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    Cristin Milioti Finds Harmony in Fiona Apple and a Location Change

    The “Palm Springs” actor talks about playing the object of adoration in her HBO Max series, “Made for Love,” and a few of the things she obsesses over herself.Cristin Milioti was certain she was made for “Made for Love.”“I banged on every door for this role, and they were like, ‘Absolutely not, no way, no way, no way, no way,’” she said. “They had a short list of people that I was not anywhere near. I don’t even think I was on a medium list or a long list. I didn’t make any of the lists.”But Milioti was undaunted. And over lunch with Patrick Somerville — a creator of this dark comedy about a tech billionaire’s wife on the lam from the virtual-reality cube in which he’s cloistered her for a decade — she made the hard sell.“I remember saying, ‘Hey, I know that you guys have your sights set on way fancier people,’” said Milioti, who had just wrapped “Palm Springs,” the “Groundhog Day”-esque rom-com with Andy Samberg. “‘But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this is exactly what I think this show is, and this is how I would play it.’”When Milioti was offered the part a couple of weeks later, she said, “I don’t think anyone was more shocked than I was.”Season 2, which started April 28 on HBO Max, finds Hazel trapped in a labyrinth of lies, having returned to the cube with her husband (Billy Magnussen) to save the life of her father (Ray Romano).From the moment Hazel popped out of a door in the ground in the show’s first episode — as a reluctant dream girl breaking free of the man who monitors her every move, down to her orgasms — the story line has spoken “to the ways in which I feel like women are forced to perform for so much of their lives,” Milioti said. “Then you hit a breaking point where you suddenly realize that you’ve been performing for an audience that you have no interest in performing for. And you want to scream.”In a video call from Puerto Rico, barely rested after a late-night shoot for the upcoming Peacock romantic thriller “The Resort,” a gorgeously bed-headed Milioti spoke about her favorite food as a Jersey girl, how New York still thrills her and why the best times are all about location, location, location.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Fiona Apple She has been such a beacon for me my entire life. Her artistry has helped me navigate not only my own personhood, but the world that I walk through. I think she’s unparalleled as a lyricist, and her melodies are like little galaxies. Something that was so incredibly special about this last album [“Fetch the Bolt Cutters”] is that you could tell that that’s what she’d been moving toward her entire career. Every album she releases is astonishing, but this was like her magnum opus. She is a [expletive] North Star, and she has never wavered.2. Graphic Novels I’m an extremely avid reader, but I’d never read a graphic novel. Then for my birthday last year, one of my closest friends got me “Wendy’s Revenge,” in this trilogy by Walter Scott. To me, they open up some other portal in my brain that is wildly soothing and fantastical, because you can pore over the universe of the page. It feels like it exercises some lobe that I didn’t know about, like brain and soul calisthenics.3. Adam McKay’s “Step Brothers” I’ve probably seen “Step Brothers” 25 times, and it’s just so fantastically, gloriously stupid. I think I like it so much because everyone in it is treating it like it’s a prestige drama. There’s no winking at the camera. Kathryn Hahn’s performance is so outrageously funny because she’s playing it like a Greek tragedy. Richard Jenkins is playing it so serious and so is Mary Steenburgen — not to mention Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Adam Scott. It’s like a murderers’ row playing the most absurd concept as if it’s an Oscar film.4. Harmonizing There is something about how we figured out harmonies that chills me. You’re making this sound with someone else where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the most beautiful form of listening. I was in chorus in high school and we sang “O Magnun Mysterium,” and we were accepted into this choral competition at Riverside Church in Manhattan. I remember us practicing in a hallway. I was a New Jersey teenager, smoking in diners and sort of living a Bruce Springsteen song like, “I can’t wait to get outta this town.” And we all sat in this hallway singing to each other, listening to the sound of each other’s voices and all the social constructs — the fighting, the cliques — melted away. Just a bunch of [expletive] teens from Jersey in this old church, creating something that was so beautiful that we couldn’t believe that it was coming from us. We sang it in