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    Tony Predictions: Expect Wins for ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ and ‘Leopoldstadt’

    Our theater reporter talked to one-fifth of the Tony voters ahead of Sunday’s ceremony. Here’s hoping they steered him right.What do you get when you toss together a brassy grifter, an Elvish-speaking anagrammist, a show choir and, oh yes, a teenager with a life-threatening genetic condition? This year, it seems, you get a Tony-winning musical.“Kimberly Akimbo,” a small show with a huge heart, is likely to win the most coveted prize at the 76th Tony Awards ceremony on Sunday, according to my annual survey of Tony voters.Over the last week, I have connected, by email or telephone, with 158 voters who generously agreed to discuss their picks (and, often, their concerns about, and hopes for, the theater business); they are distributing their votes widely among the nominees after a season with few consensus favorites.There are a total of 769 Tony voters, and they are mostly industry insiders — producers, investors, actors, writers, directors, designers, and many others with theater-connected lives and livelihoods. Although in recent years, voters have been allowed to cast ballots only in categories in which they had seen all nominees, this year, because health and economic disruptions (and, over the last few days, wildfire smoke) made it hard for some voters to catch some shows, there is more leeway: Voters can cast ballots in any category in which they have seen all but one nominee.This is not a scientific poll, but in past years this exercise has provided a reliable forecast of the ultimate winners in key categories. For the actual results (and the songs!) tune in on Sunday for the telecast at 8 p.m. Eastern on CBS and Paramount+ (and, if you want to see the awards for design and other creative categories, stream the preshow at 6:30 p.m. Eastern on Pluto TV).Until then, here’s what I am hearing:‘Leopoldstadt’ leads in the race for best play.In each of the last four Tony Awards, voters have chosen as best play an epic production imported from London. Last year was “The Lehman Trilogy,” and before that were “The Inheritance,” “The Ferryman” and “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.”This year, that trend seems certain to continue. By a significant margin, voters are favoring “Leopoldstadt,” a play by Tom Stoppard about how the Holocaust affected an assimilated and affluent Jewish family in Austria.The play proved inadvertently timely: Although written several years ago, it arrived on Broadway last September, just as concern about resurgent antisemitism was rising in the United States and beyond.“Leopoldstadt” is leading the second-place favorite, “Fat Ham,” two-to-one among the voters with whom I spoke, suggesting that it is all but certain to win. Three other nominated plays, “Ain’t No Mo’,” “Cost of Living” and “Between Riverside and Crazy,” are further behind.“Fat Ham,” now running on Broadway with, from left, Nikki Crawford, Marcel Spears and Billy Eugene Jones, won a Pulitzer Prize, but it looks likely to be the runner-up in the Tony race for best new play.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStoppard, who is 85, is already the winningest playwright on Broadway: He has previously won the best play Tony four times, for “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Travesties,” “The Real Thing” and “The Coast of Utopia.”“Leopoldstadt,” directed by Patrick Marber and featuring an ensemble cast of 38, is about a fictional family, but is inspired by Stoppard’s own life experience: He was born in what was then Czechoslovakia; his parents fled invading Nazis when he was a toddler; he has spent his life in Britain; and, like a character in “Leopoldstadt,” only late in life came to understand his family’s Jewishness and the impact of the Holocaust on his relatives.The play, which transferred to Broadway after winning the Olivier Award for best play in London, opened last October to strong reviews and healthy box office sales in New York. Its sales have softened considerably this year, and it is scheduled to close on July 2.Among new musicals, ‘Kimberly Akimbo’ is favored.“Kimberly Akimbo” is the smallest of the nominated new musicals, with just nine characters and a budget that is about one-third that of its splashiest competitors.But it is shaping up to be the little engine that could: It opened last fall to the strongest reviews of any of the season’s new musicals, and now a plurality of voters interviewed say they are voting for it as the season’s best new musical.Not all voters love “Kimberly Akimbo” — some are finding it extraordinarily moving, while others are left cold — but the show’s odds are good because those who are not voting for it are splitting their votes between two comedies: “Some Like It Hot,” adapted from the Billy Wilder film, and “Shucked,” a pun-filled and country-scored fable. The two other nominated musicals, “& Juliet” and “New York, New York,” lag considerably behind.J. Harrison Ghee, in the red dress, is heavily favored to win a Tony Award as best leading actor in a musical for “Some Like It Hot.” Ghee’s dancing partner, Kevin Del Aguila, is also a Tony nominee.