly comic outrage. SundanceTV, Oct. 27.BIG MOUTH Since Nick Kroll broke the third-dimensional wall in the Season 5 finale and had a heart-to-heart with his animated character, Nick Birch, will any of his castmates get to follow suit in the sixth season of this raunchy paean to puberty? The real-life John Mulaney would probably have some interesting things to say to his animated counterpart, randy Andy Glouberman. Netflix, Oct. 28.MANIFEST A hit in reruns on Netflix after being canceled by NBC, this paranormal mystery-melodrama gets a fourth and final season at its streaming home. Netflix, Nov. 4.DANGEROUS LIAISONS This new adaptation of the Choderlos de Laclos novel was announced nearly a decade ago, with Christopher Hampton, who had already based a play and a film on the novel, attached as writer once again. Hampton didn’t remain as the writer — he gets an executive producer credit — but the mini-series has arrived billed as the “origin story” of the Marquise de Merteuil and the Vicomte de Valmont. Apparently they weren’t always jaded monsters. Starz, Nov. 6.MOOD Like Phoebe Waller-Bridge (“Fleabag”) and Michaela Coel (“Chewing Gum”) before her, Nicole Lecky turns a hit one-woman play into a buzzy British TV series. She plays Sasha, a broke and unemployed young Londoner who finds herself in the potentially lucrative and liberating — and also potentially exploitative and dangerous — world of the influencer economy. BBC America, Nov. 6.Nicole Lecky in “Mood,” premiering Nov. 6 on BBC America.Natalie Seery/BBC Studios, via Bonafide FilmsTULSA KING On the same night that Tyler Sheridan’s flagship show, “Yellowstone,” begins its fifth season, his portfolio of manly genre dramas grows with the addition of this mash-up of gangster story and neo-western. It’s also Sheridan’s latest action-hero reclamation project: Sylvester Stallone stars as a Mafia capo sent to oversee operations in the foreign territory of Tulsa, Okla. Paramount+, Nov. 13.LIMITLESS WITH CHRIS HEMSWORTH Deploying the charm he brings to his depiction of the Norse god Thor for Marvel, Hemsworth headlines a wellness-and-longevity documentary series for Marvel’s corporate parent, Disney. (The sound of his unadulterated Australian accent makes him even more charming, if that’s possible.) Subjects like how to deal with stress and the value of fasting are addressed with superheroic energy. Disney+, Nov. 16.WELCOME TO CHIPPENDALES Robert Siegel, fresh off “Pam & Tommy,” and Jenni Konner of “Girls” are the showrunners of a mini-series starring Kumail Nanjiani as Steve Banerjee, the unlikely and eventually ill-fated founder of a male-stripping colossus. Hulu, Nov. 22.WILLOW Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy film “Willow” is not the first piece of intellectual property anyone would have predicted for a reboot, but when George Lucas is involved — he received “story by” credit on the film — anything can happen. Lucasfilm and Howard’s Imagine Entertainment are producing this sequel series; Warwick Davis, now 52, returns as the title character. Maybe Willow will be a more consistent spell caster than he was as a teenager. Disney+, Nov. 30.Warwick Davis in “Willow,” premiering Nov. 30 on Disney+.Lucasfilm/Disney+THE ADVENTURES OF SAUL BELLOW Asaf Galay’s documentary, an “American Masters” offering, recruits wives, children and innocent bystanders to talk about being the real-life sources of Bellow’s books. Meanwhile, fellow novelists and critics like Charles Johnson, Salman Rushdie, Stanley Crouch and, in what may have been his last interview, a captivating Philip Roth certify or question Bellow’s place in the American pantheon. PBS, Dec. 12.And if all that isn’t enough for you, these new and returning shows are also coming this fall (new shows in bold):Sept. 11: “Monarch,” Fox; Sept. 12: “War of the Worlds,” Epix; Sept. 13: “The Come Up,” Freeform; Sept. 15: “La Otra Mirada,” PBS; “Vampire Academy,” Peacock; “The Light in the Hall,” Sundance Now; Sept. 16: “Los Espookys,” HBO; Sept. 18: “60 Minutes,” CBS; “SEAL Team,” Paramount+; Sept. 19: “Bob Hearts Abishola,” “NCIS,” “NCIS: Hawai’i,” “The Neighborhood,” CBS; “9-1-1,” “The Cleaning Lady,” Fox; Sept. 20: “FBI,” “FBI: International,” “FBI: Most Wanted,” CBS; “The Resident,” Fox; “New Amsterdam,” NBC; Sept. 