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    In ‘Prima Facie,’ Jodie Comer Finds Her Light

    The one-woman show, coming to Broadway, is the “Killing Eve” star’s first stage role. She dared herself to do it.Until last year, the actress Jodie Comer had never performed onstage. Comer, 30, a native of Liverpool, England, who began her career as a teenager, hadn’t gone to drama school. She hadn’t studied voice or movement. Her comfort was in the close-up, the medium shot. She knew how to make her face still and her voice quiet, and to let the camera do the rest. The theater directors she auditioned for didn’t trust that she could fill a stage.“It kind of felt unattainable,” she said.But she is filling one now. On Broadway, at the John Golden Theater on West 45th Street, her face is emblazoned above the marquee, twice. The art for the Olivier Award-winning “Prima Facie” — an intimate and harrowing monodrama about a woman contending with the fallout of a sexual assault — shows Comer bathed in pink tones, serene, in a barrister’s wig, her eyes closed; it also shows her washed in blue, screaming. Opening on April 23, the play, which Comer first performed in London last year, runs 100 minutes. She is alone onstage for all of them. It’s the theatrical equivalent of being shoved down a mountain the first time you put on skis, or off a high dive before you have even learned to swim.Comer put it a little differently. “I pushed myself,” she said.This was on a Sunday morning in late March, at an out-of-the way table at a West Village cafe. Comer, buoyed by the London-to-New York time change, had arrived early, chipper and casual in jeans and a fisherman’s sweater. (Casual, but not entirely anonymous: The reservation was in my name, yet a waiter had already brought a plate of complimentary pastries.) A plastic clip held her hair away from her face.About that face: Comer has wide-set eyes, full lips and an impossible milk-and-roses complexion. She looks like a Botticelli goddess who has stepped out of the canvas and into some cute ankle boots. And yet, if you have seen her previous work — the action comedy “Free Guy,” the action drama “The Last Duel,” the crusading BBC film “Help” and, most significantly, the queer assassin fever dream “Killing Eve” — you will know that her beauty is usually the least interesting thing about her. That prettiness is a mask she can remove at will, exposing something weirder, spikier, wilder beneath.A theatrical debut and an endurance test: Comer is alone onstage for the full 100-minute run of “Prima Facie.”Helen Murray“It’s like Jodie didn’t get the memo that she is staggeringly beautiful,” Shawn Levy, who directed “Free Guy,” told me. “Jodie is uninterested in relying on her physical appearance.”Unlike many beautiful actresses, Comer has mostly avoided wife, girlfriend and love-interest parts — and their inherent limitations. “From early on, my characters were quite nuanced or multifaceted,” she said. “I was probably very lucky that that’s where I started. Once people see you in that light, they latch on to that.”At the cafe, the morning sun showed her as friendly, unassuming almost, until she began to speak about her work. Then, behind those wide eyes, something like lightning flashed.“Jodie is extraordinarily powerful,” Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with her on “Killing Eve,” told me. “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door. Because it’s a waste.”And yet, the role that Comer plays in “Prima Facie” is very much a girl next door, which lends the show much of its heartbreak and force. Written by Suzie Miller, an Australian attorney turned playwright, and directed by Justin Martin (“The Jungle”), also Australian, “Prima Facie” centers on Tessa Ensler, a promising barrister who has transcended her working-class origins and accent. When she finds herself the victim of a sexual assault, a crime whose accused perpetrators she had often defended, Tessa’s poise and selfhood collapse. In this play, the reality and violence of the assault is never in doubt. That it should happen to a woman like Comer’s Tessa — so pretty, so assertive, so canny — means that it could happen to anyone.“Prima Facie” debuted in Sydney in 2019, starring the Australian actress Sheridan Harbridge. When Miller and Martin knew that they wanted to take it to London, they began throwing around the names of English actresses. Martin suggested Comer. Miller said no. She had seen Comer on “Killing Eve,” as the mercurial assassin Villanelle, who is Russian-born and Russian-accented. Comer’s Emmy Award-winning command of the role was so absolute that Miller assumed that Comer was actually Russian. Once Martin gently corrected her, a script was sent.It reached Comer early in Britain’s lockdown, in Liverpool, where she was living with her parents. It spoke to her directly, and at volume. She had several friends who had undergone versions of Tessa’s experience. And the professional challenge was as serious as it was undeniable.“I was so fearful of it. I knew if I said no to it, it would be purely because of that,” Comer said. “But there was a part of myself deep down that believed I could do it, and I was interested in how I was going to get to that point.”That fear powered her initial approach to the role. “She gets scared,” Martin said. “But her way of dealing with it is to throw herself into it.”Comer as the assassin Villanelle with Sandra Oh in BBC’s “Killing Eve.” “People aren’t just going to cast her as the girl next door,” said Shannon Murphy, a director who worked closely with Comer on the show.BBC AmericaComer discovered theater in her teens. “I got into it because I enjoyed it. It made me happy. I don’t think that’s ever changed,” she said. A teacher put her forward for a radio drama, which led to an agent and to occasional television appearances. After graduation, she worked at a supermarket checkout and at a bar to make ends meet. Her idea of luxury was being able to make a living from acting only. Her first major break came seven years ago, when she was cast as the lead in “Thirteen,” a BBC drama about a woman who escapes from long captivity. Even then, Comer couldn’t land a stage role.But the recognition that “Killing Eve” brought changed all that. For Martin and for James Bierman, lead producer on “Prima Facie,” her lack of theater experience was never a problem. They offered her the resources — voice lessons, movement sessions — and the rehearsal time that she would need.Comer has always been an intuitive actor. The challenge, she found, was to take that intuition and extend it outward so that it reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Rehearsals, which began early in 2022, were rigorous, as was Comer’s research. She spoke to barristers, to police officers, to a high-court judge. She visited a police station and attended a hearing. She had herself fitted for a wig. What would a woman like Tessa wear, she wanted to know. What would she eat? How would she sit, stand and speak? In watching some of the women barristers at work, Comer felt an immediate connection.