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Kimberly Akimbo,” which opened in November, is about a high school student, 15 going on 16, whose life is threatened by a genetic disorder that causes her to age prematurely; that sounds sad, and it is, but the musical is also quite funny, as the protagonist navigates a dysfunctional home life, a gawky peer group, and the criminal aunt who connects those worlds. The show, directed by Jessica Stone, is adapted from a play by David Lindsay-Abaire; he wrote the musical’s book and lyrics, and Jeanine Tesori wrote the music.The revival categories are tougher to predict.This was, by all accounts, a good season for revivals, many of which were praised by critics and a number of which sold well at the box office. But that is making these categories tougher for voters, who liked so many of the offerings that they are torn over which to single out for prizes.Among play revivals, a production of Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Topdog/Underdog” appears to have a modest but real lead, and is likely to win the Tony Award. If it is upset, it would be by the revival of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” but there is enough support for revivals of August Wilson’s “The Piano Lesson” and Lorraine Hansberry’s “The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window” to make it difficult for any of them to catch up.Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, left, and Corey Hawkins as the two brothers at the heart of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play “Topdog/Underdog.” Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“Topdog/Underdog,” first staged Off Broadway in 2001, is about two Black brothers, portentously named Lincoln and Booth, living together in a one-room apartment, trying to get by in a world that makes their lives difficult. The play is an undisputed classic — it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2002, and in 2018 was named the best American play of the previous quarter century by New York Times critics. The revival, directed by Kenny Leon, ran from September 2022 to January.The musical revival category is even closer. A production of “Parade,” a 1998 musical written by Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown about the lynching of a Jewish man in early-20th-century Georgia, has a narrow lead among voters I spoke with, but there is also substantial support for revivals of two shows with songs by Stephen Sondheim: “Into the Woods” and “Sweeney Todd.” Any of those three could win; a revival of “Camelot” is not a significant factor in the race. “Parade” opened in March and is scheduled to close in August; “Camelot” and “Sweeney Todd” are running indefinitely, while “Into the Woods” is wrapping up a national tour.Three of the top acting races are sewn up. One is not.J. Harrison Ghee, Jodie Comer and Victoria Clark can start writing their acceptance speeches. Each of them is almost certainly going to take home a Tony Award.The category of best leading actor in a play, on the other hand, is way, way, way too close to call, but has boiled down to two of the five contenders: Sean Hayes and Stephen McKinley Henderson.Sean Hayes, left, and Stephen McKinley Henderson, right, seem to be the front-runners in the very tight race for best leading actor in a play.Photographs by Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesGhee, who is nonbinary, is winning over voters with an empathetic, but also entertaining, portrayal of a musician whose gender identity is evolving in “Some Like It Hot.”Comer wowed voters with her physically and emotionally exhausting tour-de-force performance in “Prima Facie,” a one-woman play about a lawyer who defends men accused of sexual assault until she becomes a victim herself. Amazingly, this is her first stage role.And Clark is heavily favored for her mind-bending star turn in “Kimberly Akimbo,” in which the 63-year-old actress plays an ailing adolescent with all the awkwardness, resilience and premature wisdom that such a role requires. Clark previously won a Tony Award in 2005 for “The Light in the Piazza.”As for that race for best leading actor in a play: A little less than a third of voters I spoke with chose Hayes, who in “Good Night, Oscar” portrays Oscar Levant, a pianist whose bitter humor made him a popular talk-show guest while he battled serious psychological problems. But nearly the same number of voters are supporting Henderson for his portrayal of a retired police officer trying to hang onto a rent-controlled apartment in “Between Riverside and Crazy.”Who will win? Check back on Sunday night. More

