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    Late Night Hosts Fight Over the Best Bits on the Final ‘Late Late Show’

    Jimmy Kimmel suggested that after leaving late night, James Corden should “stick to corporate gigs, podcasts, maybe ‘The Masked Singer.’”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.Eight Years of ‘Late Late’James Corden signed off Thursday after eight years as the host of “The Late Late Show.” He followed a prime-time send-off special with one last show in his usual late-night slot, with his parents teary-eyed in the audience and with Harry Styles and Will Ferrell as guests.For one final time, it’s #SpillYourGuts with Will Ferrell and @Harry_Styles! pic.twitter.com/xb3Sokl2Dc— The Late Late Show with James Corden (@latelateshow) April 28, 2023
    “This is it, gang, this is it. It’s the final ‘Late Late Show’ in the history of CBS,” Corden said at the top of the show. “I’m telling you tonight, finally, we are determined to get it right this time.”Corden thanked viewers by name for tuning in (“Dan, Stephanie, William — that’s it, really.”) and received a special video send-off from President Biden. “That is amazing, although there was a minute in the middle when I was watching that, where in those photos I go, ‘Wait, have I died?’” Corden said.But it was a visit from his fellow late-night hosts that was the last “Late Late Show” bit worth watching.“First things first, you can’t look like you’re enjoying retirement too much.” — SETH MEYERS”You’re going to grow a beard — a huge one. One that says, ‘God spoke to me from a bush.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And don’t get any big ideas — stick to corporate gigs, podcasts, maybe ‘The Masked Singer.’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe hosts simultaneously fought for what comedy bit they wanted now that Corden was going off air and, despite chiding Corden for singing and dancing too much on his show, they answered in unison: “Carpool Karaoke.”The Punchiest Punchlines (Tucker Tok Edition)“After being fired from Fox News on Monday, Tucker Carlson posted a video last night to Twitter and said, ‘Where can you still find Americans saying true things?’ Well, hell, you’ve already tried Fox News and Twitter. I’m out of ideas. I don’t know — maybe Wall Street?” — SETH MEYERS“Nothing says, ‘I landed on my feet’ like ranting in a decommissioned sauna.” — JIMMY FALLON“Wow, good for Tucker. Even though he’s isolated in a remote cabin somewhere, he’s still getting his message out, just like the Unabomber.” — DESI LYDIC, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Although it is funny how he said, ‘When you step outside the noise, people are actually pretty nice.’ Buddy, you are the noise. Your entire show was you being mean to people — trans people, immigrants, women, lady M&Ms. Tucker complaining about people being mean is like Guy Fieri complaining about how there are no salad shows.” — DESI LYDIC“Yep, Tucker criticized the current state of debate on television, then said, ‘And that’s why I chose to be fired.’” — JIMMY FALLON“He’s been fired by Fox, CNN, MSNBC and PBS. That’s like the EGOT of cable news.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actor and talk show host Drew Barrymore popped by the “Tonight Show” for “Ew!,” with Jimmy Fallon and the singer-songwriter Charlie Puth.Also, Check This OutGeorgia O’Keeffe’s “Evening Star No. III” from the new exhibition “To See Takes Time.” Georgia O’Keeffe Museum/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; via Museum of Modern ArtA new Georgia O’Keeffe show at the Museum of Modern Art spans more than four decades, featuring 120 works on paper and eight paintings. More

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    Jerry Springer, Host of a Raucous TV Talk Show, Is Dead at 79