21: “The Conners,” “The Goldbergs,” “Home Economics,” “Big Sky,” ABC; “Survivor,” “The Amazing Race,” CBS; “Chicago Fire,” “Chicago Med,” “Chicago P.D.,” NBC; Sept. 22: “The Kardashians,” Hulu; “Law & Order,” “Law & Order: Organized Crime,” “Law & Order: SVU,” NBC; “Thai Cave Rescue,” Netflix; Sept. 23: “Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace,” HBO Max; Sept. 24: “Finding Happy,” Bounce; Sept. 25: “The Rookie,” ABC; “The Simpsons,” “The Great North,” “Bob’s Burgers,” “Family Guy,” Fox; “Van der Valk,” PBS; Sept. 27: “The Rookie: Feds,” ABC; “La Brea,” NBC; “Mighty Ducks: Game Changers,” Disney+; Sept. 28: “The D’Amelio Show,” Hulu; Sept. 29: “Young Sheldon,” “Ghosts,” “CSI: Vegas,” CBS; “Welcome to Flatch,” “Call Me Kat,” Fox; “Dragons Rescue Riders: Heroes of the Sky,” Peacock; Sept. 30: “Ramy,” Hulu; Oct. 2: “The Equalizer,” CBS: “Family Law,” “The Coroner,” CW: Oct. 3: “The Good Doctor,” ABC: Oct. 5: “Kung Fu,” CW: “Reginald the Vampire,” Syfy; “Chucky,” Syfy/USA; Oct. 6: “Grey’s Anatomy,” “Station 19,” ABC; “Walker, Independence,” “Walker” CW; Oct. 7: “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” Apple TV+; “Fire Country,” “Blue Bloods,” “SWAT,” CBS; Oct. 9: “NCIS: Los Angeles,” CBS; “Secrets of the Dead,” PBS; Oct. 10: “All American,” “All American: Homecoming,” CW; Oct. 11: “Professionals,” CW; Oct. 14: “Shantaram,” Apple TV+; Oct. 16: “Magpie Murders,” “Miss Scarlet and the Duke,” PBS; Oct. 20: “One of Us Is Lying,” Peacock; Oct. 21: “Acapulco,” Apple TV+; Oct. 26: “Mysterious Benedict Society” Disney+; Nov. 3: “Blockbuster,” Netflix; “The Capture,” Peacock; “The Suspect,” Sundance Now; “Kold x Windy,” WE; Nov. 4: “Lopez vs. Lopez,” “Young Rock,” NBC; Nov. 9: “Zootopia+,” Disney+; Nov. 10: “The Calling,” Peacock; Nov. 11: “The English,” Amazon Prime Video; Nov. 13: “Yellowstone,” Paramount; Nov. 18: “The L Word: Generation Q,” Showtime; “Planet Sex With Clara Delevingne,” Hulu; Nov. 23: “Pitch Perfect: Bumper in Berlin,” Peacock; Nov. 30: “Irreverent,” Peacock; Dec. 1: “Wicked City,” “Hush,” AllBlk; Dec. 22: “The Best Man: The Final Chapters,” Peacock. 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    A Last Taste of Summer Theater, as Paris Heads Back to Work

    As offices and schools reopen, ParisOffFestival brings a carnival atmosphere to an area of low-income housing in the city.PARIS — “Dear neighbors!” an affable puppet called out from a third-floor window here last week. In the packed street below, a mix of theatergoers, local families and passers-by looked up. As more puppets appeared in the windows of an apartment building in the city’s south and addressed the crowd about loneliness and the “bitter pills” of daily life, the spectators murmured in approval.The strangely uplifting spectacle was part of ParisOffFestival, an annual event that began two years ago, but which already occupies a special niche in the Paris theater calendar. Run by the Théâtre 14 over three days in early September, it strives to keep the spirit of summer festivals going, even in the midst of “la rentrée,” the reopening of offices and schools that signals the end of the lengthy summer holidays in France.Seven theater productions, as well as readings, were performed during daytime hours in the courtyards of subsidized apartment buildings, in the Théâtre 14’s garden and at a local stadium, all a short walk apart. Also close by, the small pedestrian street where the puppets made their appearance acted as a welcome area for the public to hang out, with beer, cotton candy and loungers at the ready.All of the festival’s performances were free, a big investment from the small Théâtre 14, a city-run playhouse inaugurated in 1982, whose annual budget of around $800,000 is just a fraction of what the biggest stages in Paris receive.The Théâtre 14 used to keep a low profile, but since 2020, a new management team — the actor-director Mathieu Touzé and the arts administrator Édouard Chapot — has found creative ways to insert the institution into the national conversation, from partnerships with high-profile playwrights to yearly events like ParisOffFestival and Re.génération, a spring festival devoted to site-specific work.The first edition of ParisOffFestival, in the summer of 2020, was