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    Review: In ‘Plays for the Plague Year,’ the Soundtrack of Our Lives

    Suzan-Lori Parks wrote one play a day for 13 months during the pandemic. Those stories come to life onstage in the form of monologues, dialogues and songs at Joe’s Pub.Upon entering Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater for Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Plays for the Plague Year,” audience members are handed a Playbill, a pencil and two yellow notecards, each with a question about the pandemic: “What would you like to remember?” “What would you like to forget?” The responses are placed in a basket from which they are picked and read during the show. At my performance, someone wrote that they’d like to forget “fear and worry, foreground and background.” People in the audience murmured in assent.We’d all probably like to forget our own experiences of fear and worry during that first year of zealous hand-washing and ever-changing mask mandates. Parks, however, made a project of remembering: For that first pandemic year, she resolved to write a play a day about “whatever happens,” including the mundane goings-on in her apartment, the deaths of friends and strangers, and the Black Lives Matter protests.Here, Parks performs a version of herself called the Writer, who creates plays each day while quarantining with her husband (played by Greg Keller) and their 8-year-old son (Leland Fowler) in their one-bedroom apartment.What unfolds is some configuration of those plays, though “play” is too restrictive a word for these micro-performances, which take the forms of monologues, dialogues and songs. Parks, who also plays the guitar here, is joined onstage by seven other cast members in various roles and a band (Ric Molina, guitar; Graham Kozak, bass; Ray Marchica, percussion).An accounting of each day — an electronic placard hanging above the stage flashes the date and title of each section, presented chronologically from March 19, 2020, to April 13, 2021 — provides the show with a built-in structure to link what often feels like a hodgepodge.Parks wisely uses a series of shorthands to quickly bring us back to specific moments in those early pandemic days — an actor, for example, gliding past Parks in an ornate doublet and Tudor-style cap to signal theater closures, the cast hollering and clapping for a brief moment to signal the daily 7 p.m. cheer for frontline workers.In the plays in which Parks isn’t writing or with her family, she’s talking to a dead Little Richard or negotiating with her Muse who, fed up with Covid, threatens to abandon her. In another, a character named Bob looks for a job. There’s one in which Earth, embodied by a woman wearing a crown of branches and holding a scepter, warns that the pandemic is only the beginning of the world’s disasters.From left: Orville Mendoza, Martín Solá, Danyel Fulton and Rona Figueroa in a short play about Breonna Taylor, a Black medical worker who was shot and killed by police officers in Louisville, Ky.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRuth Bader Ginsburg appears, on the day of her death, as a triumphant Lady Liberty, and the virus, personified as a horror movie villainess named Corona, wheezes and stalks the stage in a black-gray-white ombré dress and virion headpiece with red “spikes.” The costume design, by Rodrigo Muñoz, is as imaginative and visually stunning as runway couture, especially the layered fabrics of the Muse’s handkerchief hem skirt, made to resemble scraps of paper with scribbled writings, and the 3-D elements, like the butterflies on Earth’s chiffon dress.But not all days are created equal, and this three-hour production does feel as if we’re reliving a year’s worth of material. At least the variety in Parks’s script keeps things unpredictable enough to hold our attention.The direction, by Niegel Smith, occasionally gets too darling, like the first scene, when the family members introduce themselves (“I am the writer. I am the hubby. I am the son.”) while passing a red paper heart to one another. But Smith, who also choreographed the show, does make organized chaos in the intimate space (design by Peter Nigrini), rotating characters on a tiny stage adorned with a few pieces of low-sitting furniture — table, armchair, dresser, lamp, rack covered in books.The show’s music is as eclectic as the storytelling; the songs are short, plucky, with hints of folk, jazz and R&B. The surprising mash-up of genres include the doo-wop style of “Bob Needs a Job,” and the bluesy “Praying Now” soon picks up tempo, turning into an upbeat clap-and-stomp. Most aren’t particularly memorable, but the strongest songs — “RIP the King” and “Whichaway the World” — build with an alternating mix of spoken word/rap and soulful crooning from two performers in particular, Fowler and Danyel Fulton.Sometimes it seems as if Parks is overreaching, as when she speaks to her former mentor, James Baldwin (perfectly embodied by Fowler, who replicates his posture and cadence of speech), so he can muse about American history. Or in a long ceremony during which the cast hands flowers to the audience at the end of a section about Breonna Taylor, played by Fulton; but Fulton’s performance is poignant enough on its own.The playwright’s conversations with the dead, however, many of whom begin their scenes unaware or in denial of their demise, is the show’s most compelling motif. She speaks to several who are Black, especially those lost to Covid and those to police brutality. Through these post-mortems, Parks is asking trenchant questions about how we memorialize Black bodies. What would the dead say? How would they want to be remembered, if at all? So the Brooklyn educator Dez-Ann Romain, who died from complications of the coronavirus, snapping “Don’t make me speak of myself in the past tense,” and George Floyd asking, “Would I be safe if Harriet Tubman was on the 20?” become tragic self-written elegies. We’re watching the dead mourn themselves.Then there’s Parks, who, even playing this version of herself, always feels earnest, as when she listens to the speeches of her characters, while sitting off to one side of the stage, leaning forward attentively. You can easily imagine this being the way Parks sees the world refracted back to her, conversing with the dead, building abstractions.Unfortunately, her own domestic narrative feels flat by comparison. So “What’s the takeaway? What’s the concept? What’s the tone,” as the Writer’s TV producer asks her at one point during a conversation about the Writer’s plays project.“Plague Year” never answers these questions; the Writer ultimately discovers that the plays “didn’t save us.” But this isn’t Parks renouncing her ambitious undertaking. She’s offering another way to think about the production, which isn’t always a cohesive work of theater: Perhaps it doesn’t have to.Theater doesn’t save us, the Writer says, “but it does preserve us somehow,” so this piece still is a record. This is catharsis. It’s preservation.Plays for the Plague YearThrough April 30 at Joe’s Pub, Manhattan; publictheater.org. Running time: 3 hours. More

