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    ‘Dabba Cartel’ Is a Go-Go-Go Drama With Depth

    This Indian Netflix series isn’t the most original thing ever, but it comes loaded with brains, humor and electric performances.The Indian drama “Dabba Cartel,” on Netflix (in Hindi, with subtitles, or dubbed), is a lively spin on the “regular people do crimes … and like it?” genre. It incorporates sudsy twists, vicious domestic subplots, corporate malfeasance and social critiques, and its foot stays on the gas. In the course of its seven episodes, characters go from being not totally sure how one consumes marijuana to synthesizing a new street drug and rubbing shoulders with big-time baddies.Raji (Shalini Pandey) runs a lunch delivery service, and she has been sneaking in “herbal Viagra” for some of her customers. Her colleague Mala (Nimisha Sajayan) has a dirtbag boyfriend who coerces her into expanding the drug distribution to include the far more lucrative MDMA. “These are real drugs!” Raji worries.“Madam, all drugs are real,” the dirtbag says.Raji is trying to save money so she and her husband, who works in big pharma, can move to Germany. Beyond the food service, Mala works as a domestic laborer to support herself and her daughter, so every little bit helps. The delivery business also includes Shahida (Anjali Anand), a real estate agent who dreams of more. The three know they’re in over their heads, but their fear and desperation turn to shock and later industriousness when Raji’s mother-in-law, Sheila (Shabana Azmi), turns out to be a retired queenpin.Luckily, she has a plan. Unluckily, that plan is that they all become mega drug dealers together.Alongside our budding Walter Whites, “Dabba” follows a government investigator (Gajraj Rao) who is trying to prevent opioids from flooding the Indian market. They’re illegal in India, but some pharmaceutical companies manufacture the drugs for American distribution, and he is convinced that Fentanyl and its ilk are making their way to the people. No one takes his concerns seriously, and he is paired with a quirky female police officer (Sai Tamhankar) who is herself often overlooked. But she thinks he’s onto something.A little “Dopesick,” a little “Good Girls,” “Dabba” has brains and humor if not total originality. It feels fresh, though, because of its electric performances, especially from Sajayan, whose brusque and perceptive Mala has some of the show’s best lines. “Dabba” also pays sharp attention to all the little moments of social friction, the mounting indignities each character faces, all the various ways to be insecure.The show is visually ambitious, unlike so many drab crime dramas: fun overhead shots, bright umbrellas, lots of high-stress traffic Jenga. And there are no departure episodes in which we leave the main plot to learn sage wisdom from a sad side character. Everything connects — and it cooks. More

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    Oliver Awards 2025 Nominations: ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ Earns 13 Nods

    The acclaimed revival, which is about to transfer to London’s Barbican, scored 13 nominations at Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.A revival of “Fiddler on the Roof,” the much-loved 1964 musical, received the most nominations on Tuesday for this year’s Olivier Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Tonys.The show got 13 nods — seven more than any other musical or play — including best musical revival, where it is up against a production of “Hello, Dolly!” starring Imelda Staunton, which ran at the London Palladium, as well as ongoing revivals of “Oliver!” at the Gielgud Theater and “Starlight Express” at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theater.Directed by Jordan Fein, “Fiddler on the Roof” is a stripped-back version of the tale of a Jewish milkman in Czarist Russia who is marrying off his daughters against a backdrop of antisemitic pogroms. It received rave reviews when it opened last August at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theater. (It transfers to the Barbican Center on May 24).Marianka Swain, writing in The Daily Telegraph, called the production “a masterclass in balancing innovation with tradition.” Fein resisted the temptation to draw out the musical’s parallels to contemporary events like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine or surging antisemitism, Swain wrote. “No need when they come through so powerfully anyway,” the reviewer added.Fein is nominated in the best director category, where he will face tight competition from the directors of three of the past year’s most critically acclaimed plays: Nicholas Hytner for “Giant,” about Roald Dahl’s antisemitism, staged last year at the Royal Court and opening in April on the West End; Robert Icke for a version of “Oedipus” that ran at Wyndham’s Theater; and Eline Arbo for “The Years,” running at the Harold Pinter Theater.From left, Anjli Mohindra, Deborah Findlay, Gina McKee, Romola Garai and Harmony Rose-Bremner in “The Years.”Helen MurrayWe 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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    ‘Mamma Mia!’ Is Returning to Broadway This Summer