a quick-thinking response to the coronavirus pandemic. After the cancellation that year of the Avignon Festival, French theater’s biggest event, Touzé and Chapot offered their help to 15 companies that had been due to perform in the Avignon Fringe. The Fringe is known as “le Off” in French, hence the name of the festival, which has stayed, even as Avignon reopened for business.That first edition, Chapot said recently, allowed the new team to meet locals who had never set foot inside the Théâtre 14. While the red brick buildings in the area near the playhouse look, at first glance, like standard bourgeois Paris dwellings, the neighborhood is primarily composed of low-income housing developments. For many there, going to the theater is an unnecessary luxury, even when it’s just a few yards away.Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar in “Florence & Moustafa.”Théâtre 14So ParisOffFestival takes theater to them instead, with additional funding coming this year from Paris Habitat, the city’s social housing authority. Last Saturday, two of the shows were staged in the courtyards of apartment complexes that Paris Habitat runs. As the mock wedding depicted in Guillaume Vincent’s “Florence & Moustafa” unfolded, a few people stepping out of their homes were stopped in their tracks and watched a scene or two, looking startled. (Others sped past, headphones firmly on.)For those paying attention, the selected shows proved engaging, with “Florence & Moustafa” an especially witty choice. It was designed as an offshoot of a much larger production, Vincent’s sprawling and extravagant “One Thousand and One Nights,” first seen at the Odéon playhouse in 2019. Like that show, “Florence & Moustafa” puts a contemporary spin on Arabic folk takes, but it requires only two actors, a table and a few props.The action started at the housing project’s gate. In full wedding attire, the performers, Florence Janas and Mathias Bentahar, welcomed audience members as the bride and groom might greet guests at a slightly unhinged reception. As they directed people to their seats, they traded thinly veiled barbs between declarations of love — and then asked someone in the first row to help them butter slices of toast.The audience didn’t get to share the food, but the interplay between Janas’s over-the-top unpredictability and Bentahar’s quiet confidence kept the proceedings lively. Like “One Thousand and One Nights,” “Florence & Moustafa” constantly slips between modern references and folk tales, which are interwoven as the characters’ back stories. Florence, we hear, tricked a former husband who had already married and disposed of seven wives; Moustafa found a magic lamp and squandered his three wishes, in a case of penis enlargement gone very wrong.That surreal energy carried over to some of ParisOffFestival’s other offerings. “Crust,” a one-man show starring the juggler Guillaume Martinet, made delightful use of the event’s backdrop. As the audience waited for him near the edge of a street, he peeked at us from behind parked cars, then sheepishly came closer wearing just white underwear and moon boots, like a curious alien, at once eager and scared.His supple juggling came as an extension of his loose-limbed stage character, catching props even as he spun, hung from window rails and crawled on the floor. When a photographer attempted to snap him up close, he played hide and seek, then climbed on top of a construction site container and continued his act there.Other productions felt more haphazard in their attempts to craft an overall narrative, including “The Windows,” the puppet show, which was designed by the company Les Anges au Plafond. Leaning out from the casements of a single building, the various characters — lonely inhabitants, a care services worker for the elderly and, inexplicably, some birds and a goat — never really made sense in relation to one another.