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    ‘Jury Duty’ Becomes a Surprise Hit

    “Jury Duty,” a unique comedy on the Amazon streaming platform Freevee, became a surprise hit thanks to word-of-mouth social media buzz.On the night of April 6, the creators of “Jury Duty,” a hybrid documentary-sitcom in which an ordinary man unwittingly participates in a staged trial among actors, came together in Culver City, Calif., for a cast and crew screening of the series.The atmosphere was muted. Early reviews had been unflattering — The Hollywood Reporter, earlier that day, had called it “a bad show for benign reasons.” And with it premiering the next day on Amazon Freevee, an ad-supported streaming platform few were familiar with, expectations for the show’s success were modest, if not outright low.“The vibe at the screening I would describe as very much like, ‘We made a show, we should be proud of that,’” Todd Schulman, an executive producer, said in a recent video interview. “I believed in what we had made. But there’s so much content out there, and this is on a platform that’s not as well-known as the other ones, so let’s be realistic about what’s going to happen.”“Then the next three weeks unfolded,” he continued. “And it felt insane.”After a slow start, “Jury Duty” rapidly found an audience, building ecstatic word-of-mouth buzz to become a bona fide social media sensation, with clips of the show racking up hundreds of millions of views on TikTok.Broader interest in the show spiked accordingly, more than doubling in the month after premiere, according to research by Parrot Analytics. (The company assesses the popularity of shows by analyzing audience demand — a combination of streaming, social media, search and other online behaviors.) Interest in “Jury Duty” remains higher now than it was during the show’s initial run, in April, suggesting that plenty of viewers are still discovering it, Parrot said.Like most streamers, Amazon declines to give viewing numbers, but it confirmed that “Jury Duty” has been Freevee’s most watched show since it premiered. Last week, seeking to capitalize and build on the popularity, Amazon released a line of “Jury Duty” merchandise as well as new versions of the episodes that include cast commentary.All of which has prompted a lot of people to ask the same question: How did this happen?“Jury Duty” feels like a minor miracle. The premise is fraught with peril: The nominal star, a contractor named Ronald Gladden, has no idea that he is in a sitcom — he had been told that some parts of the trial were being recorded as a documentary — and one of the thrilling things about watching is the constant sense that at any moment it could all implode. Ronald could have discovered the ruse; the actors playing the other jurors could have broken character or flubbed lines. But all involved managed to pull it off.Gladden, center, was the only non-actor in the series, and viewers were charmed by his agreeable demeanor.Amazon FreeveeSchulman and his team weren’t even sure that they could. When they were pitching the concept around Hollywood, they received little interest, with most networks passing on the grounds that it posed too much of a creative risk. It was ultimately Freevee and its head of originals, Lauren Anderson, who was eager to take that chance.“Usually when you say ‘They took a chance on us,’ it means they took a chance because the show could have been bad,” Schulman said. “But they could give us millions of dollars and not get a show — that’s a different scale of chance-taking.”In an interview, Anderson said that when she first heard the pitch, at the start of the pandemic, Freevee — which was known at the time as IMDb TV — hadn’t released any original content and was looking for “noisy, buzzy and unique” programming to set its slate apart. “I got the feeling that this could be really special,” she said.James Marsden was less confident. The star of “Westworld” and “Sonic the Hedgehog” has a recurring role in “Jury Duty,” playing an exaggeratedly arrogant, pretentious version of himself who is ordered to be a backup juror for the trial. While Marsden was initially intrigued by the idea, he said in a phone interview that his doubts set in once the production began.“I started thinking, ‘Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into? Can we even do this? Can we pull this off?” he said. Even if it worked, he didn’t think it would land: “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see.”Even Gladden didn’t expect much to come from it once the production had wrapped. (That he was on a TV show was revealed to him in the final episode, but he had to wait months for it to make it to air.)“It was on a brand-new streaming platform that no one had ever heard of, so I didn’t really think it was going to go anywhere,” Gladden said over the phone from Los Angeles. “I truthfully didn’t think anything was going to come from it.”Leading up to the premiere, the buzz was virtually nonexistent, but there were signs the show could resonate. A trailer put out by Freevee didn’t cause much of a splash, but then one of the show’s writers, Kerry O’Neill, shared the trailer to her Twitter account with the caption, “We truman showed a man,” and the tweet blew up. The idea that someone had recreated “The Truman Show,” the Jim Carrey movie about a man unknowingly living life on TV, “really contextualized everything for people,” said Nicholas Hatton, one of the show’s executive producers. The trailer embedded in O’Neill’s tweet received 1.3 million views.While middling reviews dampened expectations, show clips put out by Freevee found an immediate foothold on TikTok. “I’m a 44-year-old man; I’m not on TikTok,” Schulman said dryly. “I couldn’t believe how many people my age or older were telling me that they heard about the show from their teenage kids. It was working its way generationally upward.”The fan TikTok videos — which Freevee had no part in creating, though it also posted clips to its own TikTok account — were like short, self-contained advertisements for the series. Users shared scenes out of context with a line or two of explanation, and it proved more than enough for people to understand the conceit and get hyped.Marsden felt the impact immediately after the first episode aired. “I started getting texts from friends and random people I hadn’t heard from in years,” he said. “What I kept hearing was, ‘You’re blowing up on TikTok.’ I didn’t even know what that meant.” The excitement spilled over into real life: “I walked out of my hotel room in New York to get a coffee and literally every other person under 30 was stopping me to talk about ‘Jury Duty.’”James Marsden, right, played an arrogant version of himself in the series. “I thought this would either be the end of my career or something that maybe a handful of people would see,” he said.Amazon FreeveeAt the same time, Gladden — who returned to contracting work after the show and had a minimal online presence — was thrust into social media stardom. “I figured that on Instagram that I might gain a few thousand followers out of it,” he said. “But when I very quickly gained over 10,000, I realized it was actually becoming a thing.”Essential to the show’s appeal, especially on TikTok, has been Gladden’s warmth and positivity as the unwitting lead. Faced over and over again with oblique ethical quandaries engineered by the writers (such as whether to take the blame for an embarrassing bathroom accident caused by Marsden) and forced to endure the bizarre behavior of his fellow “jurors,” Gladden exuded an unflappable sweetness that viewers have found touching and inspiring.Not surprisingly, the more than 200,000 Instagram followers he now has have been flooding Gladden’s inbox with positive messages. “People have been telling me things like, ‘You’ve inspired me to be a better person,’ or ‘you make me want to be nicer to people,’” he said. “It’s the best reaction I could have gotten.”Every network hopes to cultivate this kind of grass-roots furor, and modern streaming content can feel as if it is actively courting viral success (consider the “Wednesday” dance). But no one involved with “Jury Duty” intended for it to be a TikTok hit.“This show took off in a way that you can’t buy,” Anderson said. “It took on a life of its own, in the way that you want to happen for every show you make but which you just can’t predict.”That it was a happy accident hasn’t stopped others in the industry from lusting after the recipe, of course. “I’ve had people who work at other platforms call me and say, ‘OK, what’s the secret? What did Freevee do to make this go viral?’” Schulman said. “It was completely organic.”As for what it was about “Jury Duty” in particular that resonated with audiences on TikTok, Marsden has a theory. “Young people go onto YouTube or their explore feed on TikTok or Instagram, and they watch people slipping on the ice or doing a silly dance,” he said. “They want to see what’s going on out there in all its absurdity or its hilariousness or its scariness. They want to watch something real, and not fake.”The centerpiece of “Jury Duty” is a real guy, and that edge of reality, Marsden feels, is what captures the imagination of the young. “Every 20-year-old can see themselves in that position and think, ‘What if that was me?’ There’s something kind of dangerous and exciting about that.” More

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    For the Under the Radar Festival, the Experiment is Over for Now