this competition, and we were holding each other’s hands, tears streaming down our faces like, “We did it!” Then this show choir from Florida came right after us singing the exact same song. And they annihilated us.5. Wawa Hoagies Wawa was featured heavily on “Mare of Easttown,” and I was like, “Well, well, well, look at her go.” It was like seeing an old friend hit the big time. Wawa is basically a convenience store, like a 7-Eleven, but they make these hoagies, which is a very Jersey thing. I’m pretty sure they’re made from yoga mats. The meat is possibly not meat. It’s like cheese-colored or turkey-colored material. Sadly, I can’t eat them anymore because I’m vegan now. Ironically, they might be vegan because they might all be made of napkins. I have no idea. What goes into these things, it’s unintelligible.6. Crossing over the Manhattan Bridge I have lived in New York for a million years, and when I am in a taxi with the windows down rumbling over the Manhattan Bridge — and I can see the skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty — I can’t believe that I live there after all this time. I always stop everything I’m doing and I just stare out the window at the majesty of where I live, and that the city continues to run and thrive, and it’s been through so much and it holds so much. It’s like a little prayer.7. Amy Morton at the end of Act 2 of “August: Osage County” by Tracy Letts I think I had just dropped out of [New York University] when I saw that play, and I had never seen anything like that. I remember when she turned around — she spins over her shoulder and comes at her mother with her arm pointed — and the way that she bellowed, “I’m running things now!” I still get goose bumps. My skeleton burst into doves. I melted in my seat, like my spirit rose away and was floating at the rafters.8. Traveling Solo I was always very afraid to take solo trips. I have a couple of friends who had done it and I was like, “But what do you do?” And then I took one by myself. After a job, I went to the Adirondacks for a week, and it was incredible. You’re one on one with your own personhood, and parts of your brain and heart open up when it’s just you and your thoughts, walking through the woods. I think it is so valuable. I’ve taken another solo trip since then, to the Galápagos, which I was very nervous about because it’s so far away. But I wanted to do one by myself again, to sort of shake hands with myself and say, “Hello.”9. Blooper Reels It’s like an immediate dose of laughter, Prozac for your brain. I like compilations of people falling down, farts on live TV, all of that. I think the internet is so dangerous, but one part of it that I really like to utilize is being able to go onto YouTube and watch something that makes me laugh so hard that it’s just like a lovely little reset.10. A Location Change I love going out so much, but I really love a location change. I like to go to like a place for dinner, and then you have a location change and you go to a bar, and then you maybe have one more location change for a dessert. It’s like an adventure where I’m like, “What’s going to happen?” It feels like a delightful game of Russian roulette, which is one of the reasons why I love living in New York. It’s just endless possibilities, and there’s something about it that’s very sexy and romantic. It’s effervescent. It’s like if champagne were an activity. More

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    Stephen Colbert Celebrates Sweden and Finland Applying to Join NATO

    Colbert called the move “good news” based on it being “bad news for Russia.”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.The Swedish Are ComingLeaders from Sweden joined Finland in announcing plans to submit an application for NATO on Tuesday.Stephen Colbert called the announcement “good news” because it’s “bad news for Russia.”“Wow, first Finland, now Sweden. It seems like every day we’re learning about another country we could have sworn was already in NATO.” — SETH MEYERS“Finland and Sweden are very serious about making this official. They each left a toothbrush in NATO’s bathroom already.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“One of Russia’s main goals in invading Ukraine was to weaken NATO. Now, instead, the alliance is ‘on the brink of starting its largest potential expansion in nearly two decades.’ How ironic. It’s — it’s like that O. Henry story where the guy buys his wife combs for her hair, and she joins NATO.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Primary Day Edition)“You can feel the electricity in the air because it is Primary Day all across America. Five states are choosing their party nominees for state and federal office: Pennsylvania, Oregon, Idaho, North Carolina and Kentucky. Or as election experts collectively know them, ‘POINCK.