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    ‘Henry IV’ Review: Two Plays Become One

    The relationship between Prince Hal and John Falstaff, a favorite of Shakespeare scholars, is the focus of this condensed adaptation.A young prince and an old knight walk into a tavern …So much of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV” plays like a setup, either to a joke or to a significant turning point in English history. It’s perhaps the most defining, and trickiest, element of the Henry plays, which often combine the interpersonal high jinks of a comedy with the politics and knavery of a war drama, sans the typical dramatic structure.In a new production from the Theater for a New Audience, the two “Henry IV” plays are combined into a single adaptation that clocks in at nearly four hours. The script, by Dakin Matthews, condenses and restructures the material, while the direction by Eric Tucker opts for a more classic, toned-down staging. For all the successful work this “Henry IV” does to combat the unwieldy bloat of the two history plays together, it does not probe the central characters enough to uphold the stakes and maintain the tension throughout the lengthy running time. The result is a serviceable production that lacks fresh revelations.The “Henry IV” plays are part of the Henriad, the series of history plays that begin with “Richard II” and end with “Henry V.” Often considered the less glamorous section of Shakespeare’s oeuvre, the plays are about the making and unmaking of kings, the burdens of the crown, revolts, betrayals and the disastrous clashing of many male egos.At the start of “Henry IV,” Henry Bolingbroke (played by Matthews) has usurped the crown with the help of the Percys, a family of English lords who now lead a rebellion against Bolingbroke for that same crown they helped him procure. Meanwhile, Bolingbroke’s son, Prince Hal (Elijah Jones), fetters away his time drinking and palling around with the crooked old knight John Falstaff (Jay O. Sanders) and his reprehensible cohort. Hal and Falstaff’s trivial pursuits are interrupted, however, when they’re called to the battlefield, and by the end of “Henry IV,” Hal has renounced his old habits, brutally rebuffed Falstaff and taken his place on the throne as King Henry V.The relationship between Hal and Falstaff, a favorite of lit majors and Shakespeare scholars, is the true heart of the material. The young prince and the old knight are like father and son, mentor and mentee, but also serve as each other’s foils. They represent opposite sides of age and privilege, and their gradual dynamic shift reveals the nuances of their characters. For all his comedic purpose in the story, Falstaff emerges as a tragic figure — the niggling sideshow act in a grander story about nobility and a nation’s evolution. He’s the sacrificial lamb to Prince Hal’s ascension.Each of the three acts ends with a major scene between Hal and Falstaff, marking another dramatic crux in their story. One of the production’s strengths is how Matthews cleverly structures the script to steadily follow the arc of these two characters. However, the same nuance and decisiveness is less present in the direction and some of the performances.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Night Sings Its Songs’ Review: Rare Staging of Nobel Winner Jon Fosse’s Play

    A play by the Nobel winner Jon Fosse gets a rare staging, but New Yorkers will have to wait a little longer to see a production that captures the Norwegian writer’s haunting universe.When the Norwegian writer Jon Fosse won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2023, he joined the small circle of dramatists to have received that honor, including two men he is often compared to: Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter.Unlike Beckett and Pinter, however, Fosse is largely unknown in the United States — outside of shows like “A Summer Day” in 2012 and “I Am the Wind” in 2014, productions in supposedly cosmopolitan New York are few and far between. This makes New Light Theater Project’s middling new take on Fosse’s “Night Sings Its Songs” at least noteworthy.Like much of his stage work, “Night Sings Its Songs” — which premiered in Norway in 1997 and was staged in New York in 2004 by Sarah Cameron Sunde, a translator and Fosse evangelist — is simultaneously elliptical and brutally precise. The main characters in these scenes from a miserable marriage are the Young Man (Kyle Cameron) and the Young Woman (Susan Lynskey). They have been together since high school, and their new baby seems to have brought buried issues to the surface.He spends his days and, apparently, nights reading on the couch, and fruitlessly submits manuscripts to publishers. She’s going stir crazy and eventually decides to head out on the town. At one point, she desultorily says of her husband: “He is nice. But he understands little about nothing.” For most of the play, the couple’s conversations revolve around variations on “you never want to go out” (she) and “who were you out with?” (he). They both suffer from a mutually soul-destroying postpartum funk, and it is grueling.In his Nobel acceptance speech, Fosse said that “in my drama the word pause is without a doubt the most important and the most used word — long pause, short pause, or just pause.” The script for “Night Sings Its Songs” includes stage directions and, yes, many, many requests for pauses, but no punctuation. Concretely, this means that a Fosse staging must hit an almost musical rhythm, inducing a kind of entranced fascination — the repeated motifs are like ostinatos in minimalist music.And that is where Jerry Heymann’s production falls short. It struggles to settle into the particular groove the play requires, and leans into a fairly naturalistic approach that not only fails to sync up with the text, but often also tussles against it.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With ‘Mindplay,’ Vinny DePonto Wants to Bring More Awe Into Your Life