    The confrontational “Jerry Springer Show” ran for nearly three decades and became a cultural phenomenon. Mr. Springer also had a career in politics.Jerry Springer, who went from a somewhat outlandish political career to an almost indescribably outlandish broadcasting career with “The Jerry Springer Show,” which by the mid-1990s was setting a new standard for tawdriness on American television, turning the talk-show format into an arena for shocking confessions, adultery-fueled screaming matches and not infrequent fistfights, died on Thursday in suburban Chicago. He was 79.His death, after a brief illness, was confirmed in a statement by Jene Galvin, a family friend and executive producer of Mr. Springer’s podcast.Mr. Springer earned a law degree from Northwestern University in 1968 and started on a political career, winning election to the Cincinnati City Council in 1971. But he was soon embroiled in the type of personal scandal that would later fuel his talk show: He resigned in 1974 after he was found to have written a check for prostitution services at a Kentucky massage parlor.But Mr. Springer was nothing if not resilient: He was re-elected to the council in 1975. One of his comeback speeches nodded to the prostitution controversy. “A lot of you don’t know anything about me,” he said, according to The Cincinnati Enquirer, “but I’ll tell you one thing you do know: My credit is good.”Mr. Springer in 1974 during his time in politics, at a convention of restaurant operators in Cincinnati.Bettmann Collection, via GettyHe was elected mayor of Cincinnati in 1977, and in 1982 he ran for governor of Ohio, addressing the prostitution incident forthrightly in a campaign advertisement.“The next governor is going to have to take some heavy risks and face some hard truths,” he said. “I’m prepared to do that. This commercial should be proof. I’m not afraid, even of the truth, and even if it hurts.”He finished third in the Democratic primary and made a career change, joining WLWT-TV in Cincinnati, first as a news commentator; he later became an anchor and managing editor. Over the next decade he won or shared multiple Emmy Awards for local coverage.“The Jerry Springer Show,” a daytime talk show syndicated by Multimedia Entertainment, which owned WLWT, began in 1991. Originally it was an issue-oriented program; The Los Angeles Times called it “an oppressively self-important talk hour starring a Cincinnati news anchorman and former mayor.”By 1993, however, lead-ins like “Worshiping the Lord with snakes — next, Jerry Springer!” were turning up, and the shock value just kept going up. A 1995 episode featured a young man named Raymond whom Mr. Springer was helping to lose his virginity, offering him five young women, hidden by a screen, to choose from. Raymond’s friend Woody accompanied him.“Woody doesn’t know it — his 18-year-old virgin sister is one of the contestants!” a scroll told viewers.The talk-show universe had by then become something of a free-for-all, with hosts like Montel Williams and Sally Jessy Raphael also serving up salacious content. Mr. Springer, though, did it better and more outrageously than anyone else. His viewership peaked at about eight million in 1998.Security guards separate guests as they fight on the “Jerry Springer Show,” a common occurrence.Ralf-Finn Hestoft, Corbis, via Getty ImagesMr. Springer in 1998 on the set of his talk show. That year his viewership peaked at about eight million.Getty Images“Why is it so outrageous that people who aren’t famous talk about their private lives?” he once said. “It’s like, ‘It’s OK if good-looking people talk about who they slept with, but, please, if you are ugly, we don’t want to hear about it?’”“The Jerry Springer Show” ran for nearly three decades, ending in 2018 after more than 3,000 episodes. No matter what sort of drama had taken place in front of a studio audience, as well as viewers tuning in from home, Mr. Springer ended each segment with a signature sign-off: “Take care of yourself, and each other.”Gerald Norman Springer was born on Feb. 13, 1944, in London, in an underground station that was being used as a bomb shelter during World War II.“It’s not as dramatic as it sounds,” he told The Chicago Tribune in 2007. “Because of the bombing, women who were in their ninth month were told to sleep in the subway stations, which were set up as maternity wards.”His family relocated to the United States when he was 5. In a commencement speech at Northwestern in 2008, Mr. Springer evoked the moment of arrival.“In silence, all the ship’s passengers gathered on the top deck of this grand ocean liner as we passed by the Statue of Liberty,” he said. “My mom told me in later years (I was 5 at the time) that while we were shivering in the cold, I had asked her: ‘What are we looking at? What does the statue mean?’ In German she replied, ‘Ein tag, alles!’ (One day, everything!).”Mr. Springer earned a bachelor’s degree in political science at Tulane University in 1965. He worked at WTUL, the campus station, and over the years he would check in from time to time.“It was my first job in broadcasting,” he said in a message to the station in 2009 to mark its 50th anniversary, “and it’s been downhill ever since.”After Tulane he went on to Northwestern and law school. In 1967, he took a job as a summer clerk at a law firm in Cincinnati; it was his first exposure to the city that would play an important role in his life. The next year he took time off from his law studies to work on Robert F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign, but he completed his degree after Mr. Kennedy was assassinated.Mr. Springer returned to his family home in New York without any particular plans. When the Cincinnati firm where he had spent a summer called with an offer for a full-time job, he took it.Mr. Springer in his dressing room before a taping of “The Jerry Springer Show.”Steve Kagan/Getty Images“I had to do something to get my life moving again,” he told The Cincinnati Post in 1977.He quickly became involved in local politics, impressing the city’s Democratic leaders. In 1970, he ran for Congress, losing but drawing 44 percent of the vote, much better than expected. A year later, he was on the City Council.Mr. Springer’s talk show brought him enough fame that he had a side gig as an actor, turning up in episodes of “Married … With Children,” “Roseanne,” “The X-Files” and other shows, generally playing a version of himself.He was also a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars” and “The Masked Singer,” and for a time was host of “America’s Got Talent.” In 2005, he began “Springer on the Radio,” a serious, left-leaning political show, on Air America; it lasted about two years.Information on his survivors was not immediately available.In 2008, some students objected when Mr. Springer was invited to give the commencement address at Northwestern.“To the students who invited me — thank you,” he said. “I am honored. To the students who object to my presence — well, you’ve got a point. I, too, would’ve chosen someone else.”“I’ve been lucky enough to enjoy a comfortable measure of success in my various careers,” he added, “but let’s be honest, I’ve been virtually everything you can’t respect: a lawyer, a mayor, a major-market news anchor and a talk-show host. Pray for me. If I get to heaven, we’re all going.”Remy Tumin contributed reporting. More