“Divine Wind,” a one-man show directed by Cécile Bernot, brought a virtuosic performance from David Jonquières, a gifted mime who can also mimic cartoonish sound effects. While his imitation of a plane going down is uncanny, his attempt to retell a part of World War II history — the events of 1941 in the South Pacific — felt repetitive and came uncomfortably close to offensive caricature in its depiction of Japanese characters.Adrian Saint-Pol and Elsa Guedj in “Infinity Minus One.”Théâtre 14On the other hand, Luna Muratti’s “Infinity Minus One,” also staged in a housing project courtyard, never lost its sense of grace, despite being drowned out at times by gusts of wind and passing cars. The show was inspired by a young French poet, Alicia Gallienne, who died at the age of 20; her work was published posthumously in 2020 by her cousin Guillaume Gallienne, a star actor in France.Gallienne’s poetry is a lovely discovery, full of dreamlike visions and suspended non sequiturs addressed to an elusive other, and here it was ideally delivered by the actress Elsa Guedj, seen recently in the Netflix series “Standing Up,” with help from the flutist Adrian Saint-Pol. Guedj has that rare ability to convey emotions bubbling up without yet being fully formed.“I have eyes in the shape of departure,” she whispered early on, before addressing Saint-Pol, who doubles as the love interest in Gallienne’s poems. By the time she covered his eyes with her hands and closed hers, at the end of “Infinity Minus One,” the surrounding noise was forgotten. The summer festival season may be over, but this was a welcome encore. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Declares Trump ‘the Worst Ex Ever’

    “After four years of putting up with his nonsense, we finally throw him out of the house, he takes 40 boxes of our stuff,” Kimmel said.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.‘Ménage a treason’The F.B.I.’s search at Mar-a-Lago continued to dominate late night on Wednesday, as further details emerge on its findings.Jimmy Kimmel called Trump “the worst ex ever.”“After four years of putting up with his nonsense, we finally throw him out of the house, he takes 40 boxes of our stuff.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“These documents — these are so protected they can’t even be viewed by most members of Trump’s or the president’s national security team. The only people who are allowed to see them are the president of the United States and a few highly cleared members of his council, and anyone who goes into Trump’s closet looking for a broom, I guess.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So this time, the ex-president wasn’t just betraying our country, he brought in another country for a ménage a treason.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Investigators reportedly found the nuclear documents hidden in the club’s storage closet, next to a bag of golf tees, a box of old pool noodles, and Melania, who was hiding in there.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He took top secret documents from the White House and had them sitting in boxes in a room where workers regularly went in and out. They would have been more secure inside the claw machine at Dave and Buster’s, OK?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Nuclear Stress Test Edition)“More details are emerging about the sensitive documents found inside Donald Trump’s Florida home, and it turns out some of those documents included information about a foreign nation’s military defenses and their nuclear capabilities. It’s pretty shocking. Hard to imagine such recklessness from an otherwise perfectly buttoned-up administration.” — JAMES CORDEN“How do you explain this to our allies? ‘Don’t worry, prime minister, your country’s nuclear secrets are perfectly, safely stored at the Mar-a-Lago waffle bar between the syrup and the Nutella bucket.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“These nuclear secrets could have been stolen by foreign agents, they could have been published on the internet, Eric could have eaten them — we don’t know!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Imagine being a guest at Mar-a-Lago and using the bathroom, and out of the corner of your eye you just notice something and are you like, ‘Hang on. Is that — is that Norway’s nuclear codes?’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingAmber Ruffin, a writer for “Late Night,” skewered the people who misidentified famous Black women at the U.S. Open tennis tournament and at a New York Liberty W.N.B.A. game during Wednesday’s “Amber Says What?”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightRyan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney will talk about their new series “Welcome to Wrexham” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSimone Niamani Thompson for The New York TimesThe women of “Black Panther” leaned on each other to get through the grief-stricken shoot without their late co-star Chadwick Boseman while filming the sequel, “Wakanda Forever.” More