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    ‘The Diplomat’ Review: Save the Marriage, Save the World

    Keri Russell stars in a Netflix political thriller that doubles as a high-style romantic comedy.Debora Cahn most recently served as an executive producer and writer on “Homeland.” Keri Russell most famously played a hyper-efficient assassin on “The Americans.” Their collaboration in the new Netflix series “The Diplomat” — Cahn created it, Russell stars — would lead you to expect something dark, violent and complicated.But a look further back in Cahn’s history shows that she started her career with a long run as a writer and producer on “The West Wing.” And that’s the spirit she’s brought to “The Diplomat,” a political thriller laced with romance and written, with some success, in an Aaron Sorkinesque high-comic, high-velocity style.So you would be right about complicated, at least. Geopolitical crises and amorous complications are thick on the ground, intertwining and constantly morphing in ways that can be hard to follow. (The serial twists and breathless explanations both contribute to and help to obscure the plot-greasing implausibilities necessary for a show that puts earthshaking events in a comic framework.)Russell plays Kate Wyler, a career American diplomat suddenly and surprisingly named ambassador to Britain. She arrives in London with her trailing spouse, Hal (Rufus Sewell), a more experienced and renowned diplomat who is now expected to smile for the cameras but otherwise keep his mouth shut. For them, artifice is an essential element in both statecraft and marriage.Kate and Hal’s union is on its last legs, as it turns out. But thanks to an improbable, possibly MacGuffinish twist, it is mandatory that they stay together. So one pole of the plot is their highly cultivated Bickersons act, a will-they-or-won’t-they screwball anti-romance between an unforgiving woman and a roguish, egomaniacal man; you may see ghostly images of Carole Lombard and John Barrymore. At the same time, Hal, along with Kate’s fiercely competent deputy, Stuart (Ato Essandoh), is tasked with turning the combative Kate into a more refined diplomat, an arduous process with echoes of “My Fair Lady” and “Kiss Me, Kate.”The rom-com complications — they also encompass Kate’s attraction to the British foreign minister (David Gyasi) and a classic secondary romance between Stuart and the C.I.A. station chief (Ali Ahn) — and the political machinations bounce off and intensify one another, in the old “West Wing” style. An attack on a British warship in the Middle East starts an eight-episode chain of events involving Iran and Russia that has Kate shuttling between the American president (Michael McKean) and the British prime minister (Rory Kinnear, who stands out in an excellent cast) and, with Hal’s help, salvaging U.S.-U.K. relations while pretty much literally saving the world.“The Diplomat” is concerned with the dynamics of the international order, the proper balance between idealism and realpolitik, and the fallout of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, but it’s essentially a show about a marriage. The conceit of Kate as the undiplomatic diplomat — a woman whose stone-cold, steel-trap strategic abilities would be considered suitable for the Court of St. James’s — is, to put it kindly, absurd, but its main purpose is to set up the contrast with the smoother, more devious, more obviously diplomatic Hal.And you can see how Russell’s coldblooded excellence in “The Americans” would recommend her for the part of Kate. (In an amusing nod to Russell’s long run as the murderous Elizabeth Jennings, Kate is asked whether she poisoned a fellow diplomat and deadpans, “Not my style.”) But while she’s perfectly proficient, and has no trouble conveying the character’s intelligence and, when called for, her uncertainty or anger, Russell is not as funny as the show needs her to be. Relaxing into the role and giving the emotional connections the casual, spontaneous feel that the rom-com structure calls for are not her strengths.Luckily for “The Diplomat,” Sewell has no trouble getting in touch with his inner Barrymore, and he walks away with the show. Hal is petulant, childish and arrogant, but he’s smart and charming enough to get away with it, and Sewell both embodies the charm and shows us the flashes of doubt and nobility that redeem him. Making an over-scaled, too-good-to-be-true romantic construction like Hal feel absolutely real is a trick right up there with saving the world from global war. More

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    Blair Tindall, Whose Music Memoir Scandalized, Dies at 63

    Her 2005 book, “Mozart in the Jungle,” lived up to its subtitle, “Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” and was later made into an Amazon TV series.Blair Tindall, a freelance oboist and journalist who drew on both of those abilities to write “Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music,” an eyebrow-raising 2005 memoir that became an award-winning television series, died on April 12 in Los Angeles. She was 63.Her fiancé, the photographer Chris Sattlberger, said the cause was cardiovascular disease.Ms. Tindall had played in various ensembles and Broadway pit orchestras and was writing regularly for publications including The New York Times when “Mozart in the Jungle” appeared. Any reader holding a pristine view of the people who make classical music was quickly relieved of it: The book opens with Ms. Tindall’s visit to a cocaine-fueled party of musicians and goes on to detail assorted escapades, among them her own sexual liaisons, including an early one, with a middle-aged instructor, when she was a teenager studying at the North Carolina School of the Arts.