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Ah, yes, the excitement of midterm state primaries. Put the coffee on, honey, it’s gonna be an all-nighter.” — JAMES CORDEN“Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania all held primaries today, which, of course, is news to the vast majority of people in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania.” — JAMES CORDEN“One of the most-watched races is in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Oz is trying to win the Republican nomination for senate. My apologies to Dr. Oz, but I can’t cross party lines — I’m a Dr. Phil guy through and through.” — JAMES CORDEN“Because there’s nothing more impressive than being called smart by a man who stared directly at an eclipse.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to Dr. Oz’s touting his endorsement from Donald Trump.The Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and the “Tonight Show” guest Nick Jonas performed auto-tuned tracks based on topics such as “a Craigslist ad for a roommate.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSarah Silverman will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutA commuter walking past Nick Cave’s video work, “Every One,” which plays every quarter hour and brings the suits to life in motion.Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesThe musician-artist Nick Cave’s “Each One” installation shows Soundsuits “that seem to be in motion, creating visual vortexes, variously spinning and rising or falling,” in the subway under One Times Square. More

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    Review: ‘Golden Shield’ Is an Exercise In Miscommunication

    Anchuli Felicia King’s play about an internet firewall belongs to multiple genres all at once.In “Golden Shield,” which opened Tuesday at the Manhattan Theater Club, a blowhard executive at a tech company comes up with a way to build a more effective firewall: decentralize it into multiple checkpoints.This appears to also have been the strategy of the young Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King, whose show belongs to multiple genres all at once: It is a legal drama, a romance, a story of sibling estrangement, and a cautionary tale about technology and the cost of political activism. “Golden Shield” is a lot to chew on and somehow it is not filling.The director May Adrales nimbly steers the production, which goes back and forth between 2006 and 2016 as we follow a class-action lawsuit by eight Chinese dissidents against the fictional ONYS Systems, an American company, led by the aforementioned tech bro, Marshall McLaren (Max Gordon Moore), contracted by the Chinese government to build a system filtering problematic internet content — the Golden Shield of the title. (The case borrows elements from real-life ones against Yahoo and Cisco.) Julie Chen (Cindy Cheung), a Chinese American partner in a law firm, leads the charge on behalf of the plaintiffs.Besides Marshall, Julie clashes with her younger sister, Eva (Ruibo Qian), whom she has hired as a translator because Eva has a better command of Mandarin. Julie says she picked her sister because she wants “someone I trust over there,” but the two women can’t stand each other, let alone trust each other. Eva won’t even tell her sibling how she makes a living, only specifying that “it’s not illegal.”Julie is a little slow on the uptake, and it’s a safe bet most audience members will be way ahead of her. She also appears to be terrible in court (I kept mentally interjecting “Objection!”) and flusters easily. “Where the [expletive] am I gonna get a Mandarin translator in Dallas?” Julie wonders after finding herself in a bind in the city where the trial is taking place. Where, indeed, could she possibly locate this unicorn in a huge agglomeration with enough corporate headquarters to sustain a cottage industry of specialized translators?The show’s main concern is communication, or rather miscommunication, an idea it incorporates in its very fabric with the Translator (Fang Du), an omniscient character who hovers on the periphery of the action. At regular intervals he volunteers context, explains what is spoken and verbalizes what is not — he essentially dispenses audio footnotes.At worst, which is most of the time, the Translator spells out the obvious, ruining the silences, allusions and, yes, lies that undergird many conversations, and by extension theater. It’s as if someone were filling in the blanks in a Pinter play. A little after Eva tells an Australian nonprofit employee named Amanda (Gillian Saker, in an unfortunate wig that looks as if the 1970s had crash-landed on it) that they could make out in the women’s room, for example, Amanda coyly announces, “I feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to