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    ‘The Knight of the Burning Pestle’ Review: Wielding His Trusty Kitchen Tools

    With a 17th-century grocer as its hero, Red Bull Theater and Fiasco stage a 400-year-old comedy that’s both a satire of the theater and a valentine to it.When did audience members become so wanton and disorderly? Since theaters reopened a year and a half ago, reports of fights, vomiting, public urination, public sex, and the verbal and physical abuse of staff have proliferated. Early in April, police were called to a theater in Britain hosting “The Bodyguard,” because some ticket holders wouldn’t stop singing along, precipitating a near riot. And on Monday night, at the Lucille Lortel Theater in the West Village, a grocer and his wife stormed the stage — well, maybe she didn’t storm so much as prance on up — to demand that the company revise its show and hire their apprentice, too. Is there an usher in the house?Of course, this particular disruption was planned more than 400 years ago. It’s right there in the script of Francis Beaumont’s “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” a tricksy, loopy, wildly self-referential 1607 play that parodies both city comedy and chivalric romance. Excepting the uptown revival of “Camelot,” these aren’t genres with a lot of currency. But Red Bull Theater and Fiasco, the co-creators of this revival, don’t seem overly concerned. Keep the jokes popping, keep the songs coming, the directors Noah Brody and Emily Young seem to believe, and the contemporaneity will take care of itself.When the play begins, a troupe of actors, costumed in skirts and breeches that gesture toward the Elizabethan, are about to put on a new show, “The London Merchant.” George (Darius Pierce) interrupts them. He doesn’t think that local business owners have been represented fairly by the theater. With the help of his wife, Nell (Jesse Austrian, a Fiasco founder and a cherry bomb of comedy), he forces them to remake the piece with a grocer as its hero. So Rafe (Paco Tolson) is transformed into the Knight of the Burning Pestle, a cavalier with a colander for a helmet and a pestle for a sword.The problem with topical comedy, even backward-looking topical comedy like this, is that the references don’t always survive. That’s true enough here. What’s also true is that the play within the play — the story of a merchant, a daughter, the daughter’s lover — isn’t so engrossing. It also includes a scene in which the lover, Jasper (Devin E. Haqq) threatens to murder the daughter, Luce (Teresa Avia Lim), in order to test her devotion. It’s a frightening moment and categorically abusive. The comedy can’t contain it.But the adventures of the knight and his horse (Royer Bockus) and squire (Ben Steinfeld) are beautifully silly. The interruptions of the grocer and his wife are better still, especially when Nell is pulled onstage to play a pan-Slavic princess who talks like Dracula. Best of all, though, is the Fiasco mien, which favors a giddy, affable, let’s-put-on-a-show quality. The actors are clearly enjoying themselves (Steinfeld, who sings most of his lines, often accompanied by Bockus and the actor and multi-instrumentalist Paul L. Coffey, even more than the rest). And their performances carry with them a swaggering sense of rehearsal room experimentation and delight. They seem to be performing for the sheer pleasure of it, with the audience a welcome afterthought.This probably explains their attraction to “The Knight of the Burning Pestle,” however antiquated and rickety. It’s a satire of theater that is also a valentine to it, to the transport of becoming swept up into a play, to the wonder of seeing someone just like you onstage. Or as in the case of Nell, playing a part yourself. It’s an invitation to all of us: To put on our colanders, take up our kitchen implements and give ourselves over to make-believe.The Knight of the Burning PestleThrough May 13 at the Lucille Lortel Theater, Manhattan; redbulltheater.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    ‘Welcome to Clowntown’ Review: Raunchy Stories and Giant Balloon Animals