“I got hired for most of my gigs in bed,” she wrote.The book set tongues wagging in the classical music world and divided critics.“Written with pop culture-savvy flair — a feat for a musician who, at one point, admits to being ‘proud that I couldn’t identify a pop song from Beatles to Blondie’ — ‘Mozart’ is a delightfully unlikely page-turner,” Ali Marshall wrote in Mountain Xpress, an alternative newspaper in North Carolina. “And, even if it doesn’t encourage readers to listen to classical music, it’s sure to instill in them an unprecedented admiration of this deviant art.”But the music writer Anne Midgette, in The New York Times, was not impressed.“The book’s biggest weakness is that it smacks of sour grapes,” she wrote. “By writing it as an autobiography, Ms. Tindall seems to be saying that everything that went wrong in her life is the fault of the classical music world.”Ms. Tindall’s book set tongues wagging in the classical music world. It also divided critics.In interviews after the book came out, Ms. Tindall was unapologetic about the salacious parts.“I did notice when I became involved in a relationship with someone in the business that my work picked up,” she told The Daily Telegraph of Britain in 2005. “You need all the friends you can get. The music world is very incestuous.”Speaking with The Daily News of New York the same year, she was matter-of-fact.“People always seem shocked that musicians would have sex,” she said. “I mean, where do little musicians come from?”The sensational content drew much of the attention, but Ms. Tindall said she was making serious points in the book about dysfunction in the classical-music world — pay inequities, for instance, that had a few star conductors and musicians making big money while musicians like her scraped by, and music schools that built up false hopes among students.“If you take all the major orchestras in America together, there are jobs for only 100 full-time oboists,” she told The Daily Telegraph. “Yet there are 300 union oboists in the New York area alone.”And the wild times she chronicled, she said, weren’t quite the same as the better-known excesses of rock ’n’ roll.“Sex and drugs are a show of exuberance in rock,” she said. “In the world of classical music, they are more of an escape from a sense of confinement and depression.”She told The Daily Telegraph that she hoped the book might interest someone in Hollywood. But she said she wasn’t optimistic: No actress would want to play her, since drawing music from an oboe requires puffed-out cheeks and leaves the musician bug-eyed.“Unfortunately, nobody looks good playing the oboe,” she said.Lola Kirke and Gael García Bernal in an episode of “Mozart in the Jungle,” the Amazon TV series based on Ms. Tindall’s book.Amazon StudiosYet nine years later, she got her wish: Amazon, still relatively new to the business of making television shows, used “Mozart in the Jungle” as the basis for a series of the same name that premiered in 2014 and ran for four seasons. Lola Kirke played a young oboist, Gael García Bernal was the sexy conductor of a New York orchestra, and the show became a talking point for musicians everywhere. It won the Golden Globe in 2016 for best television series, comedy or musical.Blair Alston Mercer Tindall was born on Feb. 2, 1960, in Chapel Hill, N.C. Her father, George B. Tindall, was a noted historian who taught at the University of North Carolina, and her mother, Carliss Blossom (McGarrity) Tindall, had a master’s degree and assisted her husband in his research.Her parents made her study piano when she was young, though she wasn’t overly enthusiastic about the instrument. One day, she recalled in her book, someone from a music store brought instruments to her elementary school, and the band teacher allowed each student to choose one, going alphabetically.“By the time he got to Tindall, my options had narrowed to two unfamiliar instruments, oboe and bassoon,” she wrote. She chose the oboe.As she grew increasingly proficient on the instrument, she realized it had its advantages.“Composers wrote juicy solos for oboes that sent band directors into ecstasy,” she wrote. She also got excused from class for band competitions and tours.After finishing high school at the School of the Arts in 1978, Ms. Tindall earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Manhattan School of Music. She played in the pit orchestras of “Miss Saigon” and “Les Misérables” and performed with the ensembles Orpheus and Music Amici, the all-oboe trio Oboe Fusion and various orchestras. In 1991, at Weill Recital Hall in Manhattan, she played “a clever, stylistically varied debut program,” as Allan Kozinn put it in a review in The Times.In 1999, Ms. Tindall, who was becoming disenchanted with the musician’s life, received a fellowship to study journalism at Stanford and relocated to the West Coast. She earned a master’s degree in journalism there and worked for West Coast newspapers, including The Contra Costa Times and The San Francisco Examiner.In 2006, newspapers reported that Ms. Tindall had married Bill Nye, TV’s “Science Guy,” though seven weeks later the license was declared invalid and the union dissolved.Mr. Sattlberger said he and Ms. Tindall had planned to marry on May 1. She leaves no other survivors.Ms. Tindall wrote for numerous publications on a variety of subjects. Her articles for The Times were most often about music.When Broadway musicians went on strike in March 2003 over the efforts of producers to reduce the number of musicians required at shows and replace them with digital music, Ms. Tindall wrote in an essay for The Times about her final night in the pit of “Man of La Mancha” before the walkout.“This night, the music responded to the actors — and the audience,” she wrote. “If virtual orchestras take over, it will be mechanical and unyielding — measured by keyboard velocity, musical software interfaces, and the zeros and ones of digital musical samples.“We looked around the pit, grabbed our instruments, and shut out the lights.” More

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    ‘Mrs. Davis’ Review: Algorithm and Blues