powder my nose.” The hint is none too subtle, and yet the Translator immediately informs us that she means, “Meet me in the bathroom.”At best, which is not nearly enough, the Translator sneaks in insights that are tantalizingly thought-provoking, as when he steers a conversation between Marshall and a Chinese official, or says that his job “is not really to translate but to interpret. Not to transmit truth to truth but to give you informed approximations.”A wealth of possibilities lies in the difference between these two words, but “Golden Shield” is more interested in histrionics than in how approximations can get close to the truth, or at least a truth.Golden ShieldThrough June 12 at City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    A Central Park Birder Has a New TV Show

    Christian Cooper’s encounter in Central Park with a white woman who called 911 to falsely accuse him of threatening her spurred a national outcry. Now he is hosting a birding series for National Geographic.For years, Christian Cooper has studied the habits of Kirtland’s warblers, Swainson’s thrushes, Acadian flycatchers and the other birds he has spent countless hours searching for or observing.While Mr. Cooper, a resident of Manhattan, has watched birds all over the world, one of his most frequent haunts is his beloved Central Park, where more than 200 species, including, loons, egrets, falcons and owls, live or stop by during migratory flights.He is perhaps best known for his encounter there two years ago with a woman who called the police and falsely claimed that he was threatening her after Mr. Cooper asked that she keep her dog on a leash.Now, he is about to once again be in the public eye — this time on his own television show.On Monday, National Geographic announced a new series featuring Mr. Cooper, called “Extraordinary Birder,” that is expected to run on one of National Geographic’s channels or on Disney+. A premiere date has not been released.“Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon,” National Geographic said in its announcement, “he does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above.”Mr. Cooper said that he first heard from National Geographic about the possibility of a show about a year and a half ago — “I was all in,” he said — and that he had completed six episodes of the show, traveling to deserts, cities, rainforests and the rural South.“I love spreading the gospel of birding,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he was looking forward to encouraging more people “to stop and watch and listen and really start appreciating the absolutely spectacular creatures that we have among us.”Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island.Brittainy Newman/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 59, has been a semipublic figure in various ways for decades. He served on the board of directors of GLAAD, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. While an editor for Marvel Comics, he was credited with creating one of the first gay characters in the Star Trek comic universe.The confrontation in Central Park in 2020 thrust him into the public eye in a new way. Mr. Cooper took out his phone and began recording during a disagreement with the woman he encountered there, Amy Cooper. The video showed Ms. Cooper, who is not related to Mr. Cooper, making a 911 call and saying to him: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”After Mr. Cooper’s sister posted the video to Twitter, it was viewed tens of millions of times. In the resulting furor, Ms. Cooper lost her job with the investment firm Franklin Templeton and was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with filing a false police report. Ms. Cooper sued Franklin Templeton in Federal District Court in Manhattan, saying the company defamed and discriminated against her. Franklin Templeton has asked that the suit be dismissed.Mr. Cooper emerged as a thoughtful, measured voice. He spoke publicly about what he called the “deep vein of racial bias” that runs through society, and he said there was no excuse for the racism inherent in Ms. Cooper making a false allegation against him.But he also distanced himself from the public pillorying of Ms. Cooper and declined to cooperate with prosecutors, who ended up asking a judge to dismiss the case against her after she completed a therapeutic program that included instruction about racial biases.Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island and being struck at the age of 10 by the sight of red-winged blackbirds. He still listens for birdsong, wherever he is.“It adds another dimension to just being on the street,” he said. “It adds another dimension to how you exist in the world.”While making “Extraordinary Birder,” Mr. Cooper said, he added to his life’s list, glimpsing burrowing owls for the first time. “They are actually quite adorable,” he said.Mr. Cooper still goes regularly to Central Park, especially this time of year — he’s usually there around daybreak. On Tuesday morning he had been excited to see a Tennessee warbler, a difficult-to-spot bird with “a really distinctive, urgent cry” that he said sounds in part like “a machine gun.”“The second you hear that,” he said, “it’s like, oh boy, there’s a Tennessee around.” More