“There were elements of it that felt like theater: the costumes, the cues, the rehearsal of the lines,” she said.The challenge in translating her instincts for TV acting, Comer found, was to extend them outward so that they reached the last row of the balcony. “Like, how do I emote from the top of my head to the tip of my toes?” she said.Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesTelevision and film sets provide elaborate, realistic environments. Especially if the projects are shot on location. Theater is a more symbolic space, a conjuration of lights and plywood, which offered Comer a kind of freedom. In that glow, she could experiment, she could play. “What theater really sparked in me was that curiosity and sense of imagination,” she said with all the eagerness of a recent convert. Onstage there was no armor, no safety, no ability to stop and take it again, particularly in the scene in which Comer, alone on the floor of the stage, depicts the assault.Miller was convinced, even during rehearsals. “She is magnificent onstage; she’s a theater animal,” she said of Comer on a recent video call. “She’s the character. She’s there.”But after years of performing on television and film, Comer hadn’t known how a live audience would respond. Her anxiety remained up until the first curtain and perhaps even after. “I was actually quite consumed by fear,” she said. “I didn’t really come up for air.”She recalled that, toward the end of the first preview in London, she heard a woman in the orchestra crying. “It was the most guttural cry,” Comer said. “It spread around the theater. It was like the audience were giving each other this unspoken permission to feel whatever was coming up for them.”Stephen Graham, an actor who worked with a teenage Comer on “Good Cop” and then again on “Help,” saw “Prima Facie” in London and wept through it, admiring “the beauty and the subtlety and the nuance and the craftsmanship that went into that performance,” he said.I didn’t see it in London, but I watched it a few weeks ago, on video, via a National Theater Live performance capture. Her craftsmanship was apparent from the first few minutes. Look at Comer in a robe, I thought to myself. Look how good she is. Then the character seemed to take her over. Absorbed in the story, I forgot about Comer, forgot about her beauty, and thought only of Tessa.Miller had noticed this, too. “You don’t look at her and go, ‘There’s a beautiful woman crying.’ You go, ‘There’s a devastated woman crying,’” she said.Over breakfast, Comer had said that despite her leading lady facade, she understands herself as a character actress, someone who wants to disappear into a part, even though or especially because she can’t even disappear into a Village cafe. “I’d love to get to a point where I play a role where I don’t recognize myself,” she said.“Prima Facie” began as a personal challenge, a dare almost. Could she manage alone onstage for all that time? Could she pull off the scene changes and the radical shifts in emotion? But it has become about something more.Women waited for her at the stage door every night in London, telling her that their experiences mirrored Tessa’s or that they were considering careers in law to support women like her. By vanishing into Tessa, she has given these women a way to recognize themselves. That image near the marquee? It’s her face, doubly exposed, but it’s also a mosaic composed of photos of women who submitted their pictures and stories. That’s what Comer wants: to feel part of something bigger than herself, to feel some greater purpose is working through her.“It’s those moments where you step out of your way when you feel the most fulfilled,” she said. More

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    Inside the Pods With ‘Love Is Blind,’ the Reality TV Juggernaut

    SANTA CLARITA, Calif. — Peahens choose peacocks with more elaborate feathers, earthworms mate based on size, and baboons judge on hierarchy, but humans, as more intellectually evolved creatures, have been socialized instead to seek out love.For a tiny subset of the species, this mating ritual involves 10 days on a television set in Greater Los Angeles, where participants sit alone in 12-by-14-foot rooms listening to the disembodied voices of potential mates discuss such topics as their ideal number of offspring.That is the basis for “Love Is Blind,” the voyeuristic Netflix reality series built around buzzwords, booze and mild sensory deprivation that is set to release its Season 4 finale on Friday and air a live reunion special on Sunday. On the show, 30 singles sign up to date each other, separated inside these rooms — known as “pods” — with their conversations fed through speakers. They don’t see whom they’re talking to until they decide to get engaged — a commitment that also comes with a hastily arranged wedding where they can say “I do” or walk away.Pods are set up to film, hydrate and intoxicate contestants.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesIf it all sounds rushed, chaotic, a bit unhinged, the show’s creator, Chris Coelen, understands. Brandon Riegg, the Netflix executive who greenlighted the pitch about five years ago, described the idea with a synonym for bat guano, and he recalled telling Coelen that he would be lucky to get even one couple out of it.Despite the naysayers, Coelen felt confident that people would get engaged. After all, contestants on his show “Married at First Sight” had been marrying strangers for years.