Eliana Willis

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    How a Ballroom ‘Cats,’ a Gay Kiss and a Black Marine Reclaimed Old Musicals

    How a Black lieutenant, a gay kiss and a catless ballroom are helping reclaim Broadway classics.Ten years ago, I cringed through an Encores! performance of one of the most odious musicals I’d ever seen. That’s not to throw shade on Encores!, the concert series that dredges up both diamonds and dirt from the musical theater dustbin. But “Irma La Douce,” a 1960 Broadway hit about jolly prostitutes and the men who keep them, was perhaps a dredge too far. Did I mention that it involved penguins?In a way, it was a relief that the show was so bad: There was nothing to regret in consigning it to my personal catalog of cancellation.Most of the most offensive musicals of the past are like that, providing their own incontrovertible arguments against revival, except as carefully labeled historical exhibits in some deep-future Encores! season.On the other hand, the best vintage musicals need no excuses. They should be performed as long as enough people want to see them, and perhaps even longer, until the time is right again.But between the disposables and the treasurables lies a range of works, middling to excellent, that can still be powerful despite certain problems. Often the problems arise from ways of looking at race and gender that, however progressive in their day, do not meet contemporary expectations. Who, if anyone, has the right perspective to address such works most authentically?A good answer might start with artists who represent the group that’s objectionably depicted (or gratuitously ignored) in the show itself. And though I’m not a proponent of narrow identity matching, which can shrink a capacious story to a hall of mirrors with just one person inside, I’ve seen several examples recently in which the story is instead expanded. This happens when directors and performers from the communities in question thoughtfully reappropriate material that was once appropriated from them.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: The Olympics and ‘Surreal Life: Villa of Secrets’

    The opening ceremony airs on NBC. MTV reboots a reality show.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, July 22-28. Details and times are subject to change.Monday61ST STREET 9 p.m. on the CW. The second season of this series follows a high school athlete, Moses Johnson (Tosin Cole), who is Black, as he navigates the corrupt Chicago criminal justice system when he is arrested as a supposed gang member. The show originally aired on AMC in 2022 but was canceled. The first two seasons were shot back to back, though, and the CW bought the show and is debuting Season 2.GYPSY ROSE: LIFE AFTER LOCK UP 9 p.m. on Lifetime. Since Gypsy Rose Blanchard was released from prison late last December, she has rarely been out of the headlines. This reality show has followed her as she manages parole, reconnects with her family and navigates her marriage with Ryan Anderson. Since the show has begun airing, she has filed for divorce from Anderson and is expecting a baby with her ex-fiancé, Ken Urker. On an episode of “The Kardashians” that aired last week, Blanchard met with Kim Kardashian to discuss potential prison reform efforts, so who knows what Blanchard will be up to after this show wraps.TuesdaySURREAL LIFE: VILLA OF SECRETS 9 p.m. on MTV. One thing that MTV loves to do is reboot a show. “The Surreal Life” originally aired on VH1 from 2003 to 2006. (It came back in 2022). It follows celebrities as they share a house together for two weeks. This reboot has a similar premise but with higher stakes: The celebrities — including Tyler Posey, Macy Gray and Johnny Weir — will participate in challenges that lead them to be vulnerable and divulge secrets.WednesdayA scene from “Charlie Hustle & the Matter of Pete Rose.”Courtesy of HBOCHARLIE HUSTLE & THE MATTER OF PETE ROSE 9 p.m. on HBO. Pete Rose played in the M.L.B. starting in 1963 and was most prominent when he played for the Cincinnati Reds. Throughout his career, he became a record-holder for career total of 4,256 hits, most games played (3,562) and most times at bat (14,053). In 1989, Rose had retired from playing and was the manager for the Reds when the commissioner, A. Bartlett Giamatti, banned him from the League over reports that he had engaged in sports betting — even for games involving his own team. This documentary features Rose himself as he reflects on his career.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Love Island USA’ Finds Its Magic Formula for Success

