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    ‘Dear England’ Review: When Soccer Success Becomes a Moral Victory

    A new James Graham play about the soccer coach Gareth Southgate is a lively romp, but its core message about embracing male vulnerability feels soppy.What makes a good leader? When the unassuming and softly spoken Gareth Southgate was appointed head coach of the England men’s soccer team in 2016, many fans and commentators felt he lacked the kahunas for the role, that he was simply too nice. But in the past seven years he has overseen a remarkable transformation in the England team’s fortunes, making it stronger and more exciting to watch than at any time in recent history.The ups and downs of Southgate’s tenure are portrayed with a blend of playfulness and moral seriousness in “Dear England,” directed by Rupert Goold, which runs at the National Theater, in London, through Aug. 11. It’s a lively, feel-good romp with plenty of irreverent humor, though the narrative borders on hagiography, and its core message about embracing male vulnerability is labored to the point of soppiness.The play chronicles the team’s involvement in three recent major tournaments, starting with its surprise run to the semifinals of the 2018 World Cup in Russia; then comes an agonizing defeat by Italy in the Euro 2020 final, followed by an impressive showing, culminating in an unlucky quarterfinal exit, at last year’s World Cup in Qatar.The on-field action is evoked through dynamic set pieces choreographed by Ellen Kane and Hannes Langolf, in which the players enact key moments in elaborate simulations, complete with slow-motion sequences and freeze-framed goal celebrations. These are kitsch, but mercifully brief, as the bulk of the activity takes place off the pitch: in locker rooms, team meetings and news conferences whose settings are rendered with smart simplicity by the designer Es Devlin.Joseph Fiennes as Gareth Southgate, manager of the England men’s soccer team.Marc BrennerJoseph Fiennes is outstanding as Southgate, who is portrayed as self-effacing but assertive, an approachable father figure to his young charges. Will Close, as England’s captain and star player, Harry Kane, plays up the striker’s famously laconic manner, providing a bathetic counterpoint to the coach’s earnest rhetoric. Adam Hugill is similarly amusing as the defender Harry Maguire, who is portrayed as a lovable simpleton — not the sharpest tool in the box, but solid and dependable. Kel Matsena delivers a spirited performance as Raheem Sterling, who, along with Bukayo Saka (Ebenezer Gyau), speaks out defiantly against racism after England’s Black players are the targets of abuse.The principal female character in this necessarily male-dominated lineup is the sports psychologist Pippa Grange (Gina McKee), hired by Southgate to help the players open up about their feelings and overcome self-doubt. When one unreconstructed member of the coaching staff questions the need for her services, she reminds him that psychology has been at the root of England’s past failures: “This is men, dealing, or not dealing, with fear,” she says.The play’s author, James Graham, is known for political theater, with hits including “Ink” and “Best of Enemies,” and “Dear England” has distinctly activist overtones. Southgate’s mild-mannered disposition, emotional intelligence and leftish politics — he has been supportive of Black Lives Matter and outspoken on mental health issues — are kryptonite to a certain type of reactionary sports jock. So it’s tempting to view his story as a culture-war allegory, pitting touchy-feely liberalism against old-school machismo.From left: Will Close as Harry Kane, Ebenezer Gyau as Bukayo Saka and Kel Matsena as Raheem Sterling.Marc BrennerUnfortunately the play leans into this a little too heavily, with pantomimic cameos from several of Britain’s recent Conservative prime ministers — Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss — pandering to the assumed prejudices of cosmopolitan London theatregoers in a way that comes off as ingratiating and smug. This is ramped up in the second half, which is considerably less funny, and feels rushed: The 2020 and 2022 tournaments are rattled through at speed, in contrast to the more leisurely pacing before the intermission.Southgate’s playing career is best remembered for a decisive miss in a penalty shootout against Germany in the semifinal of the 1996 European Championship, played in London, which resulted in England’s elimination from that tournament. A personal redemption narrative forms a compelling subplot the main story, and it’s a cruel irony that Southgate’s England side also lost the final of Euro 2020 in a penalty shootout on home soil. That Southgate has yet to bag a trophy — the England men’s team still hasn’t won a major tournament since 1966 — remains a powerful trump card for his doubters. And so the play’s celebratory tenor feels a little misplaced.Yet “Dear England” is not so much about sports as it is about culture. The technical and tactical foundations of the England team’s revival are conspicuously underplayed in this telling: The team’s on-field improvement is straightforwardly tethered to a shift in moral values, and we are given to understand that correlation equals causation. You can be fully on board with everything Southgate stands for and still find this cloyingly simplistic.Dear EnglandThrough Aug. 11 at the National Theater, in London; nationaltheatre.org.uk More

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    ‘Lizard Boy’ Review: Comic Book Adventures