“People want to find love,” he said in an interview last month on the “Love Is Blind” set, where production was beginning on a new season, “and they’re willing to do some pretty wild things to find it.”The show premiered in February 2020, taking off as viewers were adjusting to their own versions of pandemic-mandated pod life, and has continued to captivate audiences. More than 30 million Netflix subscribers watched during the first four weeks after its premiere, the company reported, and Season 4, which kicked off in March, topped the previous seasons’ opening weekends by hours watched. Last year, according to Nielsen, “Love Is Blind” was the eighth most-watched original streaming series in the United States, ahead of “The Crown” and the “Lord of the Rings” spinoff “The Rings of Power.” Versions of the show based in Japan and Brazil have already been released, with U.K. and Swedish adaptations in the works.Kim Kardashian, Lizzo, Billie Eilish and Daniel Radcliffe are among the show’s celebrity fans, and contestants have built gigantic social media followings, with one married participant from Season 1, Lauren Speed-Hamilton, reaching 2.5 million followers on Instagram. The series has also fueled cottage industries on TikTok of amateur detectives digging into the contestants’ back stories and of therapists analyzing the relationship dynamics onscreen. At times, “Love Is Blind” has prompted musings on our fraying social fabric, with commentators declaring that the show “speaks to the state of modern romance” and “holds a mirror to a reality we’d rather ignore.”Shake Chatterjee, one of the contestants in the second season of “Love Is Blind.”Patrick Wymore/NetflixContestants don’t meet in person until they have gotten engaged.NetflixFor Netflix, its appeal was more fundamental. It matched the streamer’s ethos around unscripted programming, Riegg said: relatable and optimistic.“If you look at some of the most beloved and established unscripted franchises, they’ve been running for a very long time,” he added. “And I don’t think there’s any reason that ours can’t do the same.”‘Whatever happens, happens.’So how did “Love Is Blind,” with its absurd conceit, manage to position itself as the closest thing to “The Bachelor” for the cable-less generation?Coelen said it’s because the show puts it all out there, revealing contestants’ explosive dramatics and romantic indifference without coaxing anything out of them.Producers have included footage of one participant, Andrew Liu, appearing to apply eye drops to simulate tears for the camera after he was dumped in Season 3. One couple in the current season had enough of each other and split before they got to the altar. And when Shake Chatterjee, from Season 2, tried to suss out what his dates looked like by asking if he could feasibly carry them on his shoulders, the producers said they never considered intervening.The hosts are a married couple, Vanessa and Nick Lachey — the latter of whom was the subject of his own early-aughts reality series when he married Jessica Simpson. They rarely interact with participants, occasionally dropping in during the season and serving as therapist-like mediators during the reunions.“We just watch. We involve ourselves in nothing,” said Ally Simpson (no relation to Jessica), one of the show’s executive producers. During production, she sits next to Coelen in the control room, where they monitor as many as 10 dates happening simultaneously.Chris Coelen and Ally Simpson working behind the scenes. “We involve ourselves in nothing,” Simpson said.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesBut the concept of authenticity gets complicated when the location for the dates is a 68,000-square-foot studio next to an Amazon warehouse, where dozens of crew members zip around with walkie talkies and 81 cameras pan and zoom to catch every blush and giggle. (Contestants stay in hotels overnight, though the napping and cooking can sometimes make it appear as though they’re living on set à la “The Real World.”)Inside the two single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic, a digital fire roars onscreen, and those metallic goblets that have become the show’s mascots are adhered to the shelves so that guests don’t knock them over.When Kwame Appiah, a tech worker who appears on the current season, says of a woman he has never seen, “I’ve just been smitten for a really long time,” he means six days.Then there’s the influencer industrial complex. In the three years since the show’s debut, cast members with new followings have promoted Smirnoff Spicy Tamarind vodka, Bud Light hard seltzer and Fenty lipstick, as well as yogurt and laxatives.When it comes to choosing a cast, the producers say they try to weed out those seeking social media fame or joining on a whim, but if such types slip into the roster, Coelen said, he believes they still tend to become invested in the process.“We build the machinery, and whatever happens, happens,” he said.A crew member affixes goblets to a shelf with mounting tape.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe contents of the fridge in the “men’s lounge.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe machinery starts with Donna Driscoll, the show’s head of casting, who has been with Coelen’s production company, Kinetic Content, since the second season of “Married at First Sight.” Interested singles apply online, but Driscoll’s team also seeks people out on social media and at bars, grocery stores and church groups.A third-party company conducts background checks and psychological evaluations, and the casting team creates what are called “compatibility grids,” a spreadsheet listing key characteristics, including the desire to have children. They are effectively trying to “stack the deck,” Coelen said, so that each person comes in with some compatibility, at least on paper, with others. (If love really is blind, it is also heavily vetted.)On the show, the contestants describe being at their wits’ end with dating norms of the 2020s, which tend to involve more swiping on touchscreens than IRL spontaneity.“My parents are like, ‘Why don’t you just go meet a guy at a bar?” said Chelsea Griffin, a speech-language pathologist from Seattle who is on the current season. “Who does that anymore?”Instead, with her phone confiscated, she met a guy at a production facility where a maze of dark hallways leads to pods and to a room where contestants sit for one-on-one interviews with a blurred backdrop positioned behind them.Coelen in the show’s control room.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesA camera inside the wall of one of the pods.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the start of filming, budding romances begin with 10-minute speed dates, lengthening each day until the most lovestruck couples chat for hours, sometimes lingering until 3 a.m.