    The musical’s original run was the ninth-longest in Broadway history; a six-month return engagement will start in August.“Mamma Mia!” is returning to Broadway this summer after a decade away.The big-hearted musical, which combined Abba songs and abs to become a huge hit onstage and then on film, is scheduled to start previews on Aug. 2 at the Winter Garden Theater — where it spent much of its original run. The opening date is set for Aug. 14, and the run is expected to last at least six months.“I hope it will be a bit of an end-of-summer treat for New York,” said Judy Craymer, the British producer who initially commissioned the musical and has transformed it into a global business.The musical’s first New York engagement, with 5,773 performances from 2001 to 2015, made it the ninth-longest-running show in Broadway history. Its 50 productions around the world, in 16 languages, have been seen by more than 70 million people and have grossed more than $7 billion, the show’s publicists said.The musical’s mother-daughter story is set on a fictional Greek island, where family and friends have gathered for a wedding. The daughter is determined to use the occasion to figure out which among three of her mother’s ex-boyfriends is her father, whose identity she has never known.The plot, for many fans, is largely a scaffolding for an extremely popular set of Abba tunes and a lot of upbeat dance numbers (performed by actors in exuberant, and sometimes skimpy, costumes) that prompted occasional dancing by patrons in the aisles.“It’s the idyllic Greek holiday,” Craymer said, “and everyone wants to be on that island, cellphone free, having a fun time.”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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    Sadie Sink Heads Back to School, in Broadway’s ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’

    For much of her high school career, Sadie Sink took her lessons inside an old lifeguard shack that had been converted into a schoolhouse for the child actors on the set of “Stranger Things.” When the cast wasn’t battling Demogorgons in a parallel dimension, “everyone was studying different things at the same time,” Sink told me recently of her experience in the shack. “It was chaos.”With that hit Netflix series nearing its end, and as Sink plotted her next move, she read the script for Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” a play about teenagers reading “The Crucible,” together, in a more typical school setting — though one that hides troubles of its own.On a February afternoon, Sink sat at a desk in a rehearsal space in Manhattan’s Flatiron district, in a simulated classroom that had a timeless quality. There were pencil grooves atop the melamine desks, tennis balls at the bottom of the chair legs. On a blackboard in the back, cryptic remnants of a lesson: “SEX IS POWER” was scrawled in chalk in uppercase letters, and below that, in lowercase, the words “changes nothing.”Sadie Sink made her Broadway debut at the age of 10 in “Annie,” and is returning this spring in the play “John Proctor Is the Villain.”Hannah Edelman for The New York TimesJust as “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 classic, used the Salem witch trials as an allegory for McCarthyism, “John Proctor Is the Villain” uses “The Crucible” to interrogate the complexity of growing up in the #MeToo era. In an English class in Appalachia in 2018, the students are studying Miller’s play just as that movement against sexual violence tears through their one-stoplight town, breaches the doors of their school and collides with their reading of the play itself.The result is a prismatic revelation: “John Proctor Is the Villain” is, at turns, a literary critique, a tender bildungsroman, a loopy comedy, a study of rural America and a Taylor Swift appreciation post. This month, it becomes a Broadway show, directed by the Tony Award-winning Danya Taymor.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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    Late Night Recaps Zelensky’s Casual Friday at the White House

    “I don’t see you asking Elon Musk if he owns a suit,” Seth Meyers said of the reporter who questioned Ukraine’s president about his attire.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.Bad Fashion PoliceOn Friday, President Trump and Vice President JD Vance berated President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine during a tense televised meeting at the White House. Things went bad after a conservative reporter asked why Zelensky hadn’t worn a suit to the Oval Office and whether he owned one.On Monday’s “Late Night,” Seth Meyers noted that Zelensky hadn’t been the only casually dressed visitor to the White House lately: “I don’t see you asking Elon Musk if he owns a suit, even though he shows up to cabinet meetings.”“People care about the cost of groceries and health care, not whether the president of Ukraine has ever been to a Men’s Wearhouse.” — SETH MEYERS“The guy’s the leader of a country that was invaded by Russia, and you’re grilling him like a fop at a garden party: ‘I have a question — is your stylist legally blind or just farsighted?’” — SETH MEYERS“Oh, Zelensky, you’re so poor and war-torn, you’re down to one Brooks Brother.” — JON STEWART“You’re so war-torn, you’ve given up the meaningless protocols of business attire.” — JON STEWART“His nation was invaded, he’s — against all odds — held off a much bigger army for three years, and we’re like, ‘And would it kill you to smile more, dress a little nicer? You’re a beautiful country, nobody would know! Show off what you got, know what I’m talking about? Maybe some of those rare metals I’ve been hearing something about.’” — JON STEWART“This poor man. They’re bombing every hospital in his country, he’s sitting there with the half-wit fashion police talking about what he is wearing.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Everyone knows Donald Trump prefers his leaders shirtless and on a horse.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ukrainian President Zelensky was criticized for what he wore to the White House meeting on Friday, but, in his defense, most suits his size come with a sailor hat and a giant lollipop.” — GREG GUTFELD“So Friday, Zelensky entered the White House in his military fatigues and left with a boot up his [expletive].” — GREG GUTFELDThe Punchiest Punchlines (Real Housewives Edition)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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    Why Does Every Play Seem Political Now?