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    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Kate,’ Tracing the Tears of a Clown

    The comedian Kate Berlant’s latest experiment, directed by Bo Burnham at the Connelly Theater, positions her as an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story.There are more than 40 individual muscles in the human face, and when Kate Berlant tries to cry, she gives all of them a workout. An open-mouthed frown suggests the mask of Greek tragedy; a pout transforms her into a gargoyle. Her brow furrows and smooths. Eyes squint, widen and cross. Lips quiver. Nostrils flare. A camera captures each shift, and a projector then throws the image onto a giant screen. Still, the tears don’t come. Some people in the audience will laugh at this. Some won’t. Some will be too busy wondering if this bit is ha-ha funny or cringe funny or merely mortifying, a convergence of pleasure, perplexity and embarrassment that is, I would hazard, exactly where Berlant and her 15-foot-face face want us.A grande dame of experimental comedy, Berlant is a thinking woman’s comic. To put it a little more precisely, she is a comic for all the girls out there who think too much. Her latest experiment, at the Connelly Theater, is “Kate,” directed by Bo Burnham, a brainy, busy, dizzy, prankish one-woman show. The confessional solo is a hallowed form downtown; Berlant desecrates it from every side. She plays with its creeds the way that a cat might toy with a mouse — teasing, batting, swiping, mauling.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work. “Kate” is structured — loosely, like drawstring pants — around Kate’s failed attempts, from childhood onward, to cry on camera. Crying functions here as the high-water mark (salt water, presumably) of actorly truth and authenticity. But what is authenticity anyway? And why would you go looking for it at a theater-comedy hybrid like this one? Sincerity doesn’t live here anymore. Joke’s on you.Impatient, stylized, cerebral, Berlant’s comedy has never been for all markets. (Or maybe she’s not for … men?) Nearly a decade ago, my colleague, Jason Zinoman, described her as “not to everyone’s taste.” Marc Maron, on a recent episode of the WTF podcast, introduced her this way: “She’s an odd presence. But funny.” Her comedy resembles an infinite recursion, a hall of mirrors in which the reflections rarely flatter.The show positions Berlant as Kate, an actress with a semi-traumatic origin story and a style too brash and crass for film work.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHere, the auto-fictional games begin as soon as you enter the lobby of the Connelly, a dainty theater folded into an East Village side street. Berlant is already everywhere, in a way that suggests both formal daring and pathological narcissism. Her stage outfit is on display behind a glass vitrine, as though borrowed from the Met’s Costume Institute. Her notebook is on exhibit, too. You can buy a beer at the “Katecessions” stand, pose with black-and-white photos of Berlant, visit a reproduction of her childhood living room, view the lunar phase at the moment of her birth. And there in the middle of it all is Berlant herself, in dark glasses and with luxuriant curls, wearing a sign that says, “Ignore Me.”If her previous projects — her film and television cameos; her sketch show with John Early; her podcast with Jacqueline Novak, Poog — have not yet won you over, how you respond to “Kate” may have to do with how much you enjoy seeing theatrical tropes savaged. (Me, I enjoy that a lot.) The accents, the miming, the assumption of multiple characters, the buildup to some terrible trauma, all are satirized here. Berlant is very much in on each joke. But Kate, her serious and self-possessed character, is not.