“The rate at which you go in this experience, it’s hard for my mom to fathom. It’s hard for my brother to fathom,” Griffin said. “I could sit and try to articulate and explain the entire thing, and people still wouldn’t get it.”Members of the production team listen on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or tears flow. They move contestant headshots around a bulletin board as they pair off and break up, like detectives on a crime procedural.At the end of the day, the contestants rank their dates on paper. The team then uses a variation on a Nobel Prize-winning algorithm, created by two mathematicians in the 1960s, to find a dating schedule in which everyone has matches. For the first four seasons, Simpson and Coelen organized the data by hand to determine the next day’s lineup of dates, but more recently, Simpson plugs the rankings into computer software.By day seven, the men are able to pick out engagement rings provided by the show. By day nine, after couples have typically spent about 30 total hours dating — albeit in separate rooms — some of them pop the question. If the answer is a yes, they finally meet.Then, it’s time to plan the wedding. Singles have been choosing among suitors they couldn’t see as far back as the 1960s (see “The Dating Game”), but “Love Is Blind” makes marriage its clear, televised conclusion.“You think about reality shows as being these zany, deviant enterprises, but when it comes right down to it, they promulgate some of our most conservative values,” said Danielle Lindemann, a sociologist who wrote a book about reality television. “Ultimately, this show is about heterosexual coupling that ends in marriage.”The lounge where male contestants gather between dates. On the show, contestants often describe being at their wits’ end with the norms of dating in the 2020s.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesSuccess, and scrutinyThe inherent limits of the show have opened it to critique. Though “Love Is Blind” might be more diverse than some reality shows in terms of race and body type, those selected for the “experiment” tend to be conventionally attractive heterosexual men and women in their 20s and 30s.Speed-Hamilton, who has gone on to co-host a podcast for Netflix about its reality series, accused the show last season of “cutting all the Black women” after the pods portion, adding that most of the couples seemed “forced” and only established “for entertainment purposes.”There have been other musings that this season of the show is falling into typical reality TV traps, zooming in on “mean girl” drama and casting people whose true intentions some viewers question. There have also been suggestions that the show has edited footage to ramp up the drama. Jackelina Bonds, a dental assistant from this season, wrote on Instagram that footage had been reordered so that it appears she went on a date before she broke up with her fiancé, when in fact, the date was afterward.Coelen said the production team works to portray the “accurate essence of each person’s journey.” He said the show focuses on building a diverse pool of participants from the start and chooses to follow the engagements that seem most genuine. Any “mean girl” behavior happened without their influence, he said.One of the most vocal skeptics of the show’s authenticity has been a former contestant, Jeremy Hartwell, who was not closely followed during his season. He filed a class-action lawsuit last year against Netflix and Kinetic Content, saying that the defendants cut off the cast from the outside world, plied them with unlimited alcohol and withheld food and sleep with the objective of leading the cast to make “manipulated decisions for the benefit of the show’s entertainment value.”Female and male contestants are kept separate throughout much of the filming of “Love Is Blind.”Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe crux of the lawsuit was an objection to the show’s payment structure at the time, which, the complaint said, involved a $1,000 stipend per filming week with a maximum of $8,000 in possible earnings. His lawsuit argued that the participants had been “willfully misclassified” as independent contractors rather than as employees who were entitled to minimum wage, overtime pay and various labor protections.Chantal McCoy Payton, a lawyer for Hartwell, declined to comment, citing the continuing litigation.Lawyers for Kinetic Content, which has said that the claims are without merit, asserted in court documents that Hartwell had been part of the show for only six days and did not qualify as an employee. Netflix lawyers argued that Hartwell had brought forward “extreme allegations” because he was “upset” about not being chosen by another contestant.Coelen declined to discuss the lawsuit, but his description of the show’s process was at odds with Hartwell’s claims.Daters are provided meals and can order food to the pods, he said, and while the alcohol supply is ample (the fridge in the lounge is stocked with champagne, beer, wine and hard seltzer), everyone decides for themselves whether they want to drink. There are two psychologists on the set, he noted, and the show offers to cover postproduction therapy for participants.Although the producers say they don’t interfere in relationships, Coelen, who is 54 and has been married for 16 years, said that they do suggest that the couples talk about important subjects like finances, parenting and religion, comparing the producers’ level of influence to Pre-Cana, a course for couples preparing to be married by the Roman Catholic Church. For instance, in Season 1, production team members encouraged one participant, Amber Pike, to tell her fiancé, Matt Barnett, that she had about $20,000 in student debt. The conversation did not go particularly well, but the pair got married anyway.“We really get invested in these relationships,” said Simpson, 45, who has been married for six years.Inside the single-sex lounges where the singles congregate, the plants are plastic and a digital fire roars onscreen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesMembers of the production team listen to the contestants on headsets, logging moments like when someone says “I love you” or when tears flow.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesCoelen has tried to sell similarly gimmicky dating shows before. In 2017, his production company released an American version of a show called “Kiss Bang Love” in which singles met each other by kissing blindfolded. In “The Spouse House,” 14 singles bent on marriage moved in together. Both shows lasted only one season.With “Love Is Blind,” the numbers are starting to add up. From the first three seasons of the show, 17 couples came out of the pods engaged, six got legally married on the show, and four are still together.In an interview last month, Brett Brown, a design director at Nike whose marital fate will be unveiled Friday, said it is those early successes that keep viewers watching, curious to find out if this bizarre dating formula can spit out happy couples.Brown acknowledged that some participants might exaggerate their feelings in exchange for the global attention that comes with being a reality TV star.But not him.“I can only speak from my experience,” he said, “and I know that I was there for the right reason.”Susan Beachy contributed research. More