    Theater about current events — both literally and abstractly — is changing the conversation between playwrights, directors and their audiences.IT’S ALWAYS BEEN a good argument starter to contend that all theater is political, even if the claim sometimes depends on stretching the definition of “political” to its vaguest outer limits. For one thing, unlike movies or television or books, theater requires you to leave your home and participate in the creation of an ad hoc collective, albeit frequently with the irritation that proximity to strangers can engender. And during periods when the people in charge belong to a party that, for instance, evinces loathing for the funding of art and artists, choosing to go to the theater can feel like a political act in itself. That’s all the truer if the experience challenges you to assess where you stand (or sit) in relation not only to whatever is being said or done onstage but to all of the reactions bursting forth around you.The people who create theater sometimes describe it, with what can seem like sanctimony or sentimentality, as a church. But more often, when it’s good, it’s like a community board hearing, not worshipful but prickly and pugnacious. That applies whether you’re in a 60-seat black box watching an Off Off Broadway play or in orchestra seats at … well, here’s where it easily can turn into a parlor game. “Hamilton”? Yes, obviously “Hamilton” is political. OK, what about “Death Becomes Her”? Of course — politics are inherent in a production about gender double standards regarding attractiveness and aging. “The Outsiders”? Class war with songs. The “Great Gatsby” musical? An indictment of kleptocracy, plus some dancing. And so on.Right now, though, the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality. It’s no surprise that the current New York season has foregrounded work like the blistering comedy “Eureka Day,” in which a series of steering committee meetings at a crunchy, liberal private school in Berkeley, Calif., turn into gladiatorial bouts pitting pro-vaccine parents against anti-vaxxers; Jonathan Spector’s play was topical when it was first produced on the West Coast in 2018 and is even more so now. Or that Sanaz Toossi’s 2023 Pulitzer Prize winner “English,” a poignant comedy-drama about four people in Iran studying English in an adult-education class, feels as if it were written in response to President Donald Trump’s first week of executive orders this past January rather than, as is actually the case, in response to the travel ban he imposed eight years ago. These plays may be even more resonant than their authors imagined they would be when they started to write them but, from the outset, their impetus was to find the frustrating, the bewildering, the nuanced and the human in our contemporary political landscape.What’s jolting at this moment, though, is how little those works seem like outliers. In the past year, we’ve had revivals that felt explicitly framed to reflect current concerns, like Amy Herzog’s reconception of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 “An Enemy of the People” as a battle between principled health activism and rapacious capitalism, and the recent deconstruction “Show/Boat: A River,” which reshaped the 1927 musical into a kind of staged essay on the subject of its own racism. We’ve had revivals that read as political because of umbrage taken at their casting: What does it mean to have Audra McDonald play a Black Madam Rose in “Gypsy,” originally staged in 1959, and what does it mean if you insist that that choice, of all choices, violates the supposed principle of realism in musicals? And we’ve had new plays in which politics are baked into their very authorship: What does it mean to have the nonbinary artist Cole Escola create a star turn for themselves as Mary Todd Lincoln in “Oh, Mary!”? (Only good things.) A revival of a show that was never not political, the eve-of-the-Nazis musical “Cabaret” (1966) feels intensified in its implications in 2025, in part because Rebecca Frecknall’s immersive staging, more than past revivals, casts us, the audience, in the role of shamefully oblivious revelers, drinking and making merry in a Berlin nightclub as a world of darkness looms outside and onstage. Even “Wicked,” 22 years into a Broadway run that will apparently outlast us all, has, in the wake of its hit movie adaptation, been rebranded as an anti-authoritarian cri de coeur.The counterargument to all this is essentially that to a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and that plenty of options remain for theatergoers who just want to have a good time (a notion that is always invoked as if work that engages with the world must be the opposite of that). So sure, if that’s your thing, go ahead: Enjoy the stripped-down version of the 1993 musical “Sunset Boulevard” — no, wait, damn it, there’s that impossible-standards-of-beauty-and-aging thing again — or the upcoming musical “Real Women Have Curves,” which … nope, that won’t work either. It’s hard not to conclude either that there are an awful lot of nails out there right now or that, this season, we’ve all become hammers.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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    What Do We Want From Political Theater?