    “It wasn’t a choice I would have made,” said Mark Russell, whose festival of experimental work will no longer be produced by the Public Theater.Mark Russell, a performance art curator and former artistic director of Performance Space 122, debuted the first Under the Radar in January 2005. A scrappy, shimmering mishmash of mostly American experimental work, the festival occupied St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn, with satellite productions elsewhere. There was theater, there was dance, there was work that fell between and among mediums.Oskar Eustis, then the newly appointed artistic director of the Public Theater, attended that iteration, which presented an early version of Elevator Repair Service’s “Gatz.” He invited Russell to bring the festival to the Public the following year.“It was the first artistic choice I made,” Eustis said in a recent phone interview. But after 17 years and 16 festivals, the Public has made a different choice. During a mid-May meeting, Russell was informed that the Public, citing financial reasons, would not produce the festival in 2024 and that Russell’s employment at the theater would soon be terminated.Russell, reached by video call in Brussels, where he was scouting new work at the Kunstenfestivaldesarts, had a bittersweet reaction.“I’m really proud of the work we did. And I have a total respect for the Public,” he said. “It wasn’t a choice I would have made. But that’s the choice they had to make.”From left, Jim Fletcher, Scott Shepherd and Victoria Vazquez in the 2010 production of the play “Gatz” at the Public Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUnder the Radar, or UTR, was founded as both a celebration and a canny act of service. It was scheduled in January, to dovetail with the annual conference of the Association of Performing Arts Professionals. The festival enabled artists to attract the attention of thousands of visiting presenters, who might then offer vital commissions and tours. It has included local artists and companies like Taylor Mac, Young Jean Lee, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Reggie Watts and 600 Highwaymen who were programmed alongside international work.UTR was soon joined by related festivals — Coil, American Realness, Other Forces, and later Prototype and the Exponential Festival. Most of those have shuttered.The online reaction to the news that UTR might meet this same fate was a mix anger and melancholy, with many responding not only to the Public’s decision, but also seemingly to the feeling that New York City has become a less hospitable place for artistic experimentation.A number of festival participants recently spoke about what inclusion in UTR had meant. The festival, many said, had introduced them to the work of international artists. It had secured them lucrative touring contracts. It had made them feel as if, after working at the margins, they finally belonged within a larger conversation.“It was inspiration, connection and communion all at once,” Paul Thureen, a founder of the devised theater group the Debate Society, wrote in an email. The group presented “Blood Play” at UTR in 2013.Hannah Bos, left, and Michael Cyril Creighton in “Blood Play,” a work produced by the devised theater group the Debate Society and presented as part of Under the Radar’s 2013 season.Javier OddoKelly Copper, a founder of the Nature Theater of Oklahoma, described the festival’s economic impact. “It gave us access to a worldwide audience,” she wrote, “and enabled us, after years of struggling from show to show, to finally support ourselves.” Its “Pursuit of Happiness” appeared at UTR in 2018.While a statement released Wednesday described UTR as “on hiatus” from the Public, Eustis clarified that he could not promise when or if the festival might continue there. “Because we feel like this is a time of real structural change,” he said, on a joint call with the Public’s executive director, Patrick Willingham.They outlined the theater’s financial circumstances — increased expenses, audience numbers that remain below prepandemic levels, sluggish philanthropic giving. Prepandemic, the Public’s annual budget was approximately $60 million. Now it is $48 million.UTR had an annual budget of about $1 million, excluding salaries and operating costs. Artist fees were small and many international shows were sponsored by their home countries, but like every show at the Public the festival lost money.“It was designed to give our artists their celebration,” Russell said. “When would you have a party and expect to come away with money? We had really good parties.”Ending UTR was, Eustis said, the most visible and the most painful effect of this budget contraction. Because the Public is a presenting theater for the festival rather than a creative or originating theater, it sacrificed UTR while retaining in-house programs like the Mobile Unit and Public Works.Still, Eustis did not underestimate the festival’s significance for the city’s artistic life. “It made a huge difference to not only the ecology of the downtown scene, but also to the international communication among artists,” he said, also noting that as other festivals and spaces closed or scaled back, Under the Radar became even more important.As it remains important, Russell, who owns the intellectual property rights to the festival, is in conversation with venues and potential producers, seeking a way forward.“I’m feeling relieved and hopeful at the changes that could come,” he said last week. “Because it does feel like we need new strategies to make a festival work in this city. We’ve proven that people are hungry for a festival. So now what do we do with that energy? That energy has to go somewhere.” More

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    The Joan Rivers Card Catalog of Jokes Finds a Home

