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    How Two ‘Yellowjackets’ Actresses Created the Same Character, Decades Apart

    In sharing a role on the Showtime series, Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher took cues from each other about never going for the obvious choice.Juliette Lewis: I first met Sophie in a big office building in Burbank before we shot the pilot [for the TV series “Yellowjackets”]. We were both like, “Oh, it’s you!” She plays a younger version of our character, Natalie, so she studied what I was doing, picking up my heaviness on set. The character is like a loaded weapon — there’s the possibility of danger at any time. Not every actor her age can make you feel that. I had that quality early on — one thing I was recognized for because of “Natural Born Killers” [the 1994 film in which Lewis played a violent fugitive] was that I could scare you. Similarly, Sophie carries herself as a rare bird because she can’t help it.culture banner More

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    Laurie Simmons and Lena Dunham Argue About Earrings, Not Art

    Laurie Simmons: My father was a first-generation American small-town dentist on Long Island with an office off our kitchen and a darkroom in the basement; I’d sit at his feet as he developed his dental X-rays. I see his work ethic in you — you’re relentless in your desire to keep making things — but I’d like to think that came from me, too.Lena Dunham: Well, it did. I’ve seen you go into your studio and come out 12 hours later in the same outfit looking confused, like you don’t know when you went in. Growing up, I spent a lot of time in that space. My favorite thing to do was to look through the loupe at slides on the light box. And then you’d take the red pen and X out the ones that weren’t good.L.S.: I can’t believe you remember that.culture banner More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Chides Fox News for Not Covering Its Lawsuit Settlement

    Kimmel joked the lack of coverage had to be an oversight: “Man, oh, man, is Rupert Murdoch going to be mad when he finds out about this!”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.Willful IgnoranceFox News and Dominion’s settlement continued to dominate the news cycle on Wednesday — everywhere except on Fox News.Jimmy Kimmel joked the omission was surely an “oversight,” saying he was curious “how Fox News was going to cover the story about themselves” and was unable to find anything about it on their home page.“Nothing about the huge payment for lying to their viewers.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Man, oh, man, is Rupert Murdoch going to be mad when he finds out about this!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This massive settlement was the number one story on every single cable news network except one. Take a guess.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Dominion also has a defamation case against Rudy Giuliani, also for $1.3 billion. That’s a lot, man. They are suing Rudy for everything he’s got, which at this point, I believe, is a stolen CVS shopping cart full of empty merlot bottles and a jar full of spare teeth.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Look, I’m happy for Dominion, but Dominion was not the only injured party here. What about, you know, our faith in democracy? There are people who will not trust elections for the rest of their lives, and I have to talk to those people! I’m going to be arguing with them at Trump rallies every four years for the rest of my life. And you know what? I’m not naïve. I didn’t expect this lawsuit to restore this country’s faith in elections or even for me to get a little cashola, no. But I was at least hoping to get a couple of weeks of joy out of seeing Sean Hannity up there on the stand, sweating through his shirt like a beached manatee. Would that have saved democracy? I don’t know. But it would have been nice to see.” — JORDAN KLEPPER, guest host of “The Daily Show”The Punchiest Punchlines (Lie-ability Edition)“This is a huge hit to Fox’s bottom line, although it’s not clear if insurance will cover some of Fox’s liability. Of course, Fox has to have liability insurance to insure their ability to lie.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Although, I don’t know who would insure them. Maybe Frauders: [singing] ‘We are Frauders, insuring Fox was dumb, dumb, dumb!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Two hours after the settlement was announced he can’t confirm how much Fox News paid? If only this Fox News anchor had some source at Fox News!” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to Fox News host Howie Kurtz saying he couldn’t confirm the settlement amountThe Bits Worth WatchingMichelle Obama surprised patrons of a Midtown bookstore with Jimmy Fallon’s help on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightIndie rock trio boygenius will perform on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutFrank Ocean performing at The Parklife Festival in 2017. Ocean has backed out of his second Coachella performance this weekend.Visionhaus#GP/Corbis via Getty ImagesFrank Ocean pulled out of Coachella this weekend, citing a leg injury that led to a disappointing headlining performance last Sunday. More

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    Review: Flying High and Falling Hard in ‘Peter Pan Goes Wrong’