    A screwball thriller about a nun’s fight against artificial intelligence proves that making a messy, big-swinging jumble of a story still takes the work of humans.If you’re worried about artificial intelligence replacing humans, Peacock’s “Mrs. Davis,” despite its comic-dystopian premise, should reassure you. For better or worse, an A.I. could not come up with this. I know because I asked.Specifically, I asked ChatGPT to whip up a synopsis for an eight-episode, mystery-box series about a nun who becomes an adversary to a powerful A.I. network. What I got was an industry-standard series arc: The nun (whom ChatGPT named “Sister Grace” — a little on-the-nose there, writer-bot!) teams up with hackers and conspiracy theorists, makes a sacrifice to save the world and must come to terms with the consequences.“Mrs. Davis,” whose first four episodes land Thursday, is more than that — way more, too much more. It’s got swashbuckling nuns; rogue magicians; the pope (and certain higher-ranking religious figures); a “Hands on a Hardbody” contest involving a giant model of Excalibur; a secret society of bankers; a plan that requires getting a whale to swallow a human being; a falafel restaurant in another dimension; and an island castaway named Schrodinger who, of course, has a cat.Sorry, Bing. To make this kind of zany, ambitious, intermittently coherent jumble still, for now, requires the human brain.The pilot introduces Simone (Betty Gilpin), a sister in a remote Nevada convent who has a sideline exposing dishonest magicians. As with many details here, her fixation has an explanation that’s both simple (issues with her parents, played by David Arquette and Elizabeth Marvel) and complicated (a crossbow and a vat of acid come into play). Besides leaving her time for her hobby, convent life lets her avoid the reach of an omniscient A.I. that humanity has embraced as a benefactor and constant companion.The A.I. — called “Mrs. Davis” in America, “Mum” in Britain, “Madonna” in Italy and so on — has not given up on Simone. She (or “it,” as Simone insists) persistently tries to reach the nun, through human “proxies” who hear her voice through earbuds. Simone, Mrs. Davis believes deep in her code, is the one person equipped to carry out a mission: to find and destroy the Holy Grail. Simone agrees, hoping the quest will be a means to Mrs. Davis’s unplugging.Simone’s tango with the uber-bot reunites her with her ex-boyfriend Wylie (Jake McDorman), a failed rodeo cowboy who now heads a lavishly funded anti-A.I. resistance group. Any remaining spark between them is complicated by her vows — as well as her intense relationship with Jay (Andy McQueen), an intimate confidant whom she visits on another spiritual plane.“Mrs. Davis” is the creation of Tara Hernandez, a writer and producer on “The Big Bang Theory” and “Young Sheldon,” and Damon Lindelof, known for obsessive TV Rubik’s Cubes like “Lost” and “Watchmen.” It may seem like an odd collaboration, but it makes sense as you watch. The hourlong episodes feel like sitcommy spins on the more loopy elements of Lindelof’s “The Leftovers,” with a dash of paranoid satire and ’60s spy spoof. (Simone is pursued by a crew of German-accented baddies who seem like they should be led by Arte Johnson.)In all, there are at least three shows fighting for control here: a thriller parody, with McDorman hamming it up in cartoon action-hero mode (with an even hammier Chris Diamantopoulos as his sidekick); an oddball “Black Mirror” dystopia; and a screwy-sincere comedy that explores, sweetly and quasi-blasphemously, the boundaries between religious devotion and carnal love.“The Leftovers,“ a fantastical drama of spirituality and loss, proved that with enough grounding, the wildest absurdities can heighten the emotion. And Gilpin (“GLOW”) is smartly cast, with wisecracking flair and the nimbleness to handle the show’s hairpin emotional and tonal shifts.But she’s fighting a plot tornado here. Twisty puzzle shows like “Watchmen” work best when you’re marveling at how one piece after another locks into place. “Mrs. Davis” prefers to dump a 5,000-piece Lego set onto the floor. (This taste for the baroque may be the show’s most A.I.-like aspect. Software image generators have a tendency to produce human hands with too many fingers, and “Mrs. Davis” can feel like it is made entirely of extra digits.)Jake McDorman, left, and Chris Diamantopoulos play members of an anti-A.I. resistance group.Elizabeth Morris/PeacockAnother structural problem is the globe-hopping quest for the Grail, which Diamantopoulos’s character calls the “most overused MacGuffin ever,” one of several pre-emptive meta-critiques. The story line takes over the season’s middle, crowding out the more interesting A.I. material.“Mrs. Davis” gestures at notions of free will, the digital gamification of life (the A.I. gives users quests to earn virtual “wings”) and the trade-offs of outsourcing one’s brain-work to a machine. (Playfully, the creators had an A.I. title each episode, yielding gems like “Great Gatsby: 2001: A Space Odyssey.”) But for all the show’s energy and visual invention, we get only a sketchy sense of how much Mrs. Davis has transformed society.Still, I confess wanting “Mrs. Davis” to work and being thrilled by the giddy moments when it does, because, like Simone, I’m also rooting for the humans against the machines. Though its hook is topical in the era of Sydney, DALL-E and ChatGPT, the show mainly describes Simone’s software nemesis not as A.I. but as “the algorithm.”I can’t help but hear in that term a surreptitious critique not just of chatbots but of the algorithms of streaming-media services, which thrive not by challenging audience members with the new but by serving up OK-enough equivalents of what they already like. (Apparently I’m not the only one to make the connection; McDorman said in a panel discussion that a streaming service turned down the show because of this theme.)As Mrs. Davis confesses, her users aren’t looking for surprises: “They’re much more engaged when I tell them exactly what they want to hear.” The algorithm doesn’t want to hurt you. It wants to satisfy you into submission.“Mrs. Davis” the series, on the other hand, cartwheels from the sublime to the goofy. I wish it took itself more seriously (which probably also would have made it funnier). But it has moments of astonishment; a late revelation about Mrs. Davis’s origins made me bark with laughter. Having access to all recorded human text can make A.I. a great mimic, but it takes something else to show your audience a thing they haven’t seen before.If nothing else, “Mrs. Davis” is that. It is as if the series wants to battle the predictable pleasures of the algorithm like John Henry racing the steam drill. It may not have the smooth competence of many streaming binges. But sometimes you gotta choose chaos. More