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    The Broadway Star Phillipa Soo Sings Her Favorite Pop Song

    In a new revival of “Camelot,” updated by Aaron Sorkin, the actress finds humanity in the legend of King Arthur and Guenevere.Phillipa Soo enjoys fantasy stories: “Lord of the Rings,” “House of the Dragon,” anything magical with kings and queens involved. That’s partly why, she says, she was drawn to this season’s Broadway revival of “Camelot,” based on the Arthurian legend and opening April 13 at Lincoln Center Theater. Soo, 32, stars opposite Andrew Burnap as Guenevere, King Arthur’s wife and ally — a role that’s long been associated with Julie Andrews, who originated the role onstage in 1960.But her interest went beyond the show’s mystical underpinnings. “Most poignant to me was this idea of Camelot [as] something that we are, as a society, striving toward — this ideal place where we can have democracy and justice and freedom,” she says. “We are grappling with this question of: What is human nature? Are humans fundamentally good? Are we fundamentally bad? Why are we here?”Those themes are central to the writer Aaron Sorkin’s new book for the musical, which is woven around the classic songs from Lerner and Loewe’s sweeping score. (Sorkin has stripped away the supernatural elements of the original — no more nymphs or sorcerers — to ground the play in a medieval-era reality.) Soo’s goal, then, is to make Guenevere “a real person,” someone driven above all by a desire to be loved. She sees Andrews’s iconic performance, with her gentle soprano that cemented the cast album as a musical-theater essential, not as a dare but an invitation: “She brought a lot of herself and her charm to her roles,” Soo says. “That was an inspiration for me to do the same.”Revivals are fresh territory for Soo, who began her professional career originating characters in new works: Natasha in “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” Off Broadway in 2013; the namesake heroine in the 2017 Broadway adaptation of “Amélie”; and, most famously, Eliza in “Hamilton,” which debuted at New York’s Public Theater in 2015. But this past year, she joined the “Into the Woods” Broadway revival as Cinderella, and then did a brief run as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.Yet the new “Camelot,” directed by Bartlett Sher from a rapidly paced Sorkin-esque script, feels less like a remake than a hybrid of a golden-age classic and a contemporary play. (Sorkin also wrote “A Few Good Men,” which premiered on Broadway in 1989, and more recently adapted “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage in 2018.) “The book has a tempo in itself: Those deep debates and discussions that Guenevere and Arthur get to have with each other [are understood] in a different way because they’re not through song,” Soo says. “It feels more immediate … I have to focus in a way that I haven’t before.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Soo to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs: Regina Spektor’s “Samson” (2002). More

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    ‘Ted Lasso,’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: Anthology

    Rebecca, Nate, Ted, Keeley, and Zava all move forward.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Signs’This episode of “Ted Lasso” was a bit disjointed — what Raymond Chandler would have called “passagework” — following individual stories that were only loosely connected. But it did push forward several important subplots.The episode opens with the news that despite the heroics of Zava, AFC Richmond is on an epic losing streak that dates back to their loss to West Ham last episode. I’ll have more to say about Zava below, but first let’s address the arcs of a few of the show’s central characters.RebeccaThe predictions of the psychic she visited in Episode 3 continue to materialize. First it was the green matchbook. Now it’s the spoonerism for “knight in shining armor,” i.e., “[expletive] in nining armor.” (This is a family newspaper, even when the swears are distinctly British.) At the coffee shop where Rebecca dumped the unfortunate John Wingsnight last season, she runs into him with his new fiancée, who immediately blurts out that precise inverted phrase. Rebecca is, understandably, more than a little freaked out.The remaining question regarding the “nining armor” phrase is whether it has any meaning beyond its repetition in the coffee shop. The green matchbook, for instance, doesn’t seem to have any significance beyond the fact that its appearance was foreseen by the psychic.If the phrase does have further significance, it seems all but certain that it will involve Jamie, who sharper observers than I am quickly noted wears the No. 9 on his jersey. (It is typically the number worn by the striker on a Premier League team, which Jamie was until Zava showed up and surely will be again now that Zava is gone.) And here I can see two obvious possibilities, one more appealing than the other. It could mean that Rebecca is going to hook up in some way with Jamie, but that would be bizarre, given that it’s very difficult to believe either would be remotely attracted to the other. It would also be, forgive me if you must, gross. After Sam, Rebecca really can’t date another 20-something subordinate, or we are entering the territory of a damaged psyche and probable lawsuits.A far better — and more plausible — reading is that under the 4 a.m. tutelage of Roy, Jamie emerges as a true star and begins leading Richmond to wins again. This, in fact, seems to be where we’re headed, psychic prediction or no psychic prediction.It’s perhaps worth noting here that so far the psychic’s predictions have occurred in the order she predicted them: the matchbook first, and the nining armor second. Does this mean that her third prediction — “Thunder and lightning, and you, and you’re upside down, and you’re drenched” — is imminent? Time will tell.But Rebecca is obviously far more interested in the psychic’s final prediction: that she will become a mother. So she heads to a doctor who gives her hope that her age might not be an obstacle to pregnancy and then, after tests, dashes that hope. Rebecca will not have a baby.There has been much speculation, here in the