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    Maggie Peterson, a Memorable ‘Andy Griffith Show’ Guest, Dies at 81

    As Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, she appeared in five episodes, beginning with one in which her character became smitten with Mr. Griffith’s.Maggie Peterson, an actress who in a recurring role on the hit sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” memorably developed an infatuation with Mr. Griffith’s character, Sheriff Andy Taylor, died on Sunday. She was 81.Her death was announced in a post on her Facebook page. The post did not say where she died, but her family said last month that she had been moved from her home in Las Vegas to a nursing facility in Colorado. The family also said that her health took a turn for the worse when her husband, the jazz musician Gus Mancuso, died of Alzheimer’s disease in December at 88.Ms. Peterson was seen on “The Odd Couple,” “Green Acres” and other television shows from 1964 to 1987. But she was probably best known for playing Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, in several episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.” (Her brothers were played by the members of the Dillards, a prominent bluegrass band; their father was played by the veteran character actor Denver Pyle.)Charlene and the other Darlings first appeared in the 1963 episode “The Darlings Are Coming,” in which the family visited Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town where the show was set, and waited for her fiancé to arrive. Sheriff Taylor lets the family spend a night in the courthouse, and Charlene becomes smitten with the sheriff — an infatuation that ends abruptly when her fiancé arrives.Ms. Peterson was a successful singer before she became an actress.via IMDbThe Darlings returned to Mayberry four more times. In one episode, Charlene and her husband are looking for a young boy for their new baby girl to become engaged to. They pick Sheriff Taylor’s son, Opie, played by Ron Howard, but are eventually tricked into changing their minds.Ms. Peterson played a different character in a later episode of the show and two other characters in episodes of the “Andy Griffith Show” spinoffs “Mayberry R.F.D.” and “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” She also appeared in movies with Mr. Griffith and another “Andy Griffith Show” cast member, Don Knotts.She returned to the role of Charlene one last time in the 1986 TV movie “Return to Mayberry.”Margaret Ann Peterson was born on Jan. 10, 1941, in Greeley, Colo., to Arthur and Tressa Peterson. She was a successful singer before she became an actress, with a family vocal group called the Ja-Da Quartet (later known as Margaret Ann & the Ja-Da Quartet), which recorded an album for Warner Bros. Records in 1959, and the Ernie Mariani Trio.After her acting career ended, she worked for the Nevada Film Commission and, usually billed as Maggie Mancuso, was a location manager on “Casino” (1995) and other movies.Information on survivors was not immediately available.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More

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    ‘Will You Come With Me?’ Review: Love in the Age of Revolution

    Set around protests in Istanbul that began in 2013, this play follows a couple as they circle, approach and retreat from each other over the years.In May 2013, a sit-in over the demolition of Istanbul’s Gezi Park gave rise to a nationwide movement after police intervened with tear gas and water cannons. Protests rocked Turkey for months as a flood of grievances against the government boiled over into the streets.Love in the age of revolution is the time-honored subject of “Will You Come With Me?” — a diaristic two-hander by the playwright Ebru Nihan Celkan that opened at MITU580 in Brooklyn on Monday night. Translated from Turkish by Kate Ferguson, the PlayCo production aims to put viewers on the ground of the Gezi Park conflict and into the hearts and heads of two women brought together and torn apart during its turmoil.The story begins with Umut (Layla Khoshnoudi) recording a video message for a distant lover on the occasion of their first anniversary, though it seems the pair has most often been apart. “They cut down the tree where we had our first kiss,” Umut says in a park like any other, her image projected on translucent panels angled around the black-box theater. We watch the screen as her friend behind the camera is arrested mid-shoot.Next it’s 2018, and Umut is awake in bed, wondering how long she’s been afraid of the dark. We meet her lover, Janina (Maribel Martinez), on the other side of the stage in Berlin, preparing to visit Umut in Istanbul. Later we learn that the two met while Janina was there on business, and she wants to bring Umut back to Berlin to live with her. Hasn’t Umut had enough of civil unrest? The two circle each other, dictating their experiences as if to bridge the distance between them and create a record for posterity.