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    ‘SNL’ Pokes Fun at Trump’s Tariffs and Economy Chaos in Easter Cold Open

    Among the sources of all the fun is ‘The White POTUS,” a parody that casts members of the administration in their own twisted playground for the privileged.With Easter approaching, it seemed appropriate for “Saturday Night Live” to resurrect a favorite bit: a scene from the Bible that is interrupted by a comic monologue from James Austin Johnson playing President Trump.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by Jon Hamm and featuring the musical guest Lizzo, began with what looked like a straightforward re-enactment of the Cleansing of the Temple, with the role of Jesus played by Mikey Day. “This will not stand,” Day said, overturning a money changer’s table. “I will rid this place of all its money.”The action paused so that Johnson could enter as Trump. “Remind you of anyone?” he asked. “Wow. I also got rid of money last week. But instead of one temple, I did whole country. Maybe even the globe. The money’s gone.”Johnson continued: “Hi, it’s me, your favorite president, Donald Jesus Trump, comparing myself to the son of God once again. You know, many people are even calling me the messiah, because of the mess-I-ah made out of the economy.”The financial turmoil, he said, was “all because of my beautiful tariffs — they’re so beautiful. They were working so well that I had to stop them.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Last of Us’ Review: On the Road Again

    Season 2 of HBO’s zombie drama begins with Joel and Ellie safe and settled. One guess how long that lasts.HBO’s video-game-inspired, postapocalyptic hit “The Last of Us” likes to cover all its zombie bases. The first season emphasized urban hellscapes — lots of cowering and running in the ruins of Boston, Kansas City and Salt Lake City — while moving toward the open spaces of Wyoming. Season 2, premiering Sunday, goes the other direction, starting out as a grisly western — stockaded town, horse patrols, waves of attackers — but moving back to the city, this time an emptied-out Seattle.Wherever it goes, though, “The Last of Us” remains (as my colleague James Poniewozik pointed out in his Season 1 review) a zombie tale that polishes and elaborates on the conventions of the genre but does not transcend them. The course of its action and the dynamics of its relationships run in familiar grooves, lubricated by generous applications of blood and goo.Where the show has differed from the genre standard is in the dramatic weight and screen time it devotes to those relationships, or, seen another way, in its sentimentality. (I say potahto.)Other zombie shows flesh out love, friendship and loyalty just enough to provide a little extra frisson when a character becomes lunch. “The Last of Us,” which was created and is still overseen by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin, doesn’t reverse that equation — it still spends time, and a lot of HBO’s money, on elaborate scenes of mayhem, in close quarters or on broad canvases. But it really wants you to care. If the Hallmark Channel had a zombie drama, it might look like a PG version of “The Last of Us.”At the heart of the series, making the greatest demands on our emotions, is the Mutt and Jeff pairing of Joel (Pedro Pascal) — a hard case whose daughter was killed at the beginning of the show’s zombie-spawning fungal pandemic — and Ellie (Bella Ramsey), a teenager he met two decades later. Ellie, who would try the patience of adults far saintlier than Joel, happens to be immune to the fungus, and in Season 1 Joel reluctantly agreed to take her on a cross-country journey in pursuit of a cure. They emerged from the perilous, season-long road trip as each other’s surrogate family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Last of Us’: What to Remember Ahead of Season 2