    Justin Huertas’s indie-rock musical, in which he also stars, follows a young misfit whose first date spirals into a comic book adventure.As “Lizard Boy,” a 2015 musical now making its New York debut at Theater Row, dragged some 20 minutes past its advertised 90, I began to wonder what the net positives of comic books have been on the culture. Presented in a Prospect Theater Company production, after a showing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe last year, this quirky indie-rock show, with book, music and lyrics by Justin Huertas, traffics in that medium’s clichés, down to a protagonist with a stunted understanding of grown-up matters. (And, no, I don’t think the show is meant for kids.)As we meet our hero, Trevor (Huertas), in Seattle, we learn of a horrific incident he had experienced 20 years ago: When a winged dragon was shot down by soldiers, its blood showered down on Trevor (and four other unlucky kids), causing them to mutate in some way, with him growing green scales. Now he only leaves the house during the annual Monster Fest, a Comic Con-like celebration of the dragon’s slaughter and apparently the only time he can go unnoticed. But when loneliness gets the better of him, he downloads Grindr and meets up with the dopey Cary (William A. Williams).Cary, who was only looking for sex, soon finds himself falling for the innocent Trevor, who tells him about a mysterious presence in his dreams. In a neat bit of timeline doubling that feels like flipping a comic’s pages back and forth, their meet cute is spliced with a visit to a grungy nightclub where that very figure from his dreams, the rough-edged Siren (Kiki deLohr), is performing. Their encounter fated, the three become embroiled in a routine battle for humanity, as the singer tries to enlist them in fending off what she and Trevor believe to be impending doom, but winds up becoming a threat herself.The cast members play their own instruments under the direction of Brandon Ivie, who has them hurtling road cases around Suzu Sakai’s cluttered-chic set. A brick back wall holds faded posters and houses Katherine Freer’s comic book projections, which do the fantastical heavy lifting when wings and superpowers enter the proceedings.Huertas’s music is agreeable, reminiscent of ’90s-era Duncan Sheik, with intuitive lyrics and some often lovely melodies. But if the idea is to build on comic books and their paralleling of heroes’ isolation to readers’ own disenfranchisement in order to fold in some sense of queer liberation, the proposition falls flat in a surprisingly close-minded show that is alarmingly puritanical in its view of sex.Trevor repeatedly berates Cary for his desires, and the show prioritizes Trevor’s virginal purity. With her tragic back story revealed, the bourbon-soaked, switchblade-wielding Siren is essentially a humorless take on Audrey from “Little Shop of Horrors” though, here, you get the sense that, in her stilettoed abjection, she is Someone Who Has Sex, and must therefore become a villain.Sex is everywhere and nowhere in “Lizard Boy,” a musical which I’m sure will continue to find its audience, just as comic books continue to infiltrate the idea of mature art.Lizard BoyThrough July 11 at Theater Row, Manhattan; prospecttheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Producer Ryan Murphy Is Expected to Move to Disney

    Mr. Murphy, the force behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “The Watcher,” is coming to the end of his $300 million Netflix deal.Ryan Murphy, the television megaproducer behind hits like “American Horror Story” and “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story,” is poised to move his operation to the Walt Disney Company, five years after he stunned Hollywood by decamping to Netflix for a $300 million deal.The contract talks with Disney are not finished, according to three people briefed on the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private negotiations. No deal is expected to be completed until after the screenwriters’ strike in Hollywood is resolved, one of the people said. (Unionized film and television writers have been on strike since May 1.)But the talks between Mr. Murphy and Disney are advanced, the people said. Mr. Murphy’s contract with Netflix expires at the end of the month. Renewal talks with Netflix never got off the ground.Representatives for Mr. Murphy, Disney and Netflix either declined to comment or did not return calls. Bloomberg reported Mr. Murphy’s likely move to Disney earlier on Tuesday.A deal with Disney would formally reunite Mr. Murphy with executives he worked closely with for more than a decade. Disney owns the FX cable channel, which is home to his “American Horror Story” franchise, which started in 2011. (The series also runs on Hulu, which Disney controls.) ABC, the Disney-owned broadcast network, recently bought the rights to “9-1-1,” a drama that Mr. Murphy created for Fox in 2018.When Mr. Murphy signed his Netflix deal, in February 2018, it was just six months after another star producer, Shonda Rhimes, had signed her own nine-figure contract with the streaming company. The back-to-back signings were an emphatic statement by Netflix that it was in the business of paying any price for big-name writers. In the process, it set off a Hollywood arms race (which, amid broader concerns about the streaming business and the writers’ strike, has mostly cooled off).Mr. Murphy’s tenure at Netflix got off to a bumpy start. Misfires included “The Politician” and “Hollywood.” It was not until last September that Mr. Murphy served up bona fide hits in “Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story” and “The Watcher.” Both series are among the 10 most-watched Netflix originals ever, according to the streaming service.Mr. Murphy, who continued making shows for Disney even though he was under contract with Netflix — new seasons of “9-1-1” and “American Crime Story” continued apace — would likewise continue to make shows for Netflix after a move to Disney. The next edition of “Monster” will focus on Erik and Lyle Menéndez, the brothers serving life sentences for killing their wealthy parents in 1989, and “The Watcher” has been renewed for another season. More