comments and elsewhere, about how and for whom Rebecca might become a surrogate mother. Put me in the camp that thinks Bex will leave Rupert (presumably after learning of his affair with Ms. Kakes) and that Rebecca will somehow help to raise her awful ex-husband’s infant child. But feel free to offer alternative theories.Hannah Waddingham offers a magnificently subtle performance here, some of the best acting she’s done on the entire show. And she is at her peak when she is not speaking at all, when her face oscillates seamlessly between hope and disappointment, sometimes conveying both at once. Her work during the devastating call from her doctor and immediately afterward is beautiful and heartbreaking, and the choice of music, “Quiet,” by Rachael Yamagata, is perfect.NateNate is oscillating too, as he has been for a few episodes now, between his true self — decent but hopelessly insecure — and the mask of the bullying egotist he keeps trying to wear, with limited success. After a nice bit in which he calls his mum to practice how he will ask the supermodel Anastasia on a date, he does in fact call her, and they go out for dinner.Nate being Nate, of course, he takes her to the relatively downscale restaurant where he and his family have celebrated special occasions for years. With Anastasia in tow, he tries once again to impress the hostess, Jade, and she is once again entirely unimpressed.Anastasia is unimpressed, too, but with the restaurant itself. If Nate were truly the big shot he is trying so hard to be, he would have foreseen this and taken her someplace “cool.” But he didn’t, and Anastasia, worried that she might appear on social media in a place “so dumpy and sad,” makes a quarter-hearted excuse and flees the premises.At which point Jade sees the true Nate, wounded and vulnerable, and joins him at his table, where we see them drinking wine and laughing easily. The mask is off, at least for now. I found it a lovely, if perhaps improbable, twist. It is certainly further evidence that in the battle for Nate’s soul, Good Nate is gaining the upper hand over Bad Nate.TedLast episode, we saw signs that Ted was tiring of his own mask of perpetual affability when he voiced his displeasure about Dr. Jacob to his ex-wife, Michelle. This episode, he has to contend with the news that his son, Henry, has been involved in a bullying incident at school.The immediate assumption is that Henry was the one bullied, leading to a hilarious scene in which Coach Beard suggests that they fly to Kansas and burn the bully’s house down, before Roy offers the sensible advice that the “best thing you can do with bullies is ignore them.” This advice is not quite what it seems, however, as Roy goes on to paint a late-at-night vengeance scenario, involving a heavy rope soaked in red paint, worthy of a Bond villain. (I can’t be the only one who was reminded of a particular scene in “Casino Royale.”)But it turns out that Henry was not the bullied but the bully. And as much as Ted is upset at this news, it’s clear that he is equally upset that he is not there, in Kansas, to be a father to his son. Despite Ted’s absence, though, Henry is still a Lasso, and he corrects his error in the most Lasso manner imaginable: “I let him know I was sorry by doing an apology rap in front of the whole class.”Ted, too, is gaining firmer control of himself. He begins to have a panic attack before his call with Henry, and it becomes full blown after he gets off the phone. He envisions the last time he saw Henry in person, as he vanished down an escalator at Heathrow on his way back to Kansas. But he gains control of himself, whispering, “He’s OK, he’s OK,” and to his own apparent surprise, the panic attack is over.I don’t know whether Ted will reunite with Michelle, or whether he should. But I have a very difficult time believing he will not wind up back in Kansas to be a father to Henry. This is a show, after all, supremely concerned with the failures of fathers: Ted’s, Nate’s, Jamie’s, Rebecca’s. (Sam’s is the exception that proves the rule.) Ted is surely not eager to join that list.Later, after the brutal loss to Man City — Beard’s joke that it has the same name as the strip club he worked at in college is priceless — Ted addresses the team about the things we let bring us down: “Crap like envy or fear or shame. I don’t want to mess around with any of that [expletive] anymore.” It’s an admission of something we’ve already seen: Ted has been suffering from all three of those feelings. But there’s hope. Ted is committed to “believing that things can get better, that I can get better.” This, again, appears to be Ted’s trajectory for the season: Becoming a better man and a better father. This doesn’t mean being a less generous person. But it may mean stashing away at least a little of his perpetually chirpy, upbeat facade.KeeleyPlease tell me we have seen the last of Shandy. Her character arc was evident from the moment Keeley hired her, and the decision to play it for broad laughs (“condoms for balls”!) just made it feel like a weekly dose of last season’s “Led Tasso” misfire. She seemed to have walked in from another, much worse sitcom. Her over-the-top tirade on the way out the door — and subsequent experiment in animal husbandry — served only as a reminder of what a feeble character she has been from the start.Jack, on the other hand, is kind of awesome, at least from what we’ve seen so far. “Compliment sandwich,” “talent dysmorphia,” sex with a birthday clown in a car with 30 of his clown buddies? Sign me up. Essentially trading Shandy for Jack could improve the Keeley story line by an order of magnitude. I’m not sure I fully buy the sudden romantic attraction. But I’m not sure I care.Even the dour chief financial officer Barbara gets in a worthy zinger upon Shandy’s departure.Barbara: “Well, I’m not going to say it.”Keeley: “But you’re going to think it.”Barbara: “Yes. Often and forever.”There may be hope for this subplot yet.ZavaHe was in only three episodes meaningfully, but Zava was a pleasant surprise. The obvious way to present him was as an astonishing egomaniac and horrible teammate — indeed that seemed to be how they were setting him back in Episode 2. (It also captures the real-life superstar he is based on, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who is famous for his many verbal and violent physical altercations, many of them with teammates.) But the show went with something weirder and at least a bit more interesting. Egoist? Sure. Messianic? Definitely. But not the living nightmare we were led to expect. And his retiring, as opposed to being kicked off