    A new host, an embrace of social media and some excellent casting led to the former also-ran becoming the summer’s buzziest show.There is no shortage of dating reality shows, but this summer one is receiving the majority of the buzz. “Love Island USA,” an American spinoff of a popular British dating show, is dominating social media discourse, breaking streaming records and making fans out of even the most curmudgeonly anti-reality TV watchers.The show, which streams on Peacock, gathers a group of contestants, called islanders, into a luxury villa (this season is in Fiji) and tasks them with coupling up, either out of true love, friendship or simple survival. Islanders who are single were kicked out of the villa, and every so often American viewers have been asked to vote out their least favorite couple. In Sunday night’s season finale, the pair voted “most compatible,” will win a cash prize of $100,000.The show is captured through 80 to 90 cameras installed around the villa, which feed footage to a war room at the resort’s reception area. There, a crew of 450 producers, editors and postproduction executives make decisions about what footage will make the cut.“What’s shot on a Monday is delivered to the network on a Tuesday, and it works that way every day for a six-week run,” Simon Thomas, an executive producer at ITV Entertainment, the production company for “Love Island,” said in an interview.Though “Love Island USA” has been on air since 2019, this season — its sixth — has been by far the most successful. The first three seasons, which aired on CBS, received moderate viewership but did not live up to the success of the original British version. This season, the show has been the top reality series across all streaming platforms since its start on June 11, according to preliminary data from Nielsen. The show has also dominated social media, overshadowing Peacock’s other fan favorites like “The Traitors.”Ariana Madix’s supportive approach as host has been a huge hit with viewers.Ben Symons/PeacockWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Quiz: Celebrating 25 Years of “SpongeBob SquarePants”

    Twenty-five years ago, a yellow sponge beat the odds to get a job at the Krusty Krab, the most beloved fast-food eatery in the underwater city of Bikini Bottom. That was just the beginning for “SpongeBob SquarePants,” whose 14 seasons made it one of the longest-running American animated series. The SpongeBob universe expanded to include […] More

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    ‘Lady in the Lake’ Review: Not Just Another Baltimore Mystery

    Natalie Portman stars in an elaborate adaptation of Laura Lippman’s novel about a pair of 1960s murders.If you’ve read Laura Lippman’s novel “Lady in the Lake,” about a pair of murders in Baltimore in the 1960s, you will know right away that the Apple TV+ mini-series based on it has taken liberties. The Thanksgiving parade that opens the action is not in the book; neither is the man dressed as a mailbox whom we see relieving himself in an alley before resuming his place in the procession.It is a small moment characteristic of the writer and director Alma Har’el’s exhaustive reworking of Lippman’s twisty but fairly straightforward 2019 mystery. It is visually striking and nimbly staged: the powder blue and rusty red shades of the mailbox costume set against the dingy alley, the camera following the dancer in his bulky carapace as he awkwardly capers back to the parade. It’s diversely suggestive: of the distant period (mail!), of the bleak season, of a still strong civic self-regard. And it’s just there — cool and quirky, with no real weight, gone when the figure rounds the corner into the street.The prodigiously talented Har’el has worked extensively in commercials and music videos and made several documentaries, including the evocative “Bombay Beach,” filmed at the Salton Sea. Before “Lady in the Lake,” her only major fictional work was the terrific feature “Honey Boy,” written by and starring her sometime collaborator Shia LaBeouf. Based on LaBeouf’s life, it explored the porous boundaries between fantasy and real life, between performance and ordinary behavior.“Lady in the Lake,” which premiered with two of its seven episodes on Friday, has some similar ideas. But working as creator, director and primary writer, Har’el doesn’t manage to pull them together. The show is visually striking and full of sensuous atmosphere. But the ideas it is trying to put across about the wages of race, class and gender in a particular place and time don’t really translate from script to screen, and Har’el’s baroque elaborations on Lippman’s solid mystery plot start to feel increasingly artificial, in a tinselly, uninteresting way.Lippman’s novel (the recipient of a rave review in The New York Times by Stephen King) tied together two fictional cases inspired by real events, the murders of a Jewish girl and a Black woman. Her main character is a Jewish housewife and frustrated writer in Baltimore, Maddie Schwartz (nee Morgenstern), who exploits the deaths to embark on a new career as a newspaper reporter; Maddie’s reinvention also involves leaving her husband and son and having an affair with a Black cop.Har’el conflates some significant characters and adds and subtracts others while adhering, until the later episodes, to the major points of the plot. But she is less interested in that plot than in the themes of storytelling — who gets to tell the stories of Tessie, the Jewish girl, and Cleo, the Black woman — and broken dreams. Cleo’s dream of being a singer has gone unrealized, but Maddie’s dream of being a writer will be gained on the back of Cleo’s death.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Donald Trump Promised a Softer Image. He Delivered Hulkamania.