    Take a look at some of the artifacts from her archive, which includes 65,000 cross-referenced gags and is headed to the National Comedy Center.When Joan Rivers died in 2014, ending one of the greatest careers in modern comedy, several groups were interested in acquiring her archives, which included a meticulously organized collection of 65,000 typewritten jokes.Her daughter, Melissa Rivers, recalled a conversation with a representative from the Smithsonian Institution who wanted the catalog of jokes but said it would not be on permanent display. Her mind instantly went to the final tracking shot of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” in which the golden Ark of the Covenant is locked inside a crate and placed in a vast warehouse with hundreds of other crates.“I couldn’t do that because so much of who she was is in those files,” Melissa Rivers told me on a video call from Los Angeles. For her mother, a pioneering stand-up and withering critic of celebrity fashion, “a view was always important.”Instead, Rivers is donating the extensive collection to the National Comedy Center, the high-tech museum in Jamestown, N.Y., joining the archives of A-list comics like George Carlin and Carl Reiner. The fact that the jokes will be accessible is only one of the reasons for Melissa Rivers’s decision.The museum is in the planning stages of an interactive exhibition that will center on Joan Rivers’s card catalog of jokes and include material covering a vast swath of comedy history, from the 1950s to 2015. The show will allow visitors to explore the file in depth.Jamestown is where Lucille Ball grew up, and “Joan Rivers was the first headliner I booked for the Lucille Ball Comedy Festival the year we announced to the world our intention to build the National Comedy Center,” Journey Gunderson, the executive director, told me by phone. Melissa Rivers, a television personality in her own right, was on hand for the groundbreaking in 2015.When it comes to the Joan Rivers joke collection, “I don’t know that another exists that is nearly as vast,” Gunderson said. In Carlin’s archives, by contrast, the jokes were “mainly scraps of paper organized into Ziploc baggies then put into a folder by topic.”Rivers, who wrote gags at all hours, paid close attention to setups and punchlines, typing them up and cross-referencing them by categories like “Parents hated me” or “Las Vegas” or “No sex appeal.” The largest subject area is “Tramp,” which includes 1,756 jokes.Along with this bounty of material, the collection includes snapshots of other aspects of this major cultural figure, including her sense of fashion, like the pearls and a little black dress she wore early in her career as well as the multiple boas from her later fashionista years. Here’s a look at a few of the artifacts headed to the center.Insults in CharacterThe jokes were categorized by topics like fashion and career, and even cross-referenced.Joan Rivers EstateAs you can see from these cards, Joan Rivers often made herself the butt of the joke, leaning on tight, snappy punchlines to describe herself as unwanted or ugly or old. Gunderson said the self-deprecating gibes emerged from a character “she was using as a position of power to comment on the plight of woman.” In real life, Melissa Rivers said that “every now and again, she would say that for whatever age she was, she looked good. But that was that.” Rivers added that those jokes came from a real place. “That was a part of her, but maybe not as crippling as everyone assumed it would be,” she said. “But she also knew she looked good.”An Unparalleled CatalogIn a scene from the documentary “Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work,” the comedian explains how she kept a record of her jokes and cross-indexed them.Break Thru Films/IFC“Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work” (from 2010 and available on major platforms) is one of the greatest documentaries about a stand-up comic ever made: candid, unflinching and alert to the brutal amount of work necessary to succeed in show business. It also introduced the world to the cabinet of jokes that Rivers kept in her home. Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described the catalog as one of “the crown jewels of comedy that exist on planet Earth.”Help With HecklersWhen Rivers was starting out, she planned her responses to hecklers.Joan Rivers EstateRivers, a fixture on television who never stopped performing live, loved sparring with a crowd. But early in her career, she prepared for rambunctious audience members with this list of comebacks that could be weaponized to mock hecklers without losing the tempo of her set. Melissa Rivers said she saw her mother upset by a heckler only once, when later in her career someone was offended by a joke about Helen Keller. “She spun around and said: ‘Don’t you dare! My mother was deaf. She lost her hearing early. Don’t tell me what’s inappropriate.’”Early AmbitionsRivers hoped for a career as an actress and regularly went to the theater.Joan Rivers EstateBefore Joan Rivers became a comedian, she wanted to be a dramatic actress. After graduating from Barnard College in 1954, she commissioned this series of head shots to display her range. She didn’t make her Broadway debut until 1972 with “Fun City,” which she co-wrote (with her husband, Edgar Rosenberg, and Lester Colodny) and starred in. It closed after nine performances. But Rivers remained a stalwart fan of the stage, a regular at shows and a savvy commentator on the television series “Theater Talk.” When she went to the theater, she always dressed up and insisted her family do the same. Melissa Rivers said: “She always said, ‘This is church.’”Ticket From a Momentous TimeThe short-lived late-night show proved both a high and low point in Rivers’s career.Joan Rivers EstateWhen Joan Rivers left her position as the permanent guest host of “The Tonight Show” on NBC to start her own version in 1986 on the then-fledging network Fox, she became the first woman in the modern era to host a late-night talk show. It was a bold move, a career landmark that also preceded a painful period of her life. She made an enemy of the “Tonight Show” host Johnny Carson, who saw her departure as a betrayal. “That made her angry,” Melissa Rivers said. “Like she often said, if it had been a man, it would have been the great send-off to my protégé.” Rivers was banished from the Carson show and fired from her own the following year. Her husband, a producer on “The Late Show Starring Joan Rivers,” died by suicide months later. “It took a huge toll on their marriage and our family,” Melissa Rivers recalled, describing the period represented by this ticket as one of “great elation and great horror.” More

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    The Iron Sheik, Villainous Hall of Fame Wrestler, Is Dead