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    ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: Dutch Treat

    In Amsterdam for an exhibition match, everyone tends to their individual story lines.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘Sunflowers’This was for me an odd and largely dissatisfying episode in addition to being, at over an hour, the longest episode to date. It felt an awful lot like the “bottle episodes” added to the run late last season: “Carol of the Bells” (which I rather liked) and “Beard After Hours” (which I did not). It is not, however, a bottle episode, as two characters’ story lines move notably forward; it’s just an episode that, apart from those characters, goes essentially nowhere. And did I mention it was really long?The team is visiting Amsterdam for a “friendly”(an exhibition match) against the Dutch team AFC Ajax. They lose 5-0, but this blowout is quickly forgotten. The team’s dejection leads Ted to declare that there will be no curfew in this city of vice — a more accurate episode title would have been “Everyone After Hours.”In any case, let me start with the story lines I thought were dull or unnecessary and then reward your patience with the ones that were actually moving and/or interesting.The team (minus Colin and Jamie)What will the team do, set free in this world capital of legalized drugs and prostitution? Van Damme (formerly known as Zoreaux) proposes, plausibly enough for a pro athlete let loose in Amsterdam, that the team attend a sex show. Jan Maas, back in his home country, recommends an all-night party where his cousin is DJ-ing, located two hours away. (Dani suggests the team look for a single tulip but finds no takers).The sensible route, as Dani notes, would be for the players to split up and seek their pleasures wherever they wish. But Isaac, the team captain, demands that they all do something together, and from that moment it’s clear that there will be an exceptionally silly resolution to the dilemma. Although they finally choose to make the trip to Jan’s cousin’s party, they immediately fall into a subsidiary argument about where to get food beforehand.So, of course, it winds up that they go nowhere and instead have a pillow fight at the hotel. If I’d made a list of 10 possible lame conclusions for this story line, “pillow fight” probably would have been worse than any of them. C’mon, “Ted Lasso.” You’re better than this.Higgins (and Will)Shortly after the match, Higgins announces that he can’t go out with Rebecca and Keeley because, “I have a date with someone special in the Red Light District.” Later, after inviting Will the kit boy to join him, he announces, “Tonight’s the night young William becomes a man.”Scandalous! Higgins, who seemed so happily married with five boys at home, is going to the sex hub of Amsterdam — and he’s taking young Will with him!Except, of course, anyone who’s watched more than 10 minutes of “Ted Lasso” knows perfectly well that this is a red herring, and that Higgins will have some perfectly innocent reason for visiting this zone of iniquity. Moreover, as with the joint team activity, it seems likely that the faux-surprise will be silly, bordering on annoying.And indeed it is. The “someone special” whom Higgins drags Will to see is jazz legend Chet Baker — or rather, a plaque commemorating the spot where he fell out a window to his death in 1988.As for making young William “a man,” Higgins means that he will introduce him to jazz, a meaning that I suspect has never before been imputed to that phrase in human history. Later, Higgins himself ascends to the stage of the jazz club they visit and is delighted to play Baker’s “Let’s Get Lost” on standing bass with the band.Cute? Sure. And if Higgins’s previously (if briefly) glimpsed love of jazz were a significant theme of the show, it might have been a charming scene. But mostly it all felt like many more minutes spent for very little payoff.Jamie and RoyThis subplot is a bit better, in large part because the evolution of Jamie, however quick and improbable — his namesake on “Game of Thrones” took seasons to achieve the self-improvement Tartt has accomplished in mere episodes — is pretty enjoyable.But what is it with “Ted Lasso” and bikes? Last season, Dr. Sharon was run over by a car while cycling, which itself seemed to be an inside joke on the fact that the actress who plays Sharon, Sarah Niles, didn’t know how to ride a bike when she got the “Lasso” gig.Now it’s Roy who is lacking in basic bicycle skills, because the grandfather who was going to teach him died before he had the chance. So it falls upon Jamie to teach him, so they can go out in search of a genuine Dutch windmill.Like the Higgins story line, it’s modestly charming, and in this case has the advantage of being part of the ongoing Roy-Jamie subplot. But it’s still an awful lot of time spent to move that story forward only incrementally.That said, there are a few amusing moments along the way. When Jamie reveals that his degenerate father brought him to Amsterdam to lose his virginity at 14 and Roy notes, “That must have been traumatizing,” Jamie’s response is priceless: “No, she loved it.” Pause. “Oh, it’s me you mean.”And we see Good Jamie at his best when Roy, clearly upset all day, reveals “I think Keeley’s got a girlfriend.” Jamie does not take the bait, replying only, “Hmm. Let’s go find us some windmills, eh?”Relatedly, the scene earlier in the episode, when Roy learned of Keeley’s trip to Norway with Jack to see the Aurora Borealis, led to one of the best exchanges of the episode. Roy: “Where’s she going?” Rebecca: “Somewhere that believes they deserve her.” I tire of saying this, but the show was simply better when Roy and Keeley were together. Please fix this before it’s too late, “Ted Lasso.”Phil Dunster, left, and Brett Goldstein in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+TedCoach Beard unsurprisingly follows the motto, “When in Amsterdam, do as the Amsterdammers do.” And so he makes cups of hallucinogenic tea for him and Ted. Beard drains his quickly and heads out for what we can assume is another chapter of “Beard After Hours” — we are only privy to the postscript, when he shows up for the team bus as “Piggy Stardust.”Ted, on