    Where did we last leave Joel and Ellie? Well, it was a little complicated. It was also over two years ago. Here’s a refresher.Videogame adaptations have not, historically, had the best critical reputations; and zombie apocalypse stories are a bit played out. This is what was working against “The Last of Us” when HBO debuted Season 1 in 2023. A series based on a game, set in a postapocalyptic landscape populated by ferocious monsters? Did we need another show like this, given that we already have something like seven iterations of the “Walking Dead”?Apparently so, given the level of acclaim and popularity the first “The Last of Us” season enjoyed. Craig Mazin, working with the game’s creator, Neil Druckmann, reimagined and reinvigorated an exhausted action-horror subgenre, making it work for television by taking advantage of what the medium allows. They broke their sweeping, epic story into gripping individual episodes, filled with small but potent moments of tension and tragedy.It helped also that “The Last of Us” has such appealing lead characters: the gruff mercenary Joel (Pedro Pascal) and the foul-mouthed teenager Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who travel together across a country populated by murderous gangs and rapacious creatures. Viewers very quickly became invested in these two, pulling for them not only to survive but also to make the most of whatever time they might have left on Earth.It has been over two years since the Season 1 finale aired, so some fans might need a refresher on what Joel and Ellie went through and where they are now. So before Season 2 debuts on Sunday, here is what you need to know.So there are these mushrooms …Some say the world will end in fire; some say ice. In “The Last of Us,” we fear the fungus. The story starts with an explanation of the fungi cordyceps, a parasitic genus that in the real world can infect insects, effectively seizing control of their brains. In the TV series, these parasites begin infecting humans in 2003 (perhaps through tainted flour). In a matter of days, the whole planet is overrun with mindless killing machines who can infect other humans with their bite.Most of Season 1 is set in 2023, after many of the noninfected have been clustered into scattered, isolated enclaves, each with its own rudimentary government and social structure. In the decades since the cordyceps plague started, the infected have gone through changes, evolving new powers and becoming stronger, while guided by an interconnected fungal root structure. The best way for humans to survive has been to seal themselves off as best as possible from the rampaging hordes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Khovanshchina’ Is Finished in Time to Be Newly Resonant

    Mussorgsky’s “Khovanshchina” has been added onto by Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Shostakovich. Now, another composer gets to have his say.Instead of finishing his masterpiece “Khovanshchina,” Modest Mussorgsky is drunk in a ditch. His friend Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov urges him to compose, using a walking stick to tickle him awake. But Mussorgsky would rather stay in the ditch, drunk.That’s fiction: a scene from “Moscow-Petushki,” a 1969 satire by the Soviet writer Venedikt Yerofeyev. But, said the composer, musicologist and author Gerard McBurney, who completed a new version of “Khovanshchina” that premieres at the Salzburg Easter Festival on Saturday, the moment shows the mythic place of the unfinished opera in Russian history.“Yerofeyev, writing to an audience who had probably never been into the opera in their life — they know this story about this great genius who is the emblematic Russian failure,” McBurney said in an interview.In real life, Mussorgsky “embarked on this monstrous piece which was supposed to sum up the whole disaster of Russian history from beginning to end,” McBurney added. “And he couldn’t finish it.”A scene from Simon McBurney’s production, which will travel to the Metropolitan Opera.Inés BacherMcBurney has created a new, completed “Khovanshchina,” and he joins a long line of composers and musicologists who did the same. Mussorgsky died in 1881, leaving key scenes in the final act unfinished. Rimsky-Korsakov made the first performance edition of the opera (which Mussorgsky preferred to call a “musical folk drama”), and it premiered at the Mariinsky Theater in 1886. In 1913, Sergei Diaghilev enlisted Stravinsky (and possibly Ravel) to prepare another version for performance in Paris, and Shostakovich reorchestrated the score for a 1959 film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Bernadette Peters Loves a Day Out in New York

    Back on Broadway for “Old Friends,” the actress reflects on the art she saw with Sondheim and the delights of the High Line and Central Park.Growing up in Queens, Bernadette Peters was enraptured by trips into Manhattan to see the dinosaurs at the American Museum of Natural History.“There’s something special about revisiting them as an adult, with fresh eyes,” said Peters, 77, a two-time Tony-winning actress who originated the roles of the Witch in “Into the Woods” and Dot in “Sunday in the Park With George.”She’s doing much the same thing in her latest turn on Broadway — her first in nearly seven years — in “Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends,” a concert-style revue of songs by the acclaimed composer and lyricist who died in 2021, in which she stars opposite Lea Salonga.Though Peters has played a number of the featured roles, her song choices are surprising — singing “I Know Things Now” as Little Red Riding Hood, for instance, in the “Into the Woods” segment.“I like a challenge,” said Peters, who put her stamp on half a dozen Sondheim characters, including Momma Rose in “Gypsy,” Desirée Armfeldt in “A Little Night Music” and Sally Durant Plummer in “Follies.”In a phone interview last month from Los Angeles, where “Old Friends” was wrapping up a pre-Broadway run, Peters, who was anxious to get back to home to New York City and her rescue dogs Charlie and Rosalie, shared 10 of her Big Apple-inspired cultural essentials.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    How Brandon Kazen-Maddox, an American Sign Language Artist, Spends Their Sundays