    In a production decidedly for grown-ups, Tanya Perez’s one-woman show draws on her life as a professional clown (and occasional stripper).According to Tanya Perez, the writer and performer of “Welcome to Clowntown,” strippers and clowns have the same modus operandi, which includes average dancing while wearing baby attire. She would know: She’s done both jobs.In this unripe one-woman show, Perez, as Pixie the Clown, performs her party act for the audience while regaling them with tales of her career as a clown-for-hire (and more) in New York City and Los Angeles.As Pixie, Perez is dressed in a vivid ensemble designed by Lisa Renee Jordan with polka dots, corkscrew ribbons, a red petticoat, a purple corset and sparkly Chuck Taylors. She seems to have done it all, from stripping to bartending: parties spent placating hostile adults, catering to gross fraternity brothers and serving drinks for one of the Real Housewives. (Don’t ask which one; she signed a nondisclosure agreement.)And then of course there’s clowning, which she started doing in college, amusing obnoxious kids for beer money. That’s why, she announces, with an unprintable word, that she hates your children.Perez has crafted a kind of rudimentary stand-up routine, but it’s light on snappy punch lines and lacks a cohesive narrative structure. Most of her stories stay close to the surface, barely mining their comic potential or personal or political stakes. She gets into misogyny in the exotic dancing world, racist microaggressions in the clowning world (she is Latina, and describes one boss who expected her to be the “hip-hop clown”) and the class divide at play in both. But these themes mostly float at the margins.Produced by the Tank and billed as an “adult immersive experience,” “Welcome to Clowntown” encourages audience participation. Perez makes balloon animals for the audience and plays games like rock, paper, scissors and telephone, but that hardly seems to qualify the work as immersive theater. As a result, the show feels underinflated, despite its fleet 60-minute running time. The erratic direction, by Lorca Peress, exacerbates the problem, fumbling the transitions between Perez’s monologues and the party games.Perez is lively, with a chuckle that’s somewhere between the jovial trill of SpongeBob and the tee-hees of Skeletor. But often her performance feels rehearsed instead of spontaneous, even a bit detached, despite the intimate space with fewer than 50 seats and a small, unadorned stage.Near the end, Perez wrestles a giant balloon animal the way “Clowntown” wrestles in a message about the importance of play and fostering one’s inner child. Still, don’t let the expletives fool you: This may be clowning for adults, but “Clowntown” still has some growing up to do.Welcome to ClowntownThrough May 13 at the Tank, Manhattan; thetanknyc.org. Running time: 1 hour. More

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    The Cathartic Value of Dame Edna’s Extravaganzas of Ego