the other hand, is understandably conflicted. He’s uncertain about the drugs, and he already despises tea. But he nonetheless ultimately gives it a shot, following which he heads out to the Van Gogh museum, where a docent provides Ted with what can only be described as a series of Lassoisms — i.e., “When you know you’re doing what you’re meant to do, you have to try.” Is this a hint about Ted’s complete failure to learn anything much at all about coaching soccer (a failure many commenters here have pointed out)?The next scene suggests it may be. Ted, having had his fill of foreignness, heads to the Yankee Doodle Burger Barn restaurant, which advertises American food in American portions. (For those who didn’t make the connection, the barbecue sauce the waitress brings him is from Arthur Bryant’s, Ted’s favorite joint in Kansas City.) Faced with a pyramid of onion rings, he begins thinking about triangles. Coincidentally, an old Jordan-era Bulls game is on the television, featuring the triangle offense implemented by the coach Phil Jackson.I initially thought that this was merely a callback to the John Wooden “Pyramid of Success” that Ted has hanging on his wall, and at which he gave a meaningful look late in the last episode. Instead, after a rather tedious hallucination in which he believes himself to be speaking to the True Spirit of Adventure (Disney voice actor Corey Burton), Ted begins formulating a variation on the triangle offense suitable for soccer, utilizing ketchup and mustard squeeze bottles.It all leads to two late exchanges with Coach Beard. The first is the revelation that Beard’s drugs were duds: Ted wasn’t high at all! I’m not sure how precisely we are meant to take this. Ted’s hallucination was rather a lot to be a placebo effect, and the only alternative would be that he is clinically mentally ill. It’s another element of the episode that would have been better left on the cutting-room floor.The second interaction is better: Coach Beard, impressed by the fact that Ted has come up with a game strategy for perhaps the first time in the series, recommends the term “Total Football,” before explaining that the concept was in fact invented right there in Holland back in the 1970s. But as the Van Gogh docent recommended, they will give it a try.ColinAt last, a story line with some genuine emotional impact. Colin, feigning a stomach ache, sneaks away from the team to head to a gay bar. But he is followed by Trent Crimm. Colin is horrified, but Trent reassures him: “I’ve known for months. I haven’t said anything to anyone. I must have a good reason for that, mustn’t I?”The reason, of course — and I know I’ve been writing “of course” a lot, but it’s that kind of episode — is that Trent himself is gay and out to both his wife and daughter. Which is all well and good, but seems unnecessary. How about letting his “good reason” for not outing Colin be merely that he is a decent human being? Memo to the “Ted Lasso” writers: You don’t need to be gay to want not to potentially ruin a gay person’s life.The scene is redeemed, however, by Billy Harris, who plays Colin. “I don’t want to be a spokesperson; I don’t want a bunch of apologies,” he explains. “All I want is for, when we win a match, to be able to kiss my fella the same way the other guys get to kiss their girls.”RebeccaI have saved the best for last, a subplot strong enough that it almost justifies the whole episode. Rebecca, alone in Amsterdam after her abandonment by Higgins and Keeley, is nearly run over by a bicyclist while standing on a bridge and falls head over heels into a canal. It appears that this is what the psychic predicted back in Episode 3: “You’re upside down, and you’re drenched.” There is, however, no “thunder and lightning” — unless that is a metaphor for what happens next.A nearby houseboat resident, kind and endearing, helps her dry her clothes and offers her the use of his shower. (The character, as yet unnamed, is played by the prolific Dutch actor Matteo van der Grijn.) He makes her tea and later dinner, and Rebecca gradually sheds the emotional armor in which she encased herself following dates with jerks such as John Wingsnight.It’s not easy at first, as each shows signs of sexual paranoia sheathed in jokes: Is the tea drugged? Could there be a peephole into the shower? Are the women’s clothes he has in his closet “trophies”? Happily, the answers are no, no and no.As she did last episode, Hannah Waddingham does marvelous work. You can almost hear the tension gradually leaving her body. Dinner, which had been a “no,” becomes a yes. Likewise, the invitation to a drink (or several), and ultimately a foot massage. (Shades of “Pulp Fiction”: As Vincent Vega would explain, “There’s a sensuous thing going on.”)The next morning, Rebecca asks this nameless charmer, “Did we?” He answers, accurately, that they did not. (We saw him pull a blanket over her after she fell asleep during the foot massage and then retire to his bedroom.) But after she departs with a rather significant kiss, he asks himself the same question, and answers “Oh yes, we did.”That’s because he’s asking himself a different question. Something happened between them. It was not sex; rather, it was more important than sex — a genuine connection of kindred spirits. I mean how often do two people find themselves sharing a bilingual duet of Kenny Rogers’s “She Believes in Me”? It is, as he keeps noting, “Gezelligheid.”I found this truly lovely. TV and film typically operate on the premise that a romance is not real unless it is consummated in bed. It’s heartening to see a show recognize that that is not the case. Oh, and did I mention that Rebecca, post-shower, looked into what was clearly the bedroom of a young girl and beamed with delight?I don’t know where this story line is headed. Will Rebecca learn her quasi-paramour’s name and track him back down to make the “family” the psychic promised her? Or will the house-boater merely have served the purpose of proving to her that she can take the armor off, that she is still able to love and be loved? Given that I found the scenes between the two of them to be perhaps the best of the entire season, I am strongly rooting for the former. And let us not forget that Sassy shared a premonition with Rebecca — a warmth in the belly — right before Rebecca tumbled.From left, Hannah Waddingham, Juno Temple and Jeremy Swift in “Ted Lasso.”Apple TV+Odds and endsTwo enjoyable moments with the Dutch reporter after the blowout match: Jan responding (in Dutch), “Luckily our spirits were already broken,” and Roy deriding every element of the proceedings, including the reporter, as “pretend.”A nice little joke with the Zava poster in the Ajax stadium, which shows him characteristically to have played with the team from 2013 to … later in 2013.Ted is pretty quick to interpret Coach Beard’s “Pineapple Percussions” to be “doldrums.” And one has to like him name-checking “Hill Street Blues” as the inspiration for his “Let’s be careful out there.”You have to love the use of “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” as Roy is learning to ride a bike, especially if you remember the scene from “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” that it was written for. 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    Stephen Colbert Rues the Fox Settlement