    Playwrights and directors wrestle with how a piece of art can galvanize its audience.In an era of vanishing cultural authority and ever-abbreviated attention spans, being called relevant is one of the best compliments a work of art can get. We’ve always celebrated art that seems to speak to our political and cultural moments, but these days — when the news relentlessly inundates us — art can feel like a surrogate, a response we’re unable to summon ourselves. Relevancy is less a compliment now than an expectation.And of all the creative genres — music, film, television, literature — the form that we most expect to answer the confusion of the time is, arguably, theater. This, says Mark Harris in his story about the politicization of American theater, is partly because of theater’s inherent intimacy. Unlike a movie, it can only be watched by a certain number of people over a limited amount of time; and moreover, those people have to be able to 1) afford to see a play, and 2) get themselves to the theater itself. Mass entertainment it’s not.On the CoversSwap wears a Louis Vuitton tank top and pants, price on request, louisvuitton.com; stylist’s own belt; and model’s own jewelry. His sons Heavn (left) and Jru’Angelo wear their own clothing.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioGabriel Medina (left) at State Management and Santino Guzman at Vision Los Angeles. From left: Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, and pants, $1,200, celine.com; Celine by Hedi Slimane shirt, about $1,100, and tie, about $250, similar styles at celine.com. Celine by Hedi Slimane jacket, price on request, shirt, about $1,100, pants, $1,500, and tie, about $250.Photograph by Luis Alberto Rodriguez. Styled by Carlos NazarioYet despite its relative exclusivity, theater’s cultural reach is much broader than one might imagine, its reverberations more profound and longer lasting. And in 2025, Harris writes, “the idea that all theater is political is less a rhetorical exercise than an irrefutable reality.” The proof is in the current season of both dramas and musicals, with new offerings and revivals about, variously, immigration, race, vaccines and bodily autonomy. We want theater to articulate what we can’t; we want it to provide catharsis; we want it to speak to our anger and give us hope. But increasingly, Harris says, the question isn’t so much what can theater do for us as what we can do for theater. “What,” he asks, “does political theater want to do to its audience? Affirm us in our beliefs? Galvanize us into action? Shake us up? Persuade us? Provoke us? Rebuke us?” Any one of those things; all of them. What we may want most, though, is to feel something at all. More

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    ‘Deli Boys,’ Plus 9 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    A new Hulu comedy premieres, “The Righteous Gemstones” are back and “The Traitors” wraps up its third season.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 3-9. Details and times are subject to change.Things aren’t going as expected.On the Hulu thriller “Paradise,” things took an unexpected turn right from the beginning — and have only gotten more twisty from there. The show follows Xavier Collins, a secret service agent played by Sterling K. Brown who is in charge of protecting President Cal Bradford (James Marsden). Slight spoilers ahead: The end of the first episode showed that Xavier, Cal and a few lucky civilians have been living in an underground city after the world ended — and that the president is actually dead. In a series of flashbacks, the rest of the episodes have revealed how things got to where they are, and this week’s finale will reveal who killed the president. Streaming Tuesday on Hulu.Netflix’s lush historical drama “The Leopard” follows the Salina family, Sicilian aristocrats who are bracing for the Giuseppe Garibaldi’s Redshirt guerrillas to conquer the island in the 19th century. The 1958 book, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, became one of the highest selling novels in Italy. If not for a look at the history, tune in for the stunning location and enviable outfits. Streaming on Wednesday on Netflix.What happens when you have been raised in the cushy world of wealth but your father’s death has left nothing but his convenience store empire, which is actually a crime front? “Deli Boys,” a new comedy, answers that question. Asif Ali and Saagar Shaikh star as brothers who are trying to maintain a deli counter while also dealing with a Peruvian cartel and the Italian mafia. Streaming Thursday on Hulu.An inside look at sports.It’s no secret that Boston takes their sports seriously. The new documentary series “Celtics City” transports viewers back to the founding of the Boston Celtics N.B.A. team in 1946 and forward to their championship win in 2024. The show features archival footage and interviews with past and present players, including Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown. Monday at 9 p.m. on HBO and streaming on Max.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