    Brandon Kazen-Maddox has always felt an affinity with mermaids.“We both straddle two worlds,” said Mx. Kazen-Maddox, 36, an American Sign Language dancer, choreographer and filmmaker who is nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns.Mx. Kazen-Maddox, like both their parents, is hearing. But they grew up living with their mother at her parents’ home in Washington State, where their maternal grandparents, both of whom are deaf, spoke with their hands.Soon, Mx. Kazen-Maddox learned to do the same. “I like to say my words are just along for the ride,” they said.Mx. Kazen-Maddox said they enjoyed spending time at Riverside Park, dancing and listening to music, near their home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.Amir Hamja for The New York TimesMx. Kazen-Maddox has been interpreting professionally since 2012 and has worked on the Broadway production of “Aladdin” and for former President Joe Biden, the composer Lin-Manuel Miranda and the actress Marlee Matlin.In a half-hour PBS special scheduled for Tuesday, “SOUL(SIGNS): Making Music Visible,” Mx. Kazen-Maddox documented the process of choreographing, filming and performing an A.S.L. music video for Morgan James’s “Drown,” shedding light on their own relationship with music and sign language.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Theater to Stream: David Tennant as ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Death of England’ and More

    Take in Shakespeare, experimental theater and a three-play series on the fallout of Brexit, all available to watch at home.‘Macbeth’Stream it on Marquee TV.In the 2023 production of Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” at the Donmar Warehouse in London, directed by Max Webster, an unusual request was made of audience members as they entered the theater: Wear headphones.The actors, too, wore headsets, their quips, shouts and whispers transmitted digitally into the audience’s ears, at times alternating between the left and right earphones. Writing for The New York Times, the critic Houman Barekat said that “the transmitted audio imbues the words with an added richness and immediacy.” The production conjures “just enough novelty,” he added, “to freshen things up, while still ensuring that the text remains center stage — in all its timeless glory.”Luckily for Shakespeare fans, the show, which was nominated for three Olivier awards, including best revival, best actor and best sound design, was recorded live.From Barekat’s critical notebook, which praised David Tennant’s turn as Macbeth, a “gaunt, energetic bundle of angst”:Tennant, with his slim-line physique and withdrawn, vaguely haunted-looking face, has a more expressive emotional energy that lends itself to treacherous intrigue and anguished remorse alike. He is frantic, almost from the get-go.The N.Y.C. Fringe FestivalAzhar Bande-Ali in “Bad Muslim.”Peter CooperStream it on frigid.nyc.Each year, the New York City Fringe Festival, presented by the nonprofit theater company Frigid, uses a lottery system to randomly select the plays it produces, giving less established theater makers a chance to stage their work.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Rick Levine, Who Gave Commercials Cinematic Flair, Dies at 94

    An award-winning director, he created ads for brands like Diet Pepsi (starring Michael J. Fox) and Wells Fargo by bringing a Hollywood sensibility to the small screen.Rick Levine, an award-winning television commercial director who brought a big-screen sensibility to the small screen with widely celebrated spots, like a Diet Pepsi Super Bowl ad from the 1980s featuring Michael J. Fox risking life and limb for love, died on March 11 at his home in Marina del Rey, Calif. He was 94.The death was confirmed by his daughter Abby LaRocca.Mr. Levine was a product of what is often called the golden age of advertising, rising in the business through the “Mad Men” era of the 1960s and founding his own company, Rick Levine Productions, in 1972. It was a time when network television held a hypnotic sway over the average American household, and advertising, like so many other cultural arenas of the era, was exploding in creativity.Often serving as his own cinematographer, Mr. Levine approached his big-budget commercials like a director of Hollywood blockbusters.“We decided to make our ads look as good as films,” he said in a 2009 interview with DGA Quarterly, published by the Directors Guild of America. “I would direct and shoot, so I would have complete control.”The Guild named him the best commercial director in 1981 and 1988, in particular for three specific spots.Most notable among them was the Diet Pepsi commercial with Mr. Fox, which Mr. Levine made for BBDO New York; it was one of many ads he shot for Pepsi.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More