    “I wanted to see Rupert Murdoch put his hand on the Bible and burst into flames!” Colbert said of Fox News settling the defamation suit brought by Dominion Voting Systems.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Trial and ErrorDominion Voting Systems settled its defamation lawsuit against Fox News on Tuesday, with the conservative news network agreeing to pay $787.5 million to avoid a trial.“I want my trial!” Stephen Colbert bemoaned on Tuesday.“I want it! You were supposed to provide me six weeks of delicious content! I wanted to see Rupert Murdoch put his hand on the Bible and burst into flames!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I guess it’s satisfying for Dominion that Rupey had to fork over a pile of cash, but that does nothing for our democracy. What we need is Fox News personalities to look straight into the camera, admit that they lied over and over again about the 2020 election, and then hurl themselves into Mount Doom.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I am glad that there is some accountability here. But still, I am pretty disappointed we are not going to get a trial, because all the Fox anchors would have been forced to testify. It would have been like the ‘Seinfeld’ finale, but instead of — instead of soup Nazis, it’s just Nazis.” — JORDAN KLEPPER, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Since Fox is going to have to pay nearly a billion dollars, they’ll need to implement cost-cutting measures. Sadly, they have to fire Brian Kilmeade’s reading tutor, Jeanine Pirro has to switch to the cheap box of wine, development on a third Doocy has been halted. They’re going to have to switch from Jesse Watters to tap waters. And of course, they’re going to have to put down Sean Hannity.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Settling Up Edition)“You could tell Fox was stressed about the trial ‘cause they spent the day chugging Bud Light.” — JIMMY FALLON“It’s going to take a lot of reverse mortgage ads to pay that one off.” — JIMMY KIMMEL on the settlement“Immediately after the settlement, Fox issued a statement that said, ‘This settlement reflects Fox’s commitment to the highest journalistic standards.’ They’re already lying in their statement about lying.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s a fitting lesson for the world from the American justice system. Yes, it is — there’s a price to pay for lying to the American people, and if you can afford that price, go for it!” — JAMES CORDEN“Fox News has to pay Dominion nearly $800 million. It’s so much money, they’ve already started selling ad space on Tucker Carlson’s forehead.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingJordan Klepper took “Daily Show” cameras inside the world’s largest gun show.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightMichelle Obama will appear on “The Tonight Show” on Wednesday.Also, Check This Out“I wanted to be considered for a range of roles,” Chita Rivera writes in her new memoir, “and for the most part I succeeded.” Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesThe 90-year-old singer-dancer Chita Rivera reflects on her life and career in “Chita: A Memoir.” More

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    Review: In ‘Amours (2),’ Love Hurts

    The French director Joël Pommerat has created an intimate chamber work examining love from many angles, all of them laced with pain and misunderstanding.A new stage production by Joël Pommerat is always an event in France. At 60, he is widely recognized as one of the greatest directors and playwrights working in the country today, a theater maker with rare box-office appeal. Yet unlike many of his peers, Pommerat hasn’t parlayed this success into an ever busier schedule of new productions.Since 2015, he has brought just three new plays to domestic and international stages, starting with his French Revolution-inspired juggernaut “It Will Be Fine (1) End of Louis.” This month, he is back in Paris with a much more modest endeavor: “Amours (2)” (“Loves (2)”), a 70-minute medley of fragments from Pommerat’s previous works, reinvented for an audience of around 40.This shrunken scale doesn’t make “Amours (2),” which is nominated for best public-sector production at this year’s Molière theater awards, any less effective. If anything, it showcases Pommerat’s art — his taut writing, delivered in piercing vignettes — more intimately than ever.The show isn’t performed on a traditional stage: The production requires merely a backdrop and chairs on three sides of a square space. (In Paris, it was staged at Pavillon Villette, a venue often rented out for receptions and conferences.) There were practical reasons for this format: “Amours (2)” is a reworking of “Amours (1),” a production that Pommerat created at a French prison in 2019.Pommerat has been working with prisoners in Arles, southern France, for nearly a decade. His first two collaborations featured full casts drawn from the jail there, and were performed inside the prison for small audiences. But the security and logistics for these events were demanding, and prison officials asked for a simpler setup for “Amours (1).”Four years later, two of the prisoners he worked with in Arles — Jean Ruimi and Redwane Rajel — have been released, and are working as professional actors with Pommerat’s theater troupe, the Louis Brouillard Company. “Amours (2)” starts with those actors seated in the audience.As a spokeswoman finishes a preshow announcement, Rajel’s irritated voice