    Aerial mishaps and half-wit actors turn a fantasy classic into a farce. But, like Peter, not all of the jokes land.Six years ago, the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society brought its production of “The Murder at Haversham Manor” from its home base in England to Broadway. Mayhem ensued. Part of the manor collapsed. An actor was poisoned in a prop mix-up. After the leading lady was knocked unconscious by a door, she was replaced by the stage manager; when knocked unconscious as well, he was replaced by a sound technician and eventually, somehow, a grandfather clock.The company has grown up since then, or down, or perhaps just sideways. Rebranded as the Cornley Youth Theater, and for reasons of liability or just sheer embarrassment no longer associated with a polytechnic institute, it has returned to Broadway with its children’s version of J.M. Barrie’s “Peter Pan.” Many of the same disasters happen chez Darling as happened at Haversham Manor, or close variations on them. Let’s just say that Peter doesn’t fly so much as flail while airborne. He, too, is knocked unconscious.And so may you be, with laughter, especially if you did not see the earlier show, which despite its disguise of amateurism was a highly polished production called “The Play That Goes Wrong.” For the Cornley players (like the Cornley Theater) are of course fictitious, part of a tradition of farcical comedies featuring terrible actors that goes back at least to “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” In “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” which opened Wednesday at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, with a game Neil Patrick Harris in a guest role, the jokes and mishaps are still funny, if not quite as magical the second time around.For one thing, if you are already familiar with the Cornley modus maloperandi, you will spot some of the setups the moment you take your seat. That’s assuming the panicked performers, bickering in the auditorium preshow, let you sit.Onstage, the Darlings’ nursery looks as if it were built on a budget not greater than the cost of a ticket, with a rickety three-level bunk bed, a wobbly casement window and wiring that’s already sparking before the lights go down. The “flying operator” credit in the Cornley program inspires little confidence: “Not yet known.” And the turntable that will deliver the children to Neverland looks just as likely to deliver them to the emergency room.Perhaps 500 things go wrong in “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” some of them nearly fulfilling Peter’s prediction in the Barrie play: “To die will be an awfully big adventure.” Peter spends much of the play upside down or in bandages. Nana, the Darlings’ Newfoundland-slash-nursemaid, gets trapped trying to squeeze through a dog door, and has to be chainsawed out. Nor is this the first time the actor playing Nana has faced an onstage disaster. In the Cornley production of “Oliver!” some years ago, he squashed the title character.Greg Tannahill as Peter Pan, who spends much of the play upside down or in bandages.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat Nana is haunted by the memory — and that each of the other actors has a pathetic trait as well — helps give texture to the relentless shenanigans. Still, as the formula seems to require, the “Goes Wrong” shows often get near and sometimes cross the line at which violence and mockery cease to be funny. That line moves over time, of course; if stuttering no longer seems amusing, it was a surefire laugh-getter not long ago.And though it’s always hilarious to see floorboards fly up and smack actors in the face, the professionalization of fake trauma may have outstripped the comedy of it. The difficulty of producing a stunt safely is not, after all, related to the amusement it provides; in fact, the difficulty, when too obvious, can get in the way. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong,” directed by Adam Meggido, too often belabors the horseplay, making it feel mechanical.Milder but more endearing are the jokes that depend on miscues, amateur acting and erratic stagecraft. The chair that is meant to deliver the narrator (Harris) to and from the stage sometimes jerks him too suddenly into position and other times makes an excruciatingly slow exit. Harris, who will appear at most performances through April 30, is expert at consternation that turns into helplessness.And Dennis, the young Cornley actor playing John Darling and Mr. Smee, “who doesn’t know a single line,” must have his words provided through headphones; he repeats them verbatim, even when they’re clearly not meant to be spoken. “Dennis, you’re wearing the wrong costume,” he declaims proudly. “No, don’t say that, that is obviously not a line.”In such moments, “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” begins to achieve the dizzying liftoff of the best backstage farces, like Michael Frayn’s “Noises Off.” In the confusing atmosphere where real life, the play and the play within the play meet, you feel unmoored from the customary gravity of the theater. Words make very little sense, especially when, as happens blissfully once or twice, the dialogue slips out of alignment and one actor jumps ahead while another stays behind. (That also happened in “The Play That Goes Wrong.”) And when Mrs. Darling and her maid are declared to be “different in every way” though they are quite obviously played by the same flustered actor, disbelief is more than suspended. Wonderfully, it’s shattered.Matthew Cavendish, right, with Neil Patrick Harris, whose misbehaving narrator’s chair provides some of the production’s endearing jokes, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAlas, the reprieve from the weight of meaning is only temporary. Too often, the belaboring rebounds and you crash back to earth as ungracefully as Peter Pan. Several bits depend on a setup too outlandish even for farce, which works best when the conditions are real but the responses extreme, instead of the other way around. When sound cues are somehow switched with recordings of offstage conversations and even audition tapes, it’s too far-fetched to amuse.Still, the cast makes even the dimmest jokes shine; you admire the polish. The play’s three authors, once drama school chums, have given themselves the best roles. Henry Shields, the choleric, John Cleese-like one, plays Mr. Darling and Captain Hook; Henry Lewis, the haunted teddy bear, is naturally Nana; and Jonathan Sayer is the headphoned idiot who barely belongs on a stage.They have all by now honed their shticks into weapons. “Peter Pan Goes Wrong” has been playing off and on since 2013, and the “Goes Wrong” brand has been incorporated as Mischief Worldwide. Perhaps that growth has now begun to drain some joy from the franchise, which is built not just on endangering amateurs but on loving them and even to some extent being them. Death may be a big adventure, but for bumblers, which is to say all of us, unvarnished life is adventure enough.Peter Pan Goes WrongThrough July 9 at the Ethel Barrymore Theater, Manhattan; pangoeswrongbway.com. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

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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