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    Paxton Whitehead, Actor Who Found Humor in the Stodgy, Dies at 85

    An Englishman with a deep, cultured voice, he played uptight snobs in films like “Back to School” and on shows like “Friends” and “Mad About You.”Paxton Whitehead, a comic actor who earned a Tony nomination for his role in a revival of “Camelot” and played the starchiest of stuffed shirts in films like the Rodney Dangerfield comedy “Back to School” and on hit 1990s sitcoms like “Friends” and “Mad About You,” died on Friday in Arlington, Va. He was 85.His daughter, Alex Whitehead-Gordon, said the cause of his death, in a hospital, was complications of a fall.Mr. Whitehead, an Englishman with a modulated baritone voice, often coaxed humor from his sharp features and dignified bearing. His comic characters typically displayed subtly exaggerated versions of his own traits, which he executed with seeming ease.“He couldn’t help but be funny,” the critic Terry Doran wrote in The Buffalo News in 1997 of Mr. Whitehead’s time at the George Bernard Shaw Festival in Ontario, adding: “He didn’t sweat buckets striving to make us laugh. He just was amusing. It came naturally.”For Mr. Whitehead, finding the comedy was the key that unlocked a role.“You always have to find the core of humor in a character — at least I like to, the same way some people will say, ‘I like to find the good in him, even though he is a villain,’” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1997.One such character was Philip Barbay, the uptight dean of a business school and the nemesis of Thornton Melon, Mr. Dangerfield’s character, in “Back to School” (1986). Melon, a crass but successful businessman, comes to Grand Lakes University to visit his struggling son and winds up enrolling at the school after making a sizable donation.Barbay hates Melon on sight and does his best to get him expelled, to little effect. Early in the movie he and his girlfriend, Diane, a literature professor played by Sally Kellerman, see Melon buying books for students at the university bookstore, and Barbay describes him as “the world’s oldest living freshman, and the walking epitome of the decline in modern education.”Melon goes on to disrupt Barbay’s class and date Diane. Mr. Whitehead infused Barbay with some pathos — the character seemed unable to keep himself from being a killjoy — which added another layer to the humor. While out with the free-spirited, poetry-loving Diane, Barbay proposes that they take their relationship to the next level through “a merger,” adding that they would become “incorporated, if you will.”From left, Rodney Dangerfield, Mr. Whitehead and Ned Beatty in the 1986 movie “Back to School.”Orion, via ShutterstockMr. Whitehead’s stodgy figure in “Back to School” was the archetype for many of his later sitcom roles. He played a stuffy neighbor on “Mad About You,” a stuffy boss on “Friends” and the stuffy headmaster of a prestigious school on “Frasier.”He was also a prolific theater actor. He appeared in more than a dozen Broadway productions, including the revue “Beyond the Fringe” (1962-64) and the 1980 revival of “Camelot,” in which his portrayal of King Pellinore earned him a Tony nomination for best featured actor in a musical. He played Sherlock Holmes opposite Glenn Close in “The Crucifer of Blood,” which ran for 236 performances at the Helen Hayes Theater in 1978 and 1979.Mr. Whitehead’s roles, especially onstage, were not always comic. One departure was his portrayal of the ambition-crazed lead in a well-reviewed production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Old Globe in San Diego in 1985.“Comedy, tragedy, pathos, spectacle — everything is swept along before the raging kinetic power of this Richard,” the theater critic Welton Jones wrote in The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1985.Francis Edward Paxton Whitehead was born in Kent, England, on Oct. 17, 1937. His father, Charles, was a lawyer, and his mother, Louise (Hunt) Whitehead, was a homemaker. His daughter said that his family and friends had called him Paxton since he was a child.He graduated from the Rugby School in Warwickshire before studying acting at the Webber Douglas Academy of Dramatic Art in London. His early work was with touring companies, sometimes performing a new play every week. In the late 1950s he earned a stint with the New Shakespeare Memorial Theater, which is now called the Royal Shakespeare Theater and is part of the Royal Shakespeare Company.“But I was the lowest of lows,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1992, and after playing Shakespearean extras for a while, he decided to move to New York City. (His mother was American, so he was allowed to work in the States.)His Broadway career soon took off, and it continued into recent decades. He appeared in the original productions of the comedies “Noises Off” (1983-85) and “Lettice and Lovage” (1990) and in revivals of “My Fair Lady” (1993), as Colonel Pickering and later Henry Higgins, and “The Importance of Being Earnest” (2011), as the Rev. Canon Chasuble.In 1967, Mr. Whitehead became the artistic director of the Shaw Festival. He produced, acted in or directed most of Shaw’s plays, attracting actors like Jessica Tandy to the festival’s productions, before deciding to return to acting in 1977.His other films include “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (1986), which starred Whoopi Goldberg; “Baby Boom” (1987) which starred Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard; and “The Adventures of Huck Finn” (1993), which starred Elijah Wood and Courtney B. Vance. His other television appearances include “Murder, She Wrote,” “3rd Rock From the Sun,” “The West Wing,” “Hart to Hart” and “Caroline in the City.”His marriage to the actress Patricia Gage ended in divorce in 1986. The next year he married Katherine Robertson, who died in 2009.In addition to his daughter, with whom he lived in Arlington, he is survived by a son, Charles; a stepdaughter from his first marriage, Heather Whitehead; and four grandchildren.Mr. Whitehead told The San Diego Union-Tribune in 1986 that he usually preferred to act in comedy, because “it interests me more, and actually I take it a great deal more seriously than I do tragedy.”“The last time I did a tragic role,” he added, “they laughed.” More