    In this mentalist show, the magician asks his audience: “What is most meaningful to you?”When Vinny DePonto was a student at Manhattanville University, he really wanted to major in magic. But that wasn’t an option, so he created his own course of study, combining theater and psychology into a major he called psychology of performance art.“I used a little trickery to major in magic,” DePonto, 38, recalled during a recent interview at a West Village coffee shop.The intersection of stage and psyche is where DePonto takes audiences in his mentalist show “Mindplay,” directed by Andrew Neisler and running through April 20 at the Greenwich House Theater. In it, DePonto alternates between tender remembrances of growing up in a close-knit Italian American family in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y., and seemingly supernatural feats that involve him calling audience members onto the stage to talk about their most personal memories.“Mindplay” is scheduled to run through April 20 at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan.Chris RuggieroDuring the performance I attended, sniffles and gasps could be heard around the theater as DePonto, who wrote the show with Josh Koenigsberg, sat across from a man and discerned details about the man’s dead father and his beloved harmonica.DePonto has been reading minds for roughly 20 years, and he has cited as inspiration Ricky Jay, the renowned magician and mentalist who died in 2018. He said he caught the magic bug as a boy when his father gave him a shoe box of disappearing handkerchief-style tricks.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Dutchman’: An Electrifying Dance of Death

    A newly restored film adaptation of Amiri Baraka’s provocative 1964 play evoking racial and sexual anxiety is showing at the Museum of Modern Art.A subway car encounter between a button-down Black man, Clay, and a provocative white woman, Lula, ends in violence: The enigmatically named “Dutchman,” a half-hour play-cum-exorcism by Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones) was the Off Broadway sensation of 1964. Two years later, it was filmed by a neophyte director, Anthony Harvey. The response was mixed in the United States, and the film disappeared.Now newly restored, “Dutchman” is showing through Feb. 19 at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.A one-act two-hander modeled on Edward Albee’s menacing “Zoo Story,” “Dutchman” shared a bill with plays by two reigning “absurdists,” Samuel Beckett and Fernando Arrabal Terán; it reaped all the attention, received an Obie and was retained for a second run, billed with Albee’s “American Dream.” Generally faithful to the play, Harvey’s film expanded it to just under an hour with contextualizing shots of deserted subway platforms and trains barreling through dark tunnels. Lula (Shirley Knight) has ample time to slink around an otherwise empty car and, munching on an apple, writhe into the seat next to the uptight Clay (Al Freeman Jr.). Toward the end of the film, Harvey adds a half-dozen passengers, silent witnesses to their mortal combat.The dialogue is often terrific (Baraka was, after all, a poet) and until the climax “Dutchman” is essentially a verbal sparring match. Knight and Freeman, both members of the Actors Studio, were matched in the play’s Los Angeles production and, both electrifying in their own ways, returned to the fray with relish.In addition to evoking racial and sexual anxiety, “Dutchman” channels the urban nightmare of subway harassment or entrapment. Recalling “No Exit,” it might have been named after a 1930s race film, “Hellbound Train.” Harvey incorporates a current ad poster in which Bert Lahr’s devil proffers a bag of Lay’s potato chips, but nothing may be more allegorical than snaky Lula’s endless supply of apples. There are autobiographical aspects as well. Lula’s taunting lines are sprinkled with coded digs at Baraka’s white patrons (Allen Ginsberg and Albee), his Jewish wife at the time (Hettie Jones) and the author himself, calling Clay by Baraka’s original first name, “Everett.”Shock value notwithstanding, the play was respectfully received in the United States. Not so the film. The New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called it “a drawn-out, rancorous gabfest” lacking “consistency or conviction.” The movie fared better in Europe. It opened the Venice Film Festival (where Knight won an acting award) and received enthusiastic notices in Britain, earning Harvey a gig directing Katharine Hepburn and Peter O’Toole as the jousting royal couple in “The Lion in Winter.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    New Season of ‘The White Lotus’ Brings a Tourism Boom in Thailand