    Khosrow Vaziri drew on his Iranian heritage to create a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain and became one of the most memorable heels in wrestling history.The Iron Sheik, a Hall of Fame wrestler who became a villainous star in the 1980s, facing off against Hulk Hogan and teaming up with a wrestler who claimed to represent the Soviet Union, died in his sleep early Wednesday morning at his home in Fayetteville, Ga. He was either 81 (according to his passport) or 80 (according to him).The death was confirmed by his managers, Page and Jian Magen, who said they did not know the cause.Foreign-style heels are a time-honored tradition in professional wrestling, and the Iron Sheik, whose legal name was Khosrow Vaziri, became one of the most recognizable of them all.The Sheik drew loosely on his Iranian heritage to build a caricature of a Middle Eastern villain. He wore a thick mustache, boots with curled toes, and kaffiyeh, Middle Eastern head scarves — which are not generally worn in Iran.At the height of the Sheik’s infamy, and in the wake of the Iran hostage crisis in 1979, he often stomped into the ring waving an Iranian flag emblazoned with the face of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then Iran’s supreme leader, to take on stereotypically American wrestlers.The Sheik’s signature move was the camel clutch, in which he sat on an opponent’s back, locked his fingers beneath the other wrestler’s chin and pulled up. His unfortunate opponent’s spine seemed to bend like a drawn bow.In 1983 the Sheik defeated Bob Backlund to win the World Wrestling Federation championship. But his time with the title was short.About a month later, on Jan. 23, 1984, the Sheik defended his title against Hulk Hogan, then a relatively new face in the World Wrestling Federation (now known as WWE), in front of a sold-out crowd at Madison Square Garden.The match seemed to be going the Sheik’s way, and he trapped Hogan in a camel clutch. But Hogan stood up with the Sheik on his back and slammed him into a corner pylon.The Sheik flopped to the mat. Hogan launched off the ropes, leaped into a leg drop on the Sheik and then pinned him. It was the first of Hogan’s six WWE championships and the beginning of Hulkamania.The defeat continued to sting even decades later, the Sheik, very much in character, told WWE in an interview in 2014.“Hulk Hogan, only thing he had was luck,” he said. “I have one bad night, I lost my belt.”Sgt. Slaughter was a regular opponent for the Sheik, who lost a major match to him at Madison Square Garden later in 1984.The next year the Sheik teamed up with Nikolai Volkoff, a heel supposedly wrestling for the Soviet Union (he was actually from Croatia), and went on to win the World Tag Team Championship at the inaugural Wrestlemania.The Sheik also dialed up his character’s anti-American rhetoric. He often snatched the microphone from an announcer and shouted “Iran No. 1! Russia No. 1!”Then he would glare at the audience, shout “U.S.A.!” and spit on the ground.The audience reaction could be so vicious that despite his ferociousness in the ring, the Sheik sometimes feared for his safety.Keith Elliot Greenberg, a wrestling historian and writer, said in a phone interview that he thought fans sometimes believed the Sheik’s character too much.“The reality was he was actually a very loyal American, and was grateful to the United States for the opportunities it afforded him,” Mr. Greenberg said.The Iron Sheik in action against Chavo Guerrero in the 1980s.George Napolitano/MediaPunch, via Associated PressHossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri was born in Damghan, a town about 200 miles east of Tehran. His birth date appeared as March 15, 1942, on his passport, but he was not certain that it was accurate and celebrated his birthday on Sept. 9. His parents, Ghassem and Maryam Vaziri, owned a farm that grew pistachios, grapes and other crops.When he was a boy, his family moved to Tehran and opened a wrestling gym where some of Iran’s foremost wrestlers trained. He grew up immersed in the sport.Vaziri became a talented wrestler, and his prominence helped him secure a job as a bodyguard for the family of the shah of Iran. But after the Olympic gold medal-winning wrestler Gholamreza Takhti died under mysterious circumstances in 1968, perhaps for displeasing the shah, Vaziri left Iran for the United States and settled in Minneapolis.He wrestled with an amateur club in Minnesota, winning an Amateur Athletic Union Greco-Roman wrestling tournament in 1971, and served as an assistant coach for the U.S. Olympic team in 1972 and 1976 before making the transition to full-time professional wrestling.Vaziri trained under Verne Gagne, the promoter of the American Wrestling Association. The idea for the Iron Sheik came from Mary Gagne, Verne’s wife, Mr. Greenberg said, though Vaziri experimented with other versions of the character over the years.In 1975 he married Caryl Peterson, who survives him. He is also survived by their daughters, Nicole and Tanya; a sister; and five grandchildren.During the 1980s the Sheik started using drugs and drinking heavily. In 1987 he and Hacksaw Jim Duggan — a babyface, as good-guy wrestlers are known — were arrested on the New Jersey Turnpike after police officers found cocaine and marijuana in their car.The Sheik appeared in a match as an ally of Sgt. Slaughter’s in 1991, and in 1997 he managed another wrestler, the Sultan. But his professional career mostly dried up as his drug use accelerated in the 1990s. He struggled with substance abuse for a long time, but according to an article Mr. Greenberg wrote for Bleacher Report in 2013, he had more recently been able to stay off drugs, except for an occasional beer.In 2003 his daughter Marissa, 27, was killed by her boyfriend, Charles Reynolds. Vaziri said that he contemplated attacking Mr. Reynolds with a razor blade in court, Mr. Greenberg wrote, but that his family kept him from doing it. Mr. Reynolds was sentenced to life in prison. He died in 2016.In 2005 the Iron Sheik was inducted into the WWE Hall of Fame.Beginning in the early 2000s, the Sheik brought a less inhibited version of his character to Howard Stern’s radio show to rant about different wrestlers. He threatened to sodomize rivals like Hogan and used homophobic slurs to describe the Ultimate Warrior.In more recent years the Sheik’s diatribes appeared on social media. His managers often posted profanity-laced messages in all capital letters on a Twitter account that has nearly 650,000 followers. A recent one just said “HOGAN,” preceded by an expletive.But, the Sheik allowed in 2014, things were more civil when he met Hogan outside the ring.“Nobody talk bad about the past,” he said. “I get along with him.”Alain Delaquérière contributed research. More

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    Jay Johnston, ‘Bob’s Burgers’ Actor, Is Arrested on Jan. 6 Charges