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    Tony Awards Give a Box Office Boost to Prize-Winning Shows

    “Leopoldstadt,” which was named best play, and “Kimberly Akimbo,” which won best musical, saw considerable increases in ticket sales.“Leopoldstadt” and “Kimberly Akimbo,” the two shows that took home top Tony Awards last week, saw big bumps at the box office in the days following that ceremony.The increases for the award-winning shows, which far outpaced a slight rise in the box office overall, seemed to support the industry’s argument to Hollywood’s striking screenwriters that a Tony Awards telecast can play an important role in sustaining struggling shows. “Kimberly Akimbo,” in particular, needed the boost; despite strong reviews, it had been soft at the box office.“Leopoldstadt,” a heart-wrenching drama by Tom Stoppard about the effect of the Holocaust on a Jewish family in Vienna, had the biggest assist: The show won the Tony Award for best new play on June 11, and its grosses for the week that ended June 18 were up 42 percent over the prior week. The grosses were most likely boosted by the fast-approaching end of the show’s run on July 2.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a quirky show about a high school student with a life-threatening genetic condition and a comically dysfunctional home life, got a 32 percent boost at the box office after winning the prize for best new musical. The show, written by David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori, played to full houses through the week, which had not been the case previously.“After this won, I’m like, ‘I want to see this before I leave, just because it won a Tony,’” said Brad Steinmeyer, 30, who was visiting from Colorado and bought tickets to see the Tony Award winning-actors in “Kimberly Akimbo” on Saturday.Rhys Williams, 27, a theater actor from New York City, also said that watching the Tony Awards cemented his decision to buy a ticket for the show.“It made it something I didn’t want to miss,” he said.Overall, Broadway grosses were up 6 percent last week, reflecting some combination of recovery from the effects of the previous week’s wildfire smoke, the slow build of the summer tourism season, and heightened awareness of Broadway shows because of the awards ceremony and attendant media coverage.The other Tony-nominated musicals also saw improvement after their performances on the telecast, including “Shucked,” a corn-themed country-music show, which was up 23 percent; “& Juliet,” a revisionist take on “Romeo and Juliet” set to pop hits, which was up 18 percent; “New York, New York,” about two musicians making their way in the post-World War II city, which was up 17 percent; and “Some Like It Hot,” which was up 10 percent.“Parade,” which won the Tony Award for best musical revival, was also up 10 percent. The show is about the lynching of a Jewish businessman in Georgia in the early 20th century.Among plays, “Prima Facie” was up 17 percent after its lead actress, Jodie Comer, won a Tony; on Tuesday, the producers announced that the play had achieved the rare feat of recouping its capitalization cost, which was $4.1 million and means it will now begin generating profits in the days before it closes on July 2. But “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” a madcap comedy that had no presence on the Tony Awards, was up even more — 22 percent — serving as a reminder of the capriciousness of grosses.Simply performing on the Tony Awards did not pay off for “A Beautiful Noise,” the Neil Diamond musical, which was not nominated for any prizes, and suffered an 11 percent box office drop after its cast performed a singalong version of “Sweet Caroline” on the telecast.Meanwhile, “Life of Pi,” adapted from the best-selling novel that had also been developed into a film, announced Tuesday that it would end its run on July 23. The play arrived from London after winning the Olivier Award there for best new play, and it received generally positive reviews upon opening on March 30 in New York, but never caught on with audiences. It picked up three Tony Awards for design, but was not nominated in the best play category; a North American tour is planned. More

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    Review: A Genderqueer ‘Cabaret,’ at War With Itself

    A revival of the 1998 revisal of the 1966 musical highlights the stories of trans and nonbinary performers.The revival of “Cabaret” that opened on Sunday at the Barrington Stage Company in Pittsfield, Mass., has a bad case of the Underwear Problem.It’s not the only time the affliction has struck the 1966 musical set in a skeevy Berlin nightclub; indeed, it’s a chronic condition. “Cabaret” first caught the sniffles in 1972, when the Bob Fosse movie amped up the eroticism and rolled down the stockings. And it fully succumbed in 1993, when it was nearly stripped naked for a London production that came to Broadway five years later.In that revival, Sally Bowles, the minimally talented chorine at the center of the action, still wore the “lacy pants” mentioned in “Don’t Tell Mama,” one of the many great songs by John Kander and Fred Ebb — but now she and the other Kit Kat Girls wore little else. The club’s Emcee was no longer the weird, tuxedo-clad marionette that Joel Grey created in the original production; instead, as