“I’m going to get her,” Janina says. “No more counting the days, the minutes, the seconds.”The bench where they fell in love sits center stage, beside a path cut through green turf that covers the floor. The peaceful artifice of the set design by Afsoon Pajoufar belies the strife Umut describes unfolding around her in Istanbul. Sound design by Avi Amon summons crowds and confrontation, while stark spotlights from the lighting designer Reza Behjat capture Umut’s disquiet and isolation.Scenes flip forward and back through time, like the ripped-out pages of a journal. If separation charges Umut and Janina’s fondness for each other, their reunion is marked by ambivalence. Khoshnoudi and Martinez are best when they’re in dialogue, working off each other with sincerity and grace. Unfortunately, the two characters don’t interact until nearly halfway through the 80-minute play, when we flash back to their dreamy first meeting and forward to the tensions that have arisen between them since.In a set designed by Afsoon Pajoufar, images are projected on translucent panels at either side of the black-box theater. Julieta CervantesThere’s a persistent sense of disorder to “Will You Come With Me?” that suits its formal experimentation, colliding the illogic shuffle of memory with documentary style. But even with supertitled dates between scenes, the chopped-up timeline is hard to follow. And the action, which is almost entirely described rather than enacted, can feel frustratingly opaque. Those unfamiliar with even a broad outline of the Gezi Park protests won’t find their impetus or consequences detailed here.Celkan is more interested in the sensory richness of love and civil disobedience, in hearts that heave “like a pair of bellows,” or eyes that “glow like embers” one minute and burn with tear gas the next. That poetry survives translation, and its focus on imagery is well complemented by projection design from Stefania Bulbarella and Dee Lamar Mills. But the production from the director Keenan Tyler Oliphant can’t fully theatricalize a text so weighed down by narration.If “Will You Come With Me?” wants to posit love as an act of resistance, it’s not exactly clear what gets in the way of it here. The social uprising makes for a chaotic backdrop, but its forces don’t seem to be what drives the pair apart. The play feels like a kind of battle-logue, of two people trying to escape themselves for each other and bend the arc of history. It’s a valiant effort at a worthy endeavor, even if the execution is a blur.Will You Come With Me?Through June 5 at MITU580, Brooklyn; playco.org. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More

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    LaChanze, a Tony Nominee, Is Casting Herself in New Roles

    The veteran actress, nominated for her work in “Trouble in Mind,” is championing Black artists, producing on Broadway and relishing being cast as the love interest.A Tony Award-winning actress walked into a bar, and before long, she was talking about racism.“I have noticed in my career,” the actress, LaChanze, said, “that roles that I’ve gotten are roles of women who have experienced trauma. Major, major trauma. People feel comfortable making me, as a dark-skinned Black woman, a victim of some kind of violence, a victim of trauma. A victim.”The subject of racism — and the various ways it can manifest in the theater industry — came up repeatedly during a lively conversation on a recent rainy Friday afternoon in an Upper West Side wine bar.But don’t get it twisted. LaChanze is thankful — for her career and for the opportunities she’s had over the years.She just received her fourth Tony nomination — her first for best leading actress in a play — for her portrayal of Wiletta Mayer in the Broadway debut of Alice Childress’s 1955 play “Trouble in Mind.”LaChanze, who uses a mononym but was born Rhonda LaChanze Sapp, received glowing reviews. The Times’s theater critic, Jesse Green, wrote that she got the character’s “arc just right in a wonderfully rangy compelling performance.” LaChanze “dazzles,” embodying Wiletta with “breathless ease,” Lovia Gyarkye wrote in her review for The Hollywood Reporter.Every aspect of “Trouble in Mind” seems to comment on racism in some way. There were plans to take it to Broadway in the mid-1950s after a successful run in Greenwich Village, yet the show didn’t make it there until 2021. As a Black writer intending to highlight the unfairness in the theater industry, Childress, who died in 1994, ran headlong into it.