    The actor was banned from the animated sitcom in 2021 after he was accused of participating in the Capitol riot.Jay Johnston, a comic actor known for his work on the animated sitcom “Bob’s Burgers,” was arrested in California on Wednesday and charged with felony obstruction of police officers during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.The actor was identified in police body camera footage pushing against officers and aiding other rioters at the Capitol, according to the F.B.I.Mr. Johnston, 54, was charged on four counts, including civil disorder and entering a restricted building. An F.B.I. affidavit states that images from closed-circuit television show Mr. Johnston using a shield stolen from the Capitol Police to join a group assault on officers defending a tunnel entrance to the building.Mr. Johnston’s name surfaced in connection with the riot in March 2021 when amateur sleuths said they recognized him in photographs shown in an F.B.I. call for tips on Twitter. Colleagues on the podcast “Harmontown” also tweeted that they recognized Mr. Johnston, who appeared in small roles on “Arrested Development” and “Anchorman,” among other comedies.“I’m no detective, but I do know Jay,” Cassandra Church, who worked on “Harmontown” with Mr. Johnston, wrote in a tweet that has since been deleted. “He said he was there. And that’s him in the picture. So…”The F.B.I. said three associates of Mr. Johnston’s identified him in the Jan. 6 photographs. One associate provided the F.B.I. with a text message in which Mr. Johnston acknowledged being at the Capitol on Jan. 6, stating: “The news presented it as an attack. It actually wasn’t. Thought it kind of turned into that. It was a mess. Got maced and tear gassed.”Mr. Johnston was also said to have assisted other rioters by pouring water over their eyes after they had been sprayed.The Daily Beast reported in December 2021 that Mr. Johnston had been banned from voicing his recurring character, Jimmy Pesto Sr., on the Fox show “Bob’s Burgers” after the Jan. 6 riot.More than 1,040 people have been charged in connection with the attack on the Capitol, according to the Justice Department. Prosecutors have indicated that there could be as many as another 1,000 people who might eventually face charges, according to people familiar with the matter.The owner of a Long Island funeral home, Peter G. Moloney, was also charged on Wednesday in the department’s investigation of the riot. He is accused of spraying an insecticide at police officers guarding the Capitol and attacking members of the news media.Last month, Richard Barnett, who was photographed with his boot on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s desk during the attack, was sentenced to four and a half years in prison after being found guilty in January on eight criminal offenses.Stewart Rhodes, the leader of the far-right Oath Keepers militia, received the most severe penalty so far from criminal cases stemming from the Capitol attack. He was sentenced last month to 18 years in prison for his conviction on seditious conspiracy charges.Mr. Johnston has a long list of television and movie credits, mostly in comedic roles. He was a regular on the 1990s sketch comedy program “Mr. Show” with David Cross and Bob Odenkirk. He more recently appeared in an episode of “Better Call Saul,” starring Mr. Odenkirk.A lawyer for Mr. Johnston did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Alan Feuer More

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    Smoke Leads to Cancellations of ‘Hamilton’ on Broadway and ‘Hamlet’ in Central Park

    As smoke from Canadian wildfires blanketed New York City and seeped into theaters, alarming both ticket holders and performers, the Broadway productions of “Hamilton” and “Camelot,” as well as a Free Shakespeare in the Park production of “Hamlet,” canceled performances.“Hamilton” announced at 6:45 p.m. that it was canceling its 8 p.m. performance Wednesday night because so many cast members had called in sick.“Tonight’s performance of Hamilton will not go on as scheduled,” Shane Marshall Brown, a spokesman for the production, said in a statement. “The hazardous air quality in New York City has made it impossible for a number of our artists to perform this evening.”At about the same time, Lincoln Center Theater announced that its Broadway revival of “Camelot” was also canceling a Wednesday night performance; spokeswoman Juliana Hannett cited “the impact of the air quality on our artists.”“Shucked,” a new musical, planned a concert-style performance of its show, featuring composer Brandy Clark, after several actors called out sick for reasons that a spokesman said were unrelated to air quality.The Public Theater canceled the final dress rehearsal for “Hamlet” on Wednesday night, and said the loss of rehearsal time plus ongoing concern about air quality was prompting it to cancel the first two scheduled previews of the play, on Thursday and Friday nights.Broadway’s theater owners and producers held an emergency meeting Wednesday afternoon to discuss the impact of declining air quality, but, mindful that many patrons and performers were already in place for the evening’s shows, decided to let any shows that could continue with their performances that night. There were 31 performances originally scheduled to take place at Broadway theaters on Wednesday night; because of upgrades made in response to the coronavirus pandemic, the theaters have air filtration systems that are supposed to be able to reduce pollutants.“Broadway remains open this evening and most shows are set to perform,” the Broadway League’s president, Charlotte St. Martin, said in a statement. The decision came as air quality levels in New York reached record levels of unhealthiness, and as many organizations, including the New York Yankees, were canceling events — initially mostly outdoors, but then, as the haze lingered, indoors, too.The smoke has been affecting live performances in New York for more than 24 hours. On Tuesday night, the Public Theater cut short a technical rehearsal of “Hamlet,” citing air quality concerns, and then on Wednesday morning Little Island, a small park built on the Hudson River, canceled its art-making activities.Broadway felt its first major impact shortly after 2 p.m., when the actress Jodie Comer stopped her acclaimed (and physically demanding) one-woman show, “Prima Facie,” just 10 minutes after it began, saying she was having trouble breathing. The show restarted with her understudy, and Comer returned for the Wednesday evening performance.There were several other scrapped performances as government officials began talking more loudly about the health risks of going out. Vineyard Theater canceled a performance of its new play, “This Land Was Made.” New York Live Arts canceled a dance performance in Times Square by Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company. And BRIC, a Brooklyn-based arts organization, canceled the opening night of its Celebrate Brooklyn festival, which was to include a concert headlined by Taj Mahal and Corinne Bailey Rae. More