the team or demanding a trade, was a pleasantly unexpected exit as well.I confess I found his description of his love for his wife modestly adorable. And even though it doubled as a semi-dirty joke (more on this category later), his line at the end of the video he posted captured the Ted Lasso ethos about as well as anyone has: “If you put your energy into the things you truly love, the universe puts its thing back into you.” Yet another hint that Ted will return home to Henry?Odds and endsI loved it when Colin noted that “She’s All That” was based on “My Fair Lady,” and Sam one-upped him by noting that the latter was itself based on “Pygmalion.” Now that’s a locker room where I could feel at home.I enjoy watching Jamie’s progression, which I’m sure we’ll see on the field as well now that Zava is gone. “Hey, enough of that negativity,” he scolds his teammates. “Stop acting like a bunch of little bunny rabbits and let’s [expletive] do this.”Poor Coach Beard, whom Gina Gershon evidently left to meet her soul mate.Anyone else notice that when, in his big speech, Ted mentions, “Maybe we’ve hurt someone else,” the camera immediately fixes on Roy? Of course you did. We still don’t know precisely why he broke up with Keeley. But I’m quite certain it goes well beyond “we’re both too busy.”Was Higgins’s early reading of a cellphone note about the team’s poor play — I’ll omit the setup for obvious reasons, and cite only the punchline — “This is a text from my father” the dirtiest joke that has yet appeared on Ted Lasso? I say yes, but anyone who wants to offer an alternative candidate should go right ahead. Although watch your language if you want to get it past the moderators. More

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    Late Night Reacts to the Official End of the Covid Era

    Jimmy Kimmel joked that President Biden declared the pandemic’s end “about a year after the rest of us did.”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 End of an EraPresident Biden signed a congressional resolution into law on Monday, officially ending the U.S. national emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic.Jimmy Kimmel called it “the dawn of a new era,” joking that Biden declared the pandemic’s end “about a year after the rest of us did.”“I’m not sure what it means for our health, but here this means that we here can finally get back to some of our favorite prepandemic ‘Late Show’ segments, like ‘subway blind taste test.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“I have to say, I learned a lot during the pandemic. I learned that people who are most resistant to the government telling them what to do also happen to be the people who most need the government to tell them what to do and ironically are the same people who are most supportive of the government telling other people what to do.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But it wasn’t all bad. There were some positives. People helped each other. We found out who in our communities care about others, and maybe most importantly, we now have enough toilet paper to last the rest of our lives.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The end of the Covid era is surprisingly kind of bittersweet. This morning, I did something — I wiped down my groceries just for old-time sake. I actually bought a bottle of Purell and wiped it down with Purell.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Biden Goes to Belfast Edition)“Then this morning Biden was off to the emerald Ireland. The trip is part diplomacy and part homecoming, because Biden’s ancestors came to the U.S. from Ireland in the mid-1800s, when Biden was just a teen.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Biden is a proud Irish American. He’s planning to visit relatives over there from the Blewitt family — that’s his family’s name — and I really hope the visit goes well, because if Biden blows it with the Blewitts, Fox News is going to have a field day tomorrow.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Biden is making the trip to discuss Brexit, address Ireland’s parliament, and, if he’s got time later in the week, to meet with Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell to see if he can’t just patch up all of this silliness.” — JAMES CORDEN, referring to the plot and stars of “The Banshees of Inisherin”The Bits Worth WatchingTuesday’s “Late Show” guest Jennifer Garner recalled how she once landed Jennifer Coolidge’s dream role, playing a dolphin.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday Night“Mrs. Davis” star Betty Gilpin will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutAlison Goldfrapp in London. The singer, best known for her duo, Goldfrapp, is going solo in May.Rosie Marks for The New York TimesAlison Goldfrapp’s new solo album, “The Love Invention,” is a disco-tinged departure from her usual. More

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    Review: Arson, Snowmen, Avian Attacks in ‘Regretfully, So the Birds Are’

    A family of adoptees reckon with Asian American identity in this surreal play from Playwrights Horizons and WP Theater.There’s something amiss in this story of a New Jersey family.You might say it’s the sibling love affair, or the parent who’s an arsonist and murderer, or the parent who’s a racist snowman. You could guess that it’s the birds that have been dying because of the recent earth-to-sky migration by humans. You’d be right on all accounts, because the Playwrights Horizons and WP Theater’s coproduction of “Regretfully, So the Birds Are” is equal parts chaos and absurdity.In the new play, which opened Tuesday night at the Peter Jay Sharp Theater, a large family portrait hanging above a living room couch immediately clues us in to the Whistler family’s dynamic: the father, at the far right of the photo, and the wall beyond the frame, is obscured in a black cloud of scorch marks.A half-seared portrait is just one piece of the collateral damage of the dysfunction in this family, whose white matriarch, Elinore (Kristine Nielsen), is incarcerated for immolating her husband, Cam (Gibson Frazier), a former Asian studies professor, in his home office. Their three adult children, all Asian American adoptees, have their own issues: Mora (Shannon Tyo), a self-professed disaster, embarks on an overseas journey to find her birth mother just before her 30th birthday but falls prey to a woman posing as a family member (Pearl Sun).The youngest, 25-year-old Illy (Sasha Diamond), is a successful musician who has just bought real estate in the sky, the newest trend among billionaires looking to somehow