    Audiences were eager to humbly suffer the stinging quips tossed out by the towering figure that was Barry Humphries’s creation.Listen to This ArticleShe was, lest we forget, the original Real Housewife. Or Surreal Housewife, if you prefer. Possessed of few obvious talents and a bottomless sense of entitlement, this expensively upholstered figure was the archetype for the ordinary middle-class matron who blossomed into improbable, overwhelming, gasp-inducing fame.Her name was Edna Everage (just one vowel away from “average”), and her advent in the mid-20th century anticipated a brash new age of undeserved celebrity. “Oh, my prophetic soul,” she might have said, contemplating the constellation of self-anointed stars who occupy our attention these days. The line comes from “Hamlet.” But Edna was the kind of gal who could convince you that she had coined it all by herself.Dame Edna, as she became known from the early 1970s, was the inspired alter-ego of the sui generis performer Barry Humphries, who died on Saturday in Sydney, Australia. Humphries was 89. Dame Edna, of course, is immortal.To become Edna, Humphries would put on a mauve wig, an increasingly rococo pair of eyeglasses and a glittering gown that screeched conspicuous consumption. Yet it would be a mistake to describe Dame Edna primarily as a drag act.This unfiltered, towering figure — who looked down on the world, in all senses, from a six-foot-plus linebacker’s frame atop stiletto heels — wasn’t a comment on gender. No, Dame Edna was all about blinkered, arrogant class and especially a breed of self-crowned royalty that had become our default deities in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.That would be those who were defined by being famous, whether or not for any discernible reason beyond their willingness to become so. The genius of Humphries’s conceit was to translate the small-minded, unyielding smugness of the middle-class Australian suburbs in which he grew up into the even more invincible complacency of outrageous, drop-dead stardom.As for the rest of us — and that meant, in addition to us peons, her fellow celebrity chums, including the pope and Queen Elizabeth II — we existed to serve as her mirrors, reflecting her own fabulousness.During my tenure as a Times theater critic, there were few events I anticipated more avidly than Dame Edna’s extravaganzas of ego, where I would join the throngs of those she called “possums” and “paupers” to worship at her boat-size feet. Like so many of the greatest comics, she surgically tapped into the ruling obsession of her time.What Lenny Bruce was to the sexual hangups of the late ’50s and early ’60s and what Richard Pryor was to the racial anxieties of the ’70s and ’80s, Dame Edna was to the age of Olympian narcissism. As she said, graciously tossing her signature gladioli into the audience as she was magically lifted into the air at the end of a 1999 performance: “I have to rise above you. It’s the secret of my survival.”Dame Edna in her 2010 show “All About Me” at what is now the Stephen Sondheim Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMy years of reviewing Edna were years when the most commercially successful shows on Broadway were often those that featured faces found on the covers of People, Vanity Fair and supermarket tabloids. Audiences clamored to see Nicole Kidman in “The Blue Room” or Julia Roberts in “Three Days of Rain” not so much to watch a play as to participate in a sacred pilgrimage to the shrines of NICOLE and JULIA.Attending a Dame Edna show thus had its own special cathartic value, rooted in the openly sadomasochistic exchange of energy between her and her audience. She took it for granted that we were there because she was of an unapproachably higher order than we were, a holy order. In a riff that led to a reference to Jesus, she backtracked to say of course she wouldn’t compare herself to him, before pausing to add, “Although there are spooky similarities.”Naturally we humbly suffered the stinging quips she tossed in our direction, collectively and individually. (Pity — and envy — the chosen few she selected for audience participation.) Never mind that when she sang and danced, she sounded like a bullfrog on steroids and moved like a drunken stevedore.She was protected by her impregnable certainty that whatever she did was utterly beyond reproach. Reviewing her 2004 Broadway show “Dame Edna: Back With a Vengeance!,” I wrote, “Dame Edna, you see, knows better than anyone that fame means never having to say you’re sorry.”That attitude is less likely to fly in 2023, when being famous seems to mean you’re apologizing all the time. And in writings and interviews in their later years, both Edna and Humphries stumbled with comments that drew outcries from members of the Latino and trans communities and others.So allow me to return to an earlier moment in this century, when Edna was at the peak of her invulnerability, and I received a letter after raving about one of her shows. “I have to say,” the note read, “I almost deserved it.” It was signed Barry Humphries. Had the signature been Edna Everage there would have been no “almost” about it.Audio produced by More

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    ‘Somebody Somewhere’ Celebrates a Life With Tears and Jokes