played by Alan Cumming, he was a denizen of an S&M dungeon, with rouged nipples peeking out from a strappy leather harness.This was a purely contemporary idea of loucheness, employed to shock and titillate audiences who might no longer respond to period sleaze. Shock is a losing game, of course. “This same production in 10 years would probably look very tired if we remounted it,” Kander himself predicted.And because the plot still hinged on the rise of Nazism around 1930, the more modern outlook also ate away at the show’s period concept, which depended on a clear alternation between commentative cabaret numbers like “Two Ladies” and naturalistic “book” scenes dramatizing the lives of the characters. Blurring those realms — which the original director, Harold Prince, had taken pains to keep separate — turned Sally, a Weimar party girl in Joe Masteroff’s book, into a neither-world negligee zombie.That’s the Underwear Problem: the perspective confusion that sometimes results from surfacing the subtext and emphasizing interpretation over story. You may, of course, gain something in return; not for nothing did the 1998 revival win four Tonys, run six years and itself get revived in 2014. But when you strip away the social conventions from which a show’s crisis develops — prudery, repression, outerwear, what have you — you leave the action unmotivated and unmoored. It shivers in the conceptual cold.The Barrington revival embraces that denuding and deracination, which is nice for the eyes if not for the drama. That’s not to say it isn’t occasionally gripping and novel at its extremes, as when Sally (Krysta Rodriguez) sings the title song in tatters and with cataclysmic abandon. (The inventively sordid costumes are by Rodrigo Muñoz.) And the book scenes between the widower Herr Schultz (Richard Kline) and the widow Fraulein Schneider (Candy Buckley) — a Jew and a gentile who must eventually face facts — have a graceful dignity when not pushed too hard.Krysta Rodriguez, center, as Sally Bowles performing the song “Maybe This Time.”Daniel RaderBut more often this “Cabaret” oversells itself, laboring to exemplify values that, however naturally they match the “live and let live” ethos enunciated by the Emcee (Nik Alexander, channeling Eartha Kitt) are not a natural part of its storytelling. No matter how much you may respect a production that “celebrates queerness, centers the stories of trans and nonbinary performers and acknowledges that many people of color were also harmed by the Nazis” (as the director, Alan Paul, writes in a program note), that respect cannot hold the musical together.To be clear, I support the nontraditional casting. That three of the Kit Kat Ensemble (as it is now called) are played by trans or nonbinary performers (Charles Mayhew Miller, James Rose and Ryland Marbutt) helps push the 1998 revision’s flirtation with gender diversity in a more serious direction. That Alexander is Black adds an eye-opening racial dimension. And Paul, who is Barrington’s new artistic director, uses the casting expressively instead of merely paying it lip service.That, however, is part of the problem. The original script, and especially the songs, despite the now standard interpolations and deletions, are so strong they continue to tell the story their way even as the director tries to tell it his.At first the tension is useful. When Miller, Rose and Marbutt sing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in tender harmony while removing their Kit Kat costumes or combing their wigs, we are willing to accept it as a song of hope for a genderqueer future instead of the sinister Nazi anthem Kander and Ebb actually wrote. Yet later, when the song recurs, we are asked to take it as a mortal threat to the same characters. You can argue about multiplicities of meanings, but the ear won’t have it both ways.From left: James Rose, Ryland Marbutt and Charles Mayhew Miller as three members of the Kit Kat Ensemble, singing “Tomorrow Belongs to Me.”Daniel RaderThe same fight between the authors’ and the director’s intentions undermines many of the book scenes as well. Sally’s relationship with Clifford Bradshaw (Dan Amboyer), an American writer visiting Berlin for inspiration, has become less and less credible as his sexuality, altered repeatedly in different versions of the story, has become more and more obvious. Now even Nazis rub up against him, advancing the inadvertent but no less troubling idea that National Socialism was in part a queer phenomenon.I suppose you could explore that idea, but to do so you’d need a much larger conceptual intervention than even this production offers. With just one word of the text altered — a character formerly introduced as “he” is now introduced as “they” — there’s only so much a little nontraditional casting can do. Maybe a lot more would work better.Because “Cabaret” as written is not about personal identity at all. It’s about mass complacency: a society’s failure to awaken in time to injustice and disaster. In 1966, when the Holocaust was still recent history, Prince didn’t need a contemporary lens to portray that danger or make it relevant; the period lens did just fine. So did Boris Aronson’s set, which featured an enormous mirror tipping ominously toward the audience to reflect and implicate it in the story.A mirror features in Wilson Chin’s handsome set for the Barrington production, too, but instead of reflecting the audience, it reflects the stage. After seeing so many versions of “Cabaret” that strip the original bare and rebuild it inside out, I’m beginning to think that’s the real problem. It is no longer a comment on our history but its own.CabaretThrough July 8 at the Barrington Stage Company, Pittsfield, Mass.; barringtonstageco.org. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More

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    John Corbett on His Arrival in ‘And Just Like That …’