build houses among the clouds. She’s also dating her daft 28-year-old brother, Neel (Sky Smith), to Mora’s horror; the couple says the romance is fine because the siblings aren’t related by blood. Neel then has a revelation about his musical abilities that leads him to Nebraska to find himself. Cam is reincarnated as a snowman who shares facts about Pol Pot and makes racist assumptions about Asia. And above their heads, the birds are conferencing to decide how to stop the human colonization of the sky.The script, by Julia Izumi, and direction, by Jenny Koons, emphasize the work’s quirkiness, but the anemic plot and feebly drawn characters are thrown together to unclear ends.Still, Nielsen and Frazier do what they can with the material, which includes casual quasi-incest, bird puppets wielded by the cast and, again, a racist snowman. Nielsen nearly runs off with the show as Elinore, a former opioid addict with dementia who has the play’s best lines. Her delivery is full of surprises, from aloof non sequiturs about, say, the usefulness of salad spinners, to her blunt appraisals of her children when they visit her in jail (“You may not be my best-liked but you are objectively the most responsible,” she says to Illy).Frazier gives a delightfully droll performance as the snowman, who offers the clearest keyhole view into how one of the show’s most compelling themes could have been executed. Though Cam’s Frosty incarnation comes across as little more than a gimmick, his misguided exposition on Asian history and culture make him a punchy satire of white Americans who fetishize a whole race of people.Because otherwise the siblings’ arcs fail to resolve or complicate the play’s flimsy interrogation of what it means to have an Asian American identity or to be Asian in America but feel bereft of a heritage. The sky homes seem to be the beginning of a class critique and the angry birds seem to be nods to environmental catastrophe. Or maybe they’re a metaphor for racial or social identity. Or maybe they’re just birds.Even the set design, by You-Shin Chen, reflects the play’s confusion. The small stage is awkwardly trifurcated: the half-singed living room, a treehouse with a sky backdrop and a yard with the snowdad. There’s little to identify the play’s other settings — Elinore’s jail cell, an airport in China, someplace in Nebraska, a bird council meeting, a funeral altar.“Regretfully, So the Birds Are” resembles its title: initially intriguing but ultimately incomplete.Regretfully, So the Birds AreThrough April 30 at Peter Jay Sharp Theater at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; wptheater.org or playwrightshorizons.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    ‘Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera’ Review: Gloom, Zoom and a New Bloom

    The veteran performance artist Karen Finley leads the audience through the troubles that plagued New York City at the peak of the pandemic.Restlessness, fear, despair, loneliness, exhaustion, worry, anomie: Remembering the peak of the pandemic in New York City, the performance artist Karen Finley takes the audience through a maelstrom of feelings in her new solo show, “Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco.” That, of course, is after her grand entrance, wearing a white hazmat jumpsuit and a surgical mask zhuzhed-up with sequined fringe, she sashayed through the Laurie Beechman Theater to a mix of the disco classic “Don’t Leave Me This Way” and a chorus of pot-banging like the one that cheered frontline workers in 2020.Yep, she’s still got it.Even though she has long ago abandoned the shock tactics that made her a habituée in the culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s, Finley, who is also a poet and visual artist, remains as unwieldy and messy as ever. A scene in which she enacts a vintage Betty Crocker commercial by trying out a “recipe” onstage, mixing it in a plastic bucket, has an old-school sloppy, feral energy. At a time when the tiniest Off Off Broadway shows can have a soulless professionalism, this rawness feels like a jolt.Also unchanged are Finley’s obsessions: with art as salvation, with the incantatory power of words, with the issue of agency over our bodies, and with our often misguided, often awkward attempts to communicate with other humans. You can see how she would have a field day tackling an epidemic that kept New York residents at home and allowed communication only through masks or video calls.The evening is divided into short sequences organized around themes of sorts and accompanied by costume changes and projections of Finley’s videos and illustrations. (Her daughter, Violet Overn, oversaw the production design.)Reading her text from behind a lectern, Finley is in turn impassioned, mocking, beseeching, goofy, coy. The effect lands halfway between haunted sermon and ramshackle TED Talk — Finley has been a professor of art and public policy at New York University for several years now, so she has acquired a tiny bit of polish, but not all that much.The show is not as corrosive as “Unicorn Gratitude Mystery,” in which Finley covered politics a few months before the 2016 presidential election, but it is just as angry. Because if one thing has not dulled over the years, it’s her rage — at all those deaths in the early days of the pandemic, at a city in agony, at the breakdown of social rules and responsibilities. In a hallucinatory segment, Finley instructs people to put on a mask or, if they have one on, to at least wear it correctly. “I’m saying it nicely,” she insists. Sure, if “nicely” means exuding furor.A few beats later, Finley boogies to “Disco Inferno” while a video of men dancing in a club plays behind her. In one canny move, she ties together generations of deaths in New York caused by AIDS and the coronavirus, with a reference to the falling twin towers quick enough that it doesn’t feel exploitative but still pierces the heart.Like the most inspiring religious services, “Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope Disco” ends on an optimistic note, with Finley pivoting from shock and horror at the lost lives, access and control over one’s body into hope — for change, peace, courage, love. And art. Always art.Covid Vortex Anxiety Opera Kitty Kaleidoscope DiscoThrough May 6 at the Laurie Beechman Theater, Manhattan. Running time: 1 hour 5 minutes. More

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    To Become Oscar Levant, Sean Hayes Revisited His First Role

    The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa OpaleskyAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More