    When the sudden death of Mike Hagerty, one of the show’s stars, forced the creators to retool the new season, they sprinkled tributes to him throughout the episodes.In the first episode of the new season of “Somebody Somewhere,” the poignant Kansas-set comedy that returned to HBO this week, Sam (Bridget Everett) receives a letter from her father, Ed. The letter informs her that he has gone to join his brother in Corpus Christi, Texas. Ed, a farmer, has charged Sam with feeding the chickens, mowing the lawn and cleaning out the barn. Sam begins her chores, but when she finds Ed’s baseball cap, she begins to tear up.“It just feels really weird to be here with all his stuff,” Sam says. “I know he couldn’t have cleaned out this barn — it would have broken his heart. I didn’t know it would break mine.”Heartbreak might seem like a strong reaction to some rusted farm equipment. But Mike Hagerty, the actor who played Ed, had died unexpectedly in May 2022, at the age of 67, about a month before filming began for the Season 2. Ed lives on, sailing across the Gulf of Mexico; his absence and Hagerty’s absence inform most of the season. In its quiet, fine-grained way, these episodes of “Somebody Somewhere” provide a eulogy in comedy form, with grief triangulated and transformed.“We knew we wanted to dedicate the season to him,” Hannah Bos, a “Somebody Somewhere” creator, said in a recent video call. “We wanted to celebrate him.”Hagerty, a Chicago native and an alum of the Second City comedy troupe, best known for a five-episode run as the building superintendent on “Friends,” joined the series for the pilot in 2019. Carolyn Strauss, an executive producer, had worked with him before, on the short-lived series “Lucky Louie.” She bet that Hagerty — bushy haired, jowly, with a heart as big as a prairie — would bring warmth and solidity to the taciturn Ed. She won that bet.When Everett, a Kansas-born actress and cabaret star, met him for a chemistry read, she started crying before he had even said a word. “I felt immediately really safe,” she said on that same video call. Strauss and Paul Thureen, the show’s other creator, were also on the line.“It just felt like the right match and the right person and also like I’d met a friend,” Everett said. “I’m not trying to be corny; it’s just really how I felt.”Bos and Thureen enjoyed writing for Hagerty, knowing that he could make any line sound grounded and sincere, that he could endow even simple dialogue with depth. And Everett felt that she grew as an actor every time she was opposite him. He felt to her, she said, like a surrogate father.“Often I get really nervous on sets,” she said. “His affable, calm, steady hand, it set me at ease.”Bridget Everett, left, said that when she met Hagerty, “I immediately felt really safe.” (With Mary Catherine Garrison, bottom left, and Kailey Albus.)Elizabeth Sisson/HBOHagerty seemed to enjoy himself, too. In February 2022, in Los Angeles, HBO hosted a special screening for the Season 1 finale. Strauss chatted with him there, and she recalled him cracking that the show had taught him two words he’d never heard before in his long career: “Season 2.” To celebrate, he bought himself a Toyota RAV4.That spring, ‌Hagerty entered Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, feeling unwell. The Season 2 scripts had already been written, and he planned to participate in a table read from his hospital bed. But he was ultimately too ill to join. On May 5, following an adverse reaction to an antibiotic, he died.The initial response from the producers and his co-stars was a mix of shock and grief. There was a group Zoom call, with cast and creators crying in their separate windows, sharing memories of Hagerty.“He really did feel like a North Star in terms of what we were creating and what we had done,” Strauss said. “So it was hard to believe; it felt very unreal.”Twining with the grief was an understandable amount of panic. The shoot was set to begin in two weeks, and Hagerty was meant to be in almost every episode. Amy Gravitt, HBO’s executive vice president of comedy, made many individual calls, telling the showrunners and producers to take all the time that they needed to mourn — to put off worrying about the show. But Bos and Thureen knew that to put it off for too long would risk losing actors and crew members. A frantic rewrite began.At first, no one knew what to do about Ed, but Strauss, Bos and Thureen felt that they shouldn’t have him die. Season 1 had begun shortly after the death of Sam’s sister Holly — as the show follows Sam’s halting steps toward self-acceptance and a full adult life, the thinking went, another death and an explicit focus on grief would set her back too far.Everett wasn’t so sure. Her own sister and father had died a year apart, and she figured the show, which operates with an unusual degree of realism, might as well mirror that. But after sleeping on it, she agreed.Production was pushed back two weeks. Strauss worried that wouldn’t be enough time for a full rewrite, but she didn’t share that worry with the others. As originally written, the season had focused partly on Ed growing too old for hands-on farming and on his relationship with his wife, an alcoholic. He also played a role in a season-ending wedding. All of that had to be retooled. So Bos, Thureen and Everett got to work on Zoom. Thureen said these sessions, however fraught, brought relief.“It helped in a weird way to have something to focus on,” he said. “It turned into a creative problem-solving thing.”With Strauss’s help, they all worked to find a metaphor that would account for Hagerty’s absence and honor his life. Together they came up with the idea of the brother’s boat and sending Ed across the water, finally free. They also made him a presence throughout several episodes, via occasional letters and phone calls.Jeff Hiller and Everett in the new season of “Somebody Somewhere,” which includes several subtle tributes to Hagerty.Sandy Morris/HBOWhen it came time to do the scene in the barn, Everett was anxious about how it would feel to act without Hagerty. “That was going to be an emotional house of cards for me,” she said. “We all kind of felt it. Just being there without him was devastating.” She had learned the monologue about cleaning out the barn by heart, but when it came time to speak it, the loss of Hagerty overtook her. The tears she cries in the scene are very real.“We only did it two times or three times because it was just a little much,” she said. “I just wanted to say it and then let it go.”Later in the season, there is a funeral for a different character. This became an oblique tribute to Hagerty, with his memory shadowing several of the eulogies. “A poetic honoring,” Thureen called it. And in the final episode, a wedding reception pauses to honor Ed.“Raise your glasses everybody, raise them high — this is to Ed,” a character says. It was a way of making sure that Ed was still there, still a part of this family and this community.If “Somebody Somewhere” is renewed for further seasons, Ed, however far away, will remain a part of them. The creative team is already kicking around Ed-centered ideas for Season 3. Hagerty, in his own way, remains with the show, too.“His impact endures,” Strauss said. “He’s left everybody with a gift: that gravity and humor and forthrightness that characterize him, we all carry it.” More