    He was defined by his role in “Sex and the City,” not always comfortably. He’s reprising it in “And Just Like That …” because “I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do.”John Corbett at his ranch in California. He returns to his old TV Manhattan stamping grounds in the new season of “And Just Like That …”Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesOver the years, people have cornered John Corbett on the street, at the grocery store, in coffee shops, to swear fealty. “Every [expletive] person I meet is just, ‘I was Team Aidan!’” he said. He assumes that those people are lying.“People don’t want to hurt my feelings,” he said. “They’re really careful with me.”In two seasons of “Sex and the City” and in brief cameos later, including in the improvident Arabian fantasia “Sex and the City 2,” Corbett, 62, played Aidan Shaw, a hunky furniture maker and the on-again, off-again, engaged to, off-again, still mostly off-again love interest of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie Bradshaw.“He was warm, masculine and classic American, just like his furniture,” Carrie says of Aidan in voice-over.Aidan, a character designed to contrast Chris Noth’s withholding Mr. Big and originally scheduled for just three episodes, was also, like much classic American furniture, stolid and unyielding. He wouldn’t let Carrie smoke. He demeaned her interests. When she cheated on him, he punished her. Controlling, judgmental, manipulative — who wants a bedroom set like that?Carrie, apparently. Because as trailers have revealed, Corbett’s Aidan will return to the second season of the well-heeled “Sex and the City” revival, “And Just Like That …,” which premieres on Max on Thursday. And this time around, when people chase him down to declare loyalty to Aidan, Corbett thinks that they just might mean it.“Those fans that didn’t like Aidan — and I know exactly why they didn’t, he was wrong for her — there’s going to be no [expletive] help for those people,” he said.Corbett was speaking late last month, by telephone, from his home in a sleepy town about three hours north of Los Angeles. Actually it was “the wife’s” phone, the wife being the actress and model Bo Derek, as Corbett’s wasn’t working. A request for a video interview had been denied.“I can’t be myself because I’m performing,” he said. “An hour plus is a long time to suck your gut back.”This suggests that Corbett, who came to acting late and more or less by accident, has complicated feelings about performance even as he maintains, he said, a hands-off attitude to his career. To talk to him is to feel not only his shirttails-out, expletive-heavy intimacy, but also his deep ambivalence about his calling, his craft and the show that made him famous.Corbett didn’t always appreciate the way he was typecast by playing Aidan in “Sex and the City,” but he was happy to play the character again.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesCorbett grew up in Wheeling, W.Va., with his mother. After high school, he moved to Southern California to be near his father, a welder, taking a job at a steel plant. Sidelined at 22 by an injury, he enrolled in community college, which mostly bored him. But about a month in, he met some guys in the cafeteria who invited him to their improv class.“I’ve always been a guy that made my friends laugh, a class clown,” he said. “I saw 30 other people just like me in there.” That same day, he dropped his other classes and re-enrolled as an acting student. He took sword fighting; he took ballet. He has never felt that same excitement or that same freedom again.“It’s kind of like drugs,” he said. “You’re chasing that first high.”His transition into professional acting was wobblier. He posed for cheap headshots, whipped up a résumé full of fake credits and supported himself as a hairdresser while he botched almost every audition that came his way, hands shaking, scripts shaking. He had two goals: He wanted to be on television and he wanted to be famous.In 1990, he was cast as the serene, groovy Alaskan radio D.J. in the CBS comedy “Northern Exposure.” “Northern Exposure” ran for five seasons and 110 episodes. It didn’t pay much. But it gave him his first bittersweet taste of celebrity, and it taught him that while fans loved him, they loved him not for any histrionic skill but rather for his rumbling voice, sleepy smile and 6-foot-5-inch frame.“I was the hunky guy and women would gush,” he said. “I don’t think one person has ever come up to me and said, ‘Hey, I think you’re a good actor.’”He had a type, he discovered — handsome, sensitive, not quite a himbo. And in the years after “Northern Exposure,” he didn’t fight it. “You’ve got to go where the money is, right?” he said. The money back then came mostly from TV movies he described as “not great.”He had some standards, though. And in 2000, when he was first offered a role in the third season of “Sex and the City,” he turned it down. He saw himself as more than a guest star. But the showrunner Michael Patrick King, now the creator of “And Just Like That …,” tried to convince him otherwise, intuiting that Corbett could supply the affection and warmth so lacking in Noth’s Big.As one of the main love interests of Sarah Jessica Parker’s Carrie, Aidan was a nice guy with a manipulative side.Craig Blankenhorn/HBOCorbett and Parker insist the characters’ revived relationship will be healthier. “He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Craig Blankenhorn/Max“There’s so few actors that have a relaxed, strong sex appeal,” King said in an interview. “He also has that thing that some of the great male movie stars have, a really low vibration of confidence.”Since Corbett didn’t have HBO, he was sent episodes on VHS. He watched them, and he was still a no. (For one thing, the script required nudity, “and my sweet little mom watched everything I did.”) Eventually he agreed to a meeting with Parker and King, mostly for the free trip to New York. They met at King’s West Village apartment.