“She is finally getting her day in the sun,” LaChanze said of Childress after the show was nominated for four Tony Awards, including best revival of a play.Childress’s comedy-drama is centered on a group of mostly Black actors, with an all-white creative team, rehearsing a Broadway-bound play about the events leading up to a lynching. Wiletta, the main character, is a proud veteran musical-theater actor, excited to be in her first play. She just has a few notes about the script. But the white director is not receptive to Wiletta’s suggestions and feedback. And as she summons the courage to be more forceful, pointing out that some of the dialogue and actions in the script are not authentic to what Black people would actually do and say, the resulting conflict has dire consequences.LaChanze knows the feeling.“I remember having an argument with a director once, saying, ‘A Black woman would never say this about herself.’ And he said, ‘I think she would.’ And he was a white man.” There was an “organic” connection for her with the character of Wiletta: “I have literally lived it in my 40 years of being in this business.”LaChanze as Wiletta Mayer with Michael Zegen as the director Al Manners and Danielle Campbell as the ingénue Judy Sears in “Trouble in Mind,” which ran last fall at the American Airlines Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat changed with “Trouble in Mind,” whose director, Charles Randolph-Wright, was “the first Black director that I have had as a leading actress on Broadway,” LaChanze said.Describing LaChanze as a “goddess,” Randolph-Wright praised not only her acting (“I knew what she would do with this, but it was even beyond my imagination”) but also her spirit (“She led that company with grace, with humor — it was brilliant”).And the two of them had a “symbiotic” relationship while working on the show, he said, adding: “It would be late at night and I would have an idea about something, and I would go to dial her number — and my phone would be ringing. She would call me at the exact same moment.”Over a glass of wine, LaChanze was straightforward. Matter-of-fact. She was also luminous, quick to laugh and her eyes shone when she talked about her daughters. Her eldest, Celia Rose Gooding, is now starring in the TV series “Star Trek: Strange New Worlds,” after starring in the Broadway musical “Jagged Little Pill.” Her youngest, Zaya Gooding, is a linguistics major in college. Coincidentally, Celia’s “Star Trek” character, Nyota Uhura, specializes in linguistics, giving the younger daughter a chance to show off a bit for her older sibling. (“She calls her sister and she advises her on certain things,” LaChanze beamed. “How cool is that?”)Performing started early for LaChanze. As a child, one of her brothers played trombone; the other played drums. “We would make our own songs, and we sort of fashioned ourselves after being like the Jackson 5,” she said. Hers was a military family, so they moved a lot, but her mother always made sure LaChanze was in some sort of dance class or performing arts program. “I thrived there. It’s where I felt the most comfortable to be an outgoing, expressive child with this extra energy.”After attending Morgan State University in Baltimore for two years and then studying theater and dance at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, LaChanze landed in New York “so broke” in the mid-1980s.“I had decided I wasn’t going to go back to school. I was going to stay in New York and do this Broadway show ‘Uptown … It’s Hot!’” she said. Her character was, in her words, “third girl from the left.” Alas, her Broadway debut was brief: “It closed in four days.” (Technically the show closed after 24 performances, but it’s safe to say it was absolutely not a smash hit.)LaChanze ended up sleeping on an ex-boyfriend’s aunt’s couch.