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    Seth Meyers Speculates About Why Fox Dumped Tucker Carlson

    Meyers joked that “firing Tucker for racism now after tolerating it for so long would be like canceling ‘Sesame Street’ because you just found out they were puppets.”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.Cutting TiesFox News has not said why it ousted Tucker Carlson.Late-night hosts speculated he was let go because of the text messages he sent deriding former President Donald Trump and Fox executives.“Fox couldn’t have cared less when Tucker was saying vulgar, offensive stuff on television about other people, but when he said it in private about Fox News executives, they were suddenly outraged,” Seth Meyers said.“I have no idea why he got fired. Fox had no problem with his cruelty, racism and paranoid conspiracy theories, so I doubt he got fired for that. I mean, firing Tucker for racism now — after tolerating it for so long — would be like canceling ‘Sesame Street’ because you just found out they were puppets.” — SETH MEYERS“Whenever something really big happens that involves Fox News, the last people to hear about it are usually the people who watch Fox News. The network tends to hide news about itself from its own viewers. Last night there were probably a bunch of 80-year-olds watching substitute host Brian Kilmeade, saying, ‘Tucker looks different now. ’” — SETH MEYERS“Man, when Fox cuts ties with someone, they cut ties. That’s the Fox News version of rolling up someone in a carpet and throwing them in the East River.” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, Tucker has a huge following among racist lunatics and people who also want to [expletive] the green M&M.” — SETH MEYERS“It would also be weird if he got fired for being obsessed with incredibly weird [expletive] because that’s also been his thing forever, whether it was sexy candy, or eating bugs, or — this is real — testicle tanning.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Dossier of Dirt Edition)“In honor of Lesbian Visibility Week, the cast of ‘The L Word: Generation Q’ yesterday visited the White House, said Tucker Carlson to a houseplant.” — SETH MEYERS“No one’s heard from Tucker since his surprise firing on Monday, except the pillow he’s been screaming into.” — DESI LYDIC, guest host of “The Daily Show”“Fox News executives reportedly have a dossier of dirt on him. Yeah, to keep him from attacking the network. That’s right, they apparently have him saying the most vile things you can imagine, and the way they compiled it — and this is genius — is by turning on his television show and pressing record.” — DESI LYDIC“One secret weapon Fox News has that they could use to embarrass him is every episode of his show. That’s for starters.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But what could they have on Tucker Carlson that would embarrass him? Did he once try to buy a fuel-efficient car? I mean, does he have a collection of paintings that weren’t by Hitler?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingBlack Thought and El Michels Affair brought the soul singer Kirby onto “The Tonight Show” for a performance of “Glorious Game” on Wednesday.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightJames Corden will be joined by Harry Styles and Will Ferrell for his “Late Late Show” finale on Thursday.Also, Check This OutWynonna Judd in a scene from the new documentary about her. Paramount+“Wynonna Judd: Between Hell and Hallelujah” follows the singer on a tour she was supposed to share with her mother, the late Naomi Judd. More