    The last night of the Republican National Convention featured glimpses of a more sober tone — and a whole lot of testosterone.Who is Donald J. Trump?After over four decades of tabloid celebrity, reality-TV stardom and presidential politics, you would think this would be a settled question. But after his near assassination in Pennsylvania, the Republican National Convention teased that the former president was going to unveil a softer, changed version of himself. He would recast his acceptance speech to emphasize “unity,” a word that, in four days of TV coverage, was endlessly parroted and rarely defined.Mr. Trump turned himself into his own surprise guest. Would the final night of the convention portray him as a bellicose, combative alpha male, or as a sensitive late convert to empathy and self-reflection?The answer was: Yes, and yes. The night began with a pageant of hypermasculinity, with musclemen and ripped garments. It led to Mr. Trump’s taking the stage with a new, somber voice as he recounted his brush with death. Then, over the course of a digressive hour-and-a-half speech, he somehow changed back before our eyes.First came The Man Show. The introductory hours of the night featured a rotation of admirers, heavily male, who cited Mr. Trump’s close call and defiant survival as testimony to his macho fighting spirit.This is what male identity politics looks like. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News personality — who has embraced the alt-right angst over testosterone levels — spoke off the cuff, suggesting that the shooting established Mr. Trump as a leader on a biological level. “A leader is the bravest man,” Mr. Carlson said. “This is a law of nature.” Kid Rock retooled his rap-metal anthem “American Bad Ass,” exhorting the delegates to throw up their fists and “Say fight! Fight! Say Trump! Trump!” Dana White, the beefy chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, introduced Mr. Trump.But the splashiest spectacle brought Hulkamania to Milwaukee. Terry G. Bollea, the handlebar-mustached wrestler who performs as Hulk Hogan, took the stage in character to praise “my hero, that gladiator,” working himself into a rage over the attempt on Mr. Trump’s life and ripping open his shirt to expose a “TRUMP-VANCE” tank top.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Hello, Dolly!’ Review: Imelda Staunton Has the Wow, Wow, Wow Factor

    The veteran British actress shines in a new revival that is the musical theater highlight of the West End summer.Love affairs in the theater take different forms — between characters onstage, of course, but also between a performer and the public.In a new London revival of “Hello, Dolly!,” the leading lady, Imelda Staunton, grips the audience from the beginning and holds them in a shared embrace throughout. Ths show is the musical theater event of the West End summer, running at the London Palladium, through Sept. 14.“Hello, Dolly!” has always been a star vehicle. Carol Channing first played the matchmaking Dolly Gallagher Levi on Broadway in 1964 and made it her signature part, returning to the role of the deliciously meddlesome widow throughout her storied career. The others to take it on have included Pearl Bailey, Ethel Merman, Bette Midler and, on film, Barbra Streisand. This production, indeed, owes quite a bit to the 1969 movie, the choice of opening song (“Just Leave Everything to Me”) included.But Staunton — who on Wednesday received an Emmy nomination for her performance as Queen Elizabeth II in “The Crown” — is probably the only English performer who can command as much respect in the role as those American ladies. She occupies a special place in British playgoers’ hearts, which this production, directed by Dominic Cooke’, taps into directly. Her acquaintance with the classics — Albee, Chekhov, Sondheim — lends a gravity to the performance, so that we understand Dolly as a fully realized person, pain and all, and not just a figure of fun.Staunton plays Dolly Gallagher Levi, a widow who has taken on the role of matchmaker in her community.Manuel HarlanWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    At ‘Slave Play’ in London, a ‘Black Out’ Night Emerges From Controversy

    Critics slammed the idea of “restricting audiences on the basis of race,” but at a recent performance, Black spectators praised producers for creating a safe space.Elaine Grant was pleased with the scene unfolding outside the Noël Coward Theater in London on Wednesday night.Unlike most nights at the theater in the West End, there was a sea of majority Black faces laughing and jovially chatting in a line that snaked around the block before a performance of Jeremy O. Harris’s “Slave Play.”Grant, who works in the arts, had organized a group of more than 100 people, mostly Black women, to see the show. “A lot of the people that I work with don’t necessarily go to the theater a lot,” she said, and so it was important for them to be in a space where they could feel safe experiencing a range of emotion.This was a “Black Out” performance, an idea Harris first announced for his play’s Broadway 2019 run, in which he invites Black audience members to attend a specific performance, to experience and discuss art away from the white gaze. Joaquina Kalukango, an actress in the show’s New York run, told the Times in 2020 that she felt on those nights that she was performing to an audience “that fully understood the story and understood where these characters were coming from.”In London, the mood on the theater steps was upbeat and there seemed little concern that when this “Slave Play” transfer — including two Black Out performances — was announced in February, it drew the wrath of some British commentators, and got caught up in ongoing debates over race in British cultural institutions. Even the office of the prime minister at the time, Rishi Sunak, chimed in, saying, “restricting audiences on the basis of race would be wrong and divisive.”Harris responded to the widespread criticism on social media, addressing what he called a “moral panic” among parts of the British public.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More