“I’m going to be talking about something I’ve never talked about,” she says in an early scene, in the sleek, practiced rhythms of someone who has spent too long in the rehearsal room. “See, I have this secret? The show is a mess. It’s about me, so of course it is.”Berlant can run hot, like a Cassavetes heroine with big theater kid energy, tumultuous, but bright with it. Burnham’s more detached style, most conspicuous in the filmed segments, cools her down, further levering open the gap between performer and character. The Kate of the show insists that everything depends on whether or not she can cry on camera. (Part of the show’s schtick is that there’s a Disney+ executive whom she wants to impress.) But Berlant and Burnham seem up to something more destabilizing, the suggestion that authenticity is just one more act, that truth is, at best, contingent and transitory. Although “Kate” borrows elements of Berlant’s biography, it’s fiction through and through, which means that it withholds the very thing the lobby teases: knowledge of Berlant herself.It’s a great joke, if a nihilistic one. And here’s one more, a swipe at the theater itself. Because if you really were going to reveal your terrible secret, unpacking your heart with words, why would you do it for 150 people on the Lower East Side? Wouldn’t you just put that mess online?Here is how Kate, in a moment of outrage explains it: “Do you realize that if I posted a video to Instagram and it got 150 likes, I would kill myself?”KateThrough Oct. 8 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; kateshow.net. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    A New ‘Christmas Carol’ for Broadway

    Jefferson Mays will bring his adaptation of the Charles Dickens classic to the Nederlander Theater starting in November.A virtuosic one-man production of “A Christmas Carol,” in which a single actor plays more than 50 roles, including a potato, will be staged on Broadway during the coming holiday season.The actor is Jefferson Mays, a Tony Award winner with a lifelong passion for the Charles Dickens story (like many) who has been honing this production for years. In 2018, he first performed it at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles; in 2020, when the pandemic precluded in-person performances, he made a filmed version shot at the United Palace in Upper Manhattan.Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, called Mays’s performance in the film “astonishing” and said the adaptation was “an opportunity to make what was already a classic story feel new, while also making it feel as if it should matter forever.”The Broadway production is scheduled to begin previews on Nov. 8 and to open on Nov. 21 at the Nederlander Theater; the shelf-life of “Christmas Carol” productions tends to be short, and this one is slated to close on Jan. 1.Mays is a gifted shape-shifter — in 2004 he won a Tony Award for playing 35 characters in the solo show “I Am My Own Wife,” and in 2014 he was nominated for another Tony Award for playing eight roles, in the musical comedy “A Gentleman’s Guide to Love & Murder.” (He was nominated again in 2017, for playing a Norwegian diplomat in a political drama, “Oslo.”)Mays is now on Broadway playing Mayor Shinn in a lavish revival of “The Music Man”; he will leave that production some time this fall to prepare for “A Christmas Carol.”The Dickens novella, with memorable characters including Ebenezer Scrooge, Tiny Tim and four ghosts (don’t forget Jacob Marley!), is a widely staged, and frequently adapted, redemption story; the last version on Broadway was in 2019.The new version was adapted by Mays and his wife, the actor Susan Lyons, along with Michael Arden, who is directing the production. The idea was conceived by Arden and Dane Laffrey, who is the production’s scenic and costume designer; the producers are Hunter Arnold and Kayla Greenspan. More

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    On the Scene: Lea Michele in ‘Funny Girl’ 🎭

    Julia Jacobs/The New York TimesEntering the show, theatergoers shook off the rain and buzzed with anticipation. One fan of Michele’s, Stephen Carella, 24, said it felt surreal to be there after watching her play Brice on the TV show “Glee.” “It is just a pop cultural moment,” Carella said. More