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    ‘Tucker on Twitter’ Is Equal Parts Fox News and Fox Mulder

    The low-fi “Tucker on Twitter” finds the former prime-time host at the intersection of Fox News and Fox Mulder.Most of the time, it does not qualify as newsworthy to see a man in your social media feed staring into a camera, asking “What exactly happened on 9/11?” and demanding to know why the media isn’t digging for the truth about J.F.K.’s assassination. Usually, it’s just a sign that you should not have accepted so many friend requests from high school classmates you barely remember.But when that man was recently paid millions of dollars by Fox News to say much the same things on one of the most popular shows on cable TV, attention is paid. In Tuesday’s debut episode of “Tucker on Twitter,” the new home-brew show from Tucker Carlson, the ousted prime-time star’s brand of resentment, insinuation and dog-whistly mocking finally gets the guy-ranting-from-his-den visuals that suit it.There’s a touch of echo in the audio; there are wall hangings, wood paneling, a bit of woodsy green through a window. Carlson holds his own Teleprompter controller and wears a suit with a pocket square. The overall look is talk-show “Green Acres,” or Ron Swanson if he shaved and went to prep school.As a production, “Tucker on Twitter” looks less like a newscast than one of the improvised lockdown shows that late-night talk hosts recorded from home in the early Covid days of 2020. But in this case, Carlson’s quarantine is self-inflicted.Fox abruptly let him go in April, after the investigation in its now-settled litigation with the voting software company Dominion turned up a racist text message and misogynistic slurs from him, as well as statements disparaging Fox executives. It’s not clear whether streaming on Twitter violates Carlson’s contract with Fox, which lasts until early 2025.But commentators gotta commentate, and the time off in the woods has not mellowed Carlson. He gives the barest intro —“Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson!”— before giving a rundown of the dam explosion in Ukraine that would go down in the Kremlin like the smoothest vodka. “Any fair person would conclude that the Ukrainians probably blew it up,” he says, given that the dam, located in a region taken by Russia in an invasion, was “effectively Russian.”Carlson also called Volodymyr Zelensky, the Jewish president of Ukraine, “a persecutor of Christians” and described him as “shifty, dead-eyed” and “sweaty and ratlike.” For years, Carlson laundered far-right fringe rhetoric and bigotry on Fox, and there is no sign that, in the anything-goes regime of Elon Musk’s Twitter, the laundry is shutting down.Carlson’s rhetoric has not diminished, but his production has. In the 10-minute first episode, there are no guests, no produced segments, a handful of news-footage clips. It’s pure monologue, from the opening Ukraine comment to the offhand swipes at diversity and transgender women to a closing bit on a whistle-blower who contends that the U.S. government possesses material from extraterrestrial aircraft.It’s a Tucker Carlson show, in other words. A big question is whether Carlson can be what he once was without the Fox News platform and production resources.Fox has ideology, of course (which has cycled through different flavors of conservatism over the decades), but it also has an aesthetic. Its shows are produced to be glossy and urgent, to convey a sense of slick confidence. Fox News is designed to look like it is broadcasting from the top of the world; “Tucker on Twitter” looks not unlike something livestreamed after the apocalypse.Others — Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck — have failed to reclaim their peak influence after losing their Fox perches. Carlson could be different; Fox News has yet to recover in the prime-time ratings from his sudden departure.But Carlson, for all his anti-elite posturing, is wholly a creature of legacy TV, having hosted shows on Fox, CNN and MSNBC. He is a houseplant grown under corporate studio lights, even when they were installed in his rural Maine town for him to broadcast remotely to Fox.On the other hand, it’s possible that the pivot to low-fi Twitter is more of a match for the current incarnation of Carlson. Whether he is holding forth on Russia or immigrants or the Jan. 6 riot, he has one persistent meta-theme: The elites are controlling your information and telling you what you’re allowed to say. “Go ahead and talk about something that really matters and see what happens,” he says at one point, seeming to allude to his firing by Fox while casting himself as a free-speech martyr. “If you keep it up, they’ll make you be quiet. Trust us.”Within this rhetorical framework, it is not necessary to prove that aliens have been discovered on Earth or that Ukrainians blew up a Ukrainian dam. It is enough for Carlson to say They don’t want you to believe it, and the viewer can accept the idea for the sake of sticking it to them. They say you’re wrong, you’re crazy, you’re a racist. Well, what do they know?It is a premise made for social media, as many a red-pilled YouTuber and Facebook proselytizer has found. The premise of his appeal — that he is the one teller of truth, and you the one critical thinker, in a world of shepherds and sheep — dovetails with the idea of booting up your computer to seek out a man giving speeches from his den.It also dovetails with the interests of Twitter’s owner, Musk, who styles himself as a heterodox freethinker — whose heterodoxy happens to be expressed through reinstating right-wing trolls and hosting the Republican presidential campaign announcement of Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor.But since 2017, Carlson has made himself likely the most influential broadcaster in conservative politics by posturing as an outsider on the inside. However well he can monetize a Twitter audience, it’s another matter to retain as much political-cultural power as an outsider on the outside. Nor do we know if this is a real transformation or just a stopgap until Carlson is contractually free to go back on TV.Until then, the truth is out there, and so is Tucker Carlson — whether or not they are necessarily in the same place. More