“He wasn’t even my boyfriend anymore. But his aunt and I were so tight,” LaChanze recalled. “She gave me a ring to pawn. And it was, like, $600 I got for the ring. And she said, ‘When you get your job, you’re going to go back and get my ring for me.’” In just under a month, LaChanze said, “I was able to get her ring back for her.”A few years later, LaChanze landed the role of the peasant girl Ti Moune in the 1990 Broadway musical “Once on This Island.” Although the Caribbean-set fairy tale with a predominantly Black cast was based on a novel by the Trinidad-born Black writer Rosa Guy, Black people were not involved in writing the lyrics and music, nor in directing or choreographing the show.It was a hit, and in 1991, “Once on This Island” was nominated for eight Tony Awards, including best musical. LaChanze was nominated for best featured actress in a musical and won a Drama Desk Award. She went on to play Marta in the Stephen Sondheim-George Furth musical “Company.” And three years later, she stepped into a production of “Ragtime,” a stage adaptation of E.L. Doctorow’s 1975 novel exploring the lives of three families at the turn of the 20th century. It was another production with a lot of Black cast members but a white creative team, including the same music and lyrics writers as “Once on This Island,” and Terrence McNally, who wrote the show’s book.At the time, LaChanze was thrilled with the role. But now she views some aspects of the show with a more critical eye. “Don’t get me wrong. I am grateful,” she said. Still: “It was for me the first time that I realized that — aha — here we have white people deciding, culturally, what Black people are doing.”Tony Awards: The Best New Musical NomineesCard 1 of 7The 2022 nominees. More

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    Seth Meyers Skewers Tucker Carlson for Peddling Replacement Theory

    “When a cable news host opens his show with a red-faced rant about white people being replaced, that’s considered a typical episode of that show — routine and typical,” Meyers said.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.Tuckered OutSeveral late-night hosts weighed in on the shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., over the weekend.Seth Meyers pointed to right-wing news shows like Tucker Carlson’s as encouraging white supremacy, saying the Fox News host “wants to pretend it’s not a problem because he’s also openly and repeatedly promoted replacement theory on his show.”“We live in a country, and I don’t know when it happened, where an 18-year-old boy goes into a gun dealership to buy an assault weapon, and it’s a routine transaction. Under the same legal system that won’t let a person buy a six-pack of Bud Light because it would be dangerous, but an assault rifle, that’s routine. Now, the implication is that 18-year-old boys go into that gun dealer and buy weapons of war regularly. When a cable news host opens his show with a red-faced rant about white people being replaced, that’s considered a typical episode of that show — routine and typical.” — SETH MEYERS“Second, why don’t you just do some journalism and find out it’s easy to just ask open-ended questions without answering them — anyone can do that. This dude’s like a search engine that just answers your questions with a series of more questions. He’s ‘Don’t Ask Jeeves.’” — SETH MEYERS“First of all, you don’t have to be a card-carrying member of a white supremacist organization to be a white supremacist. It’s not Costco — you can be a white supremacist without being an official member the same way you can watch movies without having a Blockbuster card.” — SETH MEYERS“Second, and more important, the so-called replacement theory is obviously racist, dangerous and dehumanizing. But on top of everything else, it’s also incredibly stupid. I mean, just think about it for, like, half a second — no one’s being replaced. There’s no capacity limit here. It’s not like there’s a bouncer who only lets two in when two leave.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (You Are Who You Hang With Edition)“So where does someone get an idea that monstrous? Well, it used to be only from the furthest right- wing fringe organizations — your Stormfronts, your neo-Nazis. But these days you can see it every night on TV, thanks to Fox News host and deer caught masturbating in the headlights Tucker Carlson.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, that doesn’t mean Tucker’s responsible, but I would hope it would give anyone pause to find out that their browser history matches that of a mass murderer. If I found out that Jeffrey Dahmer was really into ‘The Lord of the Rings,’ I might switch over to the ‘Narnia’ stuff.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Also, if you think white people are being replaced, then who’s shopping at Vineyard Vines?” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingShakira took on Jimmy Fallon in the “Watch It Once TikTok Challenge.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe cast of “Hadestown” will perform on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutOn “Barry,” Sarah Goldberg’s performance and insights have added complexity to her character.Philip Cheung for The New York TimesThe actress Sarah Goldberg plays one of the most complex characters on television on Showtime’s hit series “Barry.” More