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    in Theater

    ‘New York, New York’ Review: The Big Apple, Without Bite

    Based loosely on the 1977 film, a show about performers making it in the big city comes to St. James Theater with the sharper edges of its source material sanded off.There’s a big new Broadway musical called “New York, New York,” and it’s based on the Martin Scorsese film bearing the same title.Sort of.Both the movie and the show have lead characters named Jimmy Doyle and Francine Evans, both are set immediately following World War II and both prominently feature a certain anthem by John Kander and Fred Ebb. You know, the one whose first five notes, plunked on a piano, are enough to automatically prompt the brain to fill in the rest.And it is that title song alone, rather than the movie, that is the true inspiration for the sprawling, unwieldy, surprisingly dull show that opened on Wednesday night at the St. James Theater.Extrapolating from its lyrics, “New York, New York,” directed and choreographed by Susan Stroman, is about the people wearing those “vagabond shoes,” the ones who “want to wake up in the city that doesn’t sleep.” Jimmy (Colton Ryan) and Francine (Anna Uzele) now rub elbows with characters dreamed up by the book writer David Thompson with Sharon Washington. They are musicians and singers, strivers and dreamers. And sadly, none make much of an impression, mired as they are in a syrupy muck of good sentiments and grating civic cheerleading.As the various story lines move toward their inevitable intersection, any sign of wrinkle or kink has been smoothed out. The most prominent victims are the reimagined Jimmy and Francine, who have been flattened into cardboard figures. The film’s Jimmy, portrayed by Robert De Niro, was an obnoxious, abusive, narcissistic jerk of a sax player who fell for Liza Minnelli’s Francine, a passionate singer who worked her way up from canary in big bands to solo star; their volatile relationship would not pass the smell test with 2023 audiences.The new Jimmy is merely a minor irritant who has graduated from good saxophonist to brilliant multi-instrumentalist equally at ease playing jazz with the African American trumpeter Jesse (John Clay III) and Latin grooves with the Cuban percussionist Mateo (Angel Sigala), whose own stories are delineated in broad strokes. That Jimmy ends up as a human bridge between the musical styles of Harlem and Spanish Harlem is quite a feat for a white-bread Irish kid. (A Jewish violinist played by Oliver Prose mostly exists on the sideline.)Meanwhile, Francine comes across as a spunky, empowered free spirit plugged into a 21st-century outlet. A Black woman, she overcomes the treacherous waters of the music scene with relative ease, and setbacks seem to glide off her.Ryan (“Girl From the North Country,” Connor in the film of “Dear Evan Hansen”) and Uzele (“Once on This Island,” Catherine Parr in “Six”) are technically fine, but they don’t fill characters drawn as sketches. They never find the ache that drives both Francine and Jimmy, nor the sexual attraction between them.This creates a central void that further restrains the overly polished book — friction feeds fiction.And if anybody knows that, it’s John Kander. An effective mix of louche syncopation, unabashed romanticism and biting sarcasm long set Kander and Ebb apart on Broadway, from “Cabaret” to “Chicago” to their brilliant earlier collaboration with Stroman, “The Scottsboro Boys.”The score for “New York, New York” juxtaposes new songs Kander wrote with Lin-Manuel Miranda, like the propulsive “Music, Money, Love,” with older ones set to lyrics by Ebb. Of those, the best known (you-know-what and “But the World Goes ’Round”) were pulled from the Scorsese movie, while others were repurposed, such as “A Quiet Thing” from the 1965 show “Flora the Red Menace,” and “Marry Me” from “The Rink” (1984).But no matter when or who they were written with, too many of the songs lack Kander and Ebb’s signature serrated edge. Partly this has to do with Sam Davis’s arrangements and music direction, which have a deficit of oomph, and thus further reinforce the show’s sexlessness — there is no pulse when there is no swing. (Kander and Ebb were capable of that more than most Broadway creators: Just listen to, say, the fantastically driving “Gimme Love” from “Kiss of the Spider Woman.”)Francine, who comes across as an empowered free spirit, seems to overcome the treacherous waters of the music scene and racial animosities of the 1940s with relative ease, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe new show’s rah-rah tone eventually becomes numbing. This is all the more frustrating because ambivalence is baked into the title song, which alludes to the city’s mercurial temperament. “If I can make it there/I’d make it anywhere” — we’re in a tough town — is followed by “It’s up to you/New York, New York,” which deprives the singer of agency. But the show follows the triumphant template set by Frank Sinatra rather than the more ambiguous one imparted by Minnelli. In this rose-colored vision, trials are temporary, everybody gets along, and nobody runs up against New York’s bad side.Stroman has a rare affinity for classic Broadway showmanship, as illustrated by her work on “Crazy for You” and “The Producers,” but she can also veer into radical stylization, as in “The Scottsboro Boys.”Here, the flashes of inspiration are few and far between. A highlight is a tap number staged on high beams, with a couple inscribed with “JK 3181927” and “FE 481928” — Kander and Ebb’s birth dates, and two of the Easter eggs lurking in Beowulf Boritt’s vibrant set, dominated by towering fire escapes. The magical moment known as Manhattanhenge is evoked with a terrific assist from the lighting designer Ken Billington. And there is, as always, the visceral thrill of watching a big band rise up to the stage, when Jimmy’s combo kicks off the title song at the end.It is not much to remember from a show that clocks in at nearly three hours and had such formidable potential. “You can be anyone here,” Jesse says at one point, “do anything here.”If only “New York, New York” had interpreted that line not as a reassurance, but as a challenge to dare.New York, New YorkAt the St. James Theater, Manhattan; newyorknewyorkbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes. More