“I fell in love with both of those cats,” Corbett recalled. “After that hour, I wanted to be around them some more.”Parker also remembered an immediate bond. “I opened the door for him,” she said in a recent phone interview. “He did some sort of gallant, old-fashioned bow. I don’t remember the conversation, except that it was really pleasant and happy.”Once he was on set, she realized that the camera only magnified that charm. “It’s like he wrapped his arms around the camera and merged it into his body,” she said. “He absorbed it.”Three episodes became four. Then five. Then more. When Carrie and Aidan broke up at the end of Season 3, fans sent HBO Popsicle-stick furniture demanding that Corbett be brought back, and he was.He had what he wanted: He was on TV. He was famous. But the fame, more intense than what he’d experienced in “Northern Exposure,” changed his life, and “not in the way that I wanted it to, work wise,” he said.Corbett initially declined “Sex and the City” but changed his mind after meeting with Parker and Michael Patrick King. “I fell in love with both of those cats,” he said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThere were such strong associations between Corbett and the role that he struggled to be seen in any other way. He recalled being turned down for other roles he wanted, told that he would be too distracting. His work on “Sex and the City” and in the “My Big Fat Greek Wedding” movies, the first of which was released in 2002, affirmed and limited his type: the nice boyfriend. Then he became the nice husband. Lately, in projects like the “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” movies and their recent spinoff series, “XO, Kitty,” he has charmed a new generation of viewers as the nice dad.“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” he said. “When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want.”Colleagues who speak about Corbett tend to overlap him and his characters. “He is a very fun rapscallion who likes to have a good time,” said Nia Vardalos, the writer and star of the “Greek Wedding” films, which seemed to refer equally to actor and role.“He’s a big puppy — how can you not adore a puppy?” said Toni Collette, his co-star in the Showtime series “The United States of Tara.”For Corbett, the boundaries are equally fuzzy, particularly when it comes to Aidan. “The line gets blurry because when they clap the action board, there’s not a change,” he said. “I’m still living the same life.”In “Sex and the City,” that life, for all of Corbett’s warmth, had its darkness. If fans saw Aidan as comfortable and loving, the character was also judgmental and angry. (For Corbett, the line gets blurry here, too: “I get upset. I want to send a [expletive] chair through plate glass windows a couple times a day.”)So why bring him back? Initially, King didn’t. Because he planned to kill off Big in the first season of “And Just Like That …,” he felt he couldn’t immediately summon Carrie’s other major love interest. In 2021, Corbett told a reporter that he would be a part of it, but that was just a prank. (“John’s antic,” King explained.)“I’ve made friends with the idea of, this is just what I do,” Corbett said of the decent, hunky characters he is asked to play.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesBut Corbett did want to come back. “Especially when some of the photos would pop up of them shooting in the streets,” he said. “I would get a little jealous that I wasn’t asked to come back and do a cameo.”By Season 2, enough time had elapsed. King called Corbett and soon he found himself back at Silvercup Studios, where the original “Sex and the City” had filmed. He even brought some of the same clothes.But there were differences, allegedly. Max shared only a few minutes of Aidan screen time, but Corbett and Parker said that Aidan and Carrie’s relationship has mellowed and deepened. Aidan no longer argues with Carrie in the same way, Corbett insisted. He no longer controls her.“He’s really, really listening to her now,” he said.Parker, in her separate call, agreed. “It’s not fevered; it’s not demanding,” she said of the characters’ romance. “There’s so much heat between them, but there isn’t that urgency from him.”So could there be justification for Team Aidan this time? King put it this way: “I didn’t bring Aidan back to fail.”Corbett seemed to want a win for Aidan, though not in any passionate way. Aidan gave him the career he has, even if it has been more narrowly defined than the career he once imagined. But he has made his peace with it. He will likely never be seen as a serious actor, but there are worse things than being a classic American dreamboat.“It’s given me such a wonderful life, and asked so very little in exchange for that big sack of money that I got,” he said of his career. And then, though it wasn’t entirely true, he added, “I’ve gotten everything out of this life that I wanted.”“When the phone rings and it feels like the money’s right and the place is right and the time is right, I’ll go be this guy that these people want,” Corbett said.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times More

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    ‘The Idol’ Season 1, Episode 3 Recap: Tedros Has Notes