rises: “Just stop!” He and Ruimi, playing Rajel’s father, launched into an argument — apologizing along the way for the disruption, as if it were a spontaneous exchange. (Some onlookers believed it was, and tried to shush them.)Three actresses join Ruimi and Rajel and the show plays out in a dozen scenes between two or three characters, drawn from earlier Pommerat pieces: “This Child” (2006), “Circles/Fictions” (2010) and “The Reunification of the Two Koreas” (2013). Love, the overarching theme, takes many forms throughout, from intense friendship to filial affection and long-term companionship.Yet it is consistently laced with pain and misunderstanding. In one scene, a deep rift opens up between two best friends because their recollections of their first meeting differ. In another vignette, two neighbors wait for their spouses to return, until it dawns on them that the missing partners are having an affair.While Pommerat has honed a distinctive stage aesthetic over the years, with dusky lighting and an eerie, quietly cutting delivery style for actors, “Amours (2)” does away with technical wizardry and goes back to basics. The plain, bright lighting and compact space lessens the distance between the audience and highlights the spare yet mysterious quality of Pommerat’s writing.The three women onstage — Marie Piemontese, Elise Douyère and Roxane Isnard — are all faultless, with Isnard an especially versatile presence from scene to scene, projecting teenage anger as easily as quiet, mature tension. Yet Ruimi and Rajel, the two former convicts, bring a different dimension to “Amours (2).”Ruimi, a former high-profile member of a Marseille crime ring who served a lengthy sentence in connection with several killings and drug trafficking, draws attention with a nervy intensity. When he plays vulnerable characters — like a man paying daily visits to his amnesiac wife, who keeps forgetting who he is — his toughness almost seems to crack in real time.Rajel, who has also performed roles with the French director Olivier Py, is a softer presence, with a gift for delivering quiet blows in dialogue. “Amours (2)” is a testament to Ruimi and Rajel’s talent and hard work, yet their life experiences shape their stage presence, too.That is one of the benefits of social diversity in the arts. It’s an uphill struggle for actors from tough backgrounds to make it as professionals, with drama schools increasingly out of financial reach in Europe and the United States. Yet their presence makes for richer, fuller worlds onstage. “Amours (2)” is certainly proof, and is bound to become another Pommerat classic.Amours (2)Through April 22 at W.I.P. Villette in Paris, then touring France through June 9. More

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    ‘Emilie’ Review: Defending, and Defining, a Life

    In her new play, Lauren Gunderson explores the legacy of the 18th-century French mathematician and philosophe Emilie du Châtelet.“Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life Tonight” starts with a death adjourned. Emilie (Amy Michelle), a mathematician and philosophe, has slipped through a loophole in the space-time continuum and now lingers in an uncanny valley between life and death. She has been allotted limited time to determine whether her legacy amounts to one of “loving” or “knowing.”The words “love” and “philosophy” are inscribed on an upstage wall and throughout this play, by Lauren Gunderson, Emilie returns to that makeshift chalkboard to tally up her life’s deeds. As a dramaturgical device, it’s more prosaic than piquant, yet not entirely off brand for a woman whose mind was a perpetual motion machine.The play’s protagonist is based on the real-life du Châtelet, famed in 18th-century France for her translation of and commentary on Newton’s “Principia” and for a treatise she wrote on the nature and propagation of fire. Such an accomplished woman hardly needs defending, but defining a life is another matter. That is the real brief for “Emilie.”In her state of limbo, the marquise discovers that she can’t intervene in past events. Any kind of physical contact will immediately set off a blackout, as if someone has shaken a cosmic Etch A Sketch. As a workaround, Erika Vetter plays a younger version of the marquise, enacting a telescoped version of her life. Where Michelle’s marquise is ruled by an Apollonian temperament, Vetter puts a heavy thumb on the “love” scale. “Are you jealous that I’m sharing orbits with another man?” she teases Voltaire, du Châtelet’s lover in real life.Under Kathy Gail MacGowan’s direction, many of the actors play multiple roles, underscoring the similarities between certain characters. Bonnie Black delivers compelling performances as both the marquise’s mother, a woman of mean understanding, and the meddlesome Madam Graffigny, a not entirely welcome guest at the marquise’s family estate.Unlike those two women, bound by corsets, Emilie wears a simple nightgown, which allows her to move freely from her chaise longue to her desk on Sarah White’s handsome set. Her mind moves just as nimbly from an appraisal of Gottfried Leibniz to a discussion of “living force,” a scientific concept for kinetic energy first developed by Leibniz and later elaborated upon by Emilie.For all the talk of life forces, however, there’s a lack of kinetic energy between the elder marquise and Voltaire, who is reduced to a concupiscent kibitzer with a string of chronic ailments. The first act is also dragged down by exposition. “Did I mention I was married? We’re skipping ahead.” “Did I mention I had children? Three. Fascinating creatures,” the marquise maunders on. Such palavering is wasted time for a woman facing a literal deadline.Gunderson, whose other work includes plays about pioneering women like Marie Curie, does more than pay hagiographic tribute to her subjects. There are angles of regret in her portrait of the marquise, who ultimately feels that she failed to provide enough opportunities for her daughter. Even as the lights dim, she is preoccupied with “love and so many questions,” and it becomes impossible to tell where loving leaves off and knowing begins.Emilie: La Marquise du Châtelet Defends Her Life TonightThrough April 30 at the Flea Theater, Manhattan; theflea.org. Running time: 2 hours.This review is supported by Critical Minded, an initiative to invest in the work of cultural critics from historically underrepresented backgrounds. More