    Turns out that cult-leader types have a lot of opinions about how the women in their lives should look and behave.Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Daybreak’In her 2022 memoir, “I’m Glad My Mom Died,” the actress Jennette McCurdy wrote candidly about her troubled relationship with her nightmare of a stage mother, who wielded power over every aspect of her life and career. Talking to The New York Times, McCurdy explained the somewhat shocking title she chose for her book, saying, “I feel like I’ve done the processing and put in the work to earn a title or a thought that feels provocative.”“The Idol” may not have taken inspiration directly from McCurdy’s story, but the parallels are evident as we are offered more details about Jocelyn’s past in the most recent installment. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn was a child star whose mother abused her. Like McCurdy, Jocelyn also lost that mom to cancer.But instead of offering a nuanced look at an upsetting and complicated parental relationship, where love intermingled with pain, this week’s episode of “The Idol” uses the revelation of what happened to Jocelyn in her childhood to push her deeper into a new abusive relationship: The one she is entangled in with Tedros. It goes for provocation, yes, but it hasn’t done the work to earn it.Tedros has now fully taken hold of Jocelyn. He has moved in and is micromanaging every aspect of her life. He wakes her up and demands they go shopping, telling her she doesn’t have any taste as they try on clothes in a Beverly Hills Valentino store. He threatens to “curb stomp” an employee there whom he perceives to be looking at Jocelyn. Back at home, Tedros makes Jocelyn fire her personal chef, who flirts with her after asking how her probiotic diet is working.His entire entourage has also taken up residence in Jocelyn’s mansion. So it’s not only Tedros who is pushing his ideology onto Jocelyn but also his followers, who preach his ideas that good art comes out of pain. They espouse the idea that one is not allowed to say “no” to anything because every experience, even a bad one, could yield a great song. This results in an insipid discussion in which Chloe and Izaak argue that the death of Robert Plant’s son was necessary because it led him to write Led Zeppelin’s “All My Love.”No one can deny that wonderful art has come out of terrible events, but Tedros’s group believes in an extreme version of that where the art is worth any suffering. They argue that the death of one person may have saved the lives of many more because of the beauty of the song that came from it. The exploitation they are engaging in is obvious. Even the sweet-seeming Chloe pushes Jocelyn to evoke her mother in her music — and this is before Chloe learns the full extent of what Jocelyn’s mom did.Those details emerge during a dinner party, which opens with Jocelyn sweetly thanking those gathered for being there, but devolves into an awkward scene in which Tedros, whom she thanks for teaching her “how to have fun again,” pressures her into divulging her secrets. And that’s after he pushes Xander to share his idea for using the semen-face selfie as an album cover — an image that prompted internet discussions she found humiliating, as she ultimately admits.After berating her that “you make superficial music because you think about superficial things,” Tedros pushes Jocelyn to tell everyone just how her mother hurt her. Jocelyn solemnly describes how her mom used to beat her with a hairbrush, careful to hit her only in places where the camera wouldn’t see. It was a tool of motivation — Jocelyn’s mother used the hairbrush to keep her awake, or to make her learn her lines or dance moves. It was also a tool for control, emerging when Jocelyn was caught smiling to herself. Her mother sometimes hit her hard enough to break skin.Tedros feigns sympathy but also immediately identifies another way to control Jocelyn. He asks her if she misses the “motivation” being hit gave her. She replies, “Sometimes.” He has a retort at the ready: “If you loved the music you were making, would you have felt like it was worth it?” With tears streaming down her face she says, “yes.” He commands her to go get the hair brush.The episode ends with Jocelyn, on all fours, being beaten by Tedros as his followers watch. The shots of her face as he brutally hits her with the hairbrush are interspersed with images of him bathing her. During what appears to be a scene set the next morning, she looks up at him and says, “Thank you for taking care of me.” Then the credits roll.What we are witnessing is obviously the start of an abusive relationship, and yet this show can’t resist titillation. In this finale sequence, Jocelyn is clothed in a see-through lace dress where her thong is visible. The bits in the bathtub are peppered with the nudity that is de rigueur by now. “The Idol” is itself a little bit like Tedros. It is sympathetic to Jocelyn up until a point.Mostly, however, it just wants to use whatever pathos it occasionally generates in service of what it considers entertainment. Jocelyn’s lingering need for her mom, despite the long history of abuse, is worth exploring. It’s not explored here. Instead, Tedros takes over and uses it for his benefit.Liner notes:It’s so distracting to have The Weeknd singing over various scenes. I get that Tesfaye wants to make music for the show, but it is odd to hear his voice in that context when he’s also playing Tedros.Is there some kind of award we can give Rachel Sennott for Leia’s disgusted face?We see a glimpse of Jennie as Dyanne performing in the music video that was supposed to be Jocelyn’s. Is “World Class Sinner” her song now?I feel like there is a real misread of present day pop music dynamics going on here. The genre is more confessional than ever, and the reigning queens of the industry, Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, have both used personal experiences in their music to great effect. It’s hard to imagine that record execs would be opposed to letting Jocelyn mine her sadness for her songs, or that Jocelyn would assume that fans wouldn’t find anything relatable about her life.If you want a show that (hilariously) addresses how the pop industry actually sees a star’s mental health crisis as a marketing tool, may I recommend “The Other Two” on Max? More