    Crowds of visitors descended on Maui and Sicily after the HBO show’s first two seasons. Is the tropical resort island of Koh Samui ready for Season 3?When the third season of the hit HBO series “The White Lotus” debuts on Sunday, viewers will be transported to the tropical island of Koh Samui, Thailand. And if previous seasons are any indication, many of them will soon be booking vacations there, too.The show, which takes place at a different fictional White Lotus luxury resort each season, centers on a group of wealthy tourists, their interpersonal dramas and the inevitable tension with staff and locals, all against a backdrop of paradise skewed.Members of the “White Lotus” cast this season include Lalisa Manobal, right, who performs as Lisa with the K-pop group Blackpink.Fabio Lovino/HBO, via Associated PressThe travel industry has been anticipating the new season almost as much as fans have. Partly thanks to the so-called “White Lotus” effect, Koh Samui and Thailand have already emerged as top destinations. Koh Samui was one of the New York Times 52 Places to Go in 2025, and Thailand was Travel+Leisure’s 2025 destination of the year.With a wave of tourists set to wash ashore, the roughly 68,000 residents of Koh Samui are about to get a lot more familiar with the “White Lotus” effect.On the pristine white sand of Chaweng Beach one recent evening, Tey, 46, a local carpenter who declined to give his last name, said he didn’t really know much about the series. But then came a flash of recognition.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The Actor Fred Savage’s New Role Is as a Watch Entrepreneur

    The actor, who spent his childhood in “The Wonder Years,” has established a watch assessment service.Fred Savage, the actor best known for his childhood role in the television comedy “The Wonder Years,” has taken on a new part in real life: watch collector and entrepreneur.In the past six months or so, he attended Geneva Watch Days, WatchTime New York and the Dec. 6 Important Watches auction at Sotheby’s New York. He also is a member of Classic Watch Club, a collectors’ group in Manhattan, and owns about 50 watches.“Watch collecting started as a hobby, because I was really interested in these mechanical objects that still worked and looked so great a hundred years after they were manufactured,” Mr. Savage, 48, said during a phone interview (wearing, he noted, a Jaeger-LeCoultre Memovox GT). “The deeper I’ve gotten into watches, my knowledge has grown. It has really enriched my life — almost every aspect of my life — because of the people that it has introduced me to.”And late last month Mr. Savage officially introduced Timepiece Grading Specialists, or TGS, a business that rates a watch’s condition for authentication or valuation purposes. Fees start at $250 per watch, which would include a detailed report with photos; appraisals, servicing and storage are available at additional cost. The business began accepting watches for evaluation last fall in a kind of soft launch, and three of the watches sold at the Sotheby’s sale in December had TGS assessments.Timepiece Grading Specialists is headquartered in Dayton, Ohio, in the offices of Stoll & Company, which handles the horological work.Brian Kaiser for The New York TimesMr. Savage said his company was meant to fill a void in the watch community. “I realized that, with the huge marketplace that’s like the Wild West, nobody’s looking out for the collector,” he said. “I looked at all these other collectible verticals: Whether it’s comic books or coins or baseball cards or sports cards or shoes or video games, every one of these collectibles has one, if not multiple, third-party authentication and grading services.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Pokes Fun at Trump’s Paper Straw Ban

    “Listen, the fact of the matter is Trump loves plastic,” Kimmel said. “Most of his wives are made of plastic.”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 Most Important Stuff’On Tuesday, Jimmy Kimmel noted that President Trump had been signing a flurry of executive orders, often on TV. “It’s like the Jerry Lewis telethon with this guy,” he said. One presidential edict canceled a government effort to replace plastic straws with paper ones. “All day, reporters in there — he’s taking questions, having meetings, he’s tackling all the most important stuff. He did the same thing yesterday, all day. He canceled the penny, he changed the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, and he finally got tough on paper straws.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Of course, the reason we switched to those admittedly terrible paper straws in the first place is because plastic straws wind up in the ocean, and they kill marine life, which I guess is another argument Trump, a well-known hater of sharks, doesn’t buy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That degree in marine biology is really coming in handy.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Listen, the fact of the matter is Trump loves plastic. Most of his wives are made of plastic.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Remember when Trump said he would make the day after the Super Bowl a national holiday? When is that executive order coming down the pike? Let’s whip out that fat little presidential Sharpie and deliver on what might be the only good thing you ever do. Do it.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Brotherly Love Edition)“The Philadelphia Eagles are set to hold their Super Bowl victory parade this week on Valentine’s Day in what’s being called the ultimate test for Philadelphia boyfriends. ‘[Imitating Philadelphia Eagles fan:] Babe, what if I go for just an hour or so?’” — SETH MEYERS“It’s also Valentine’s Day, so while couples will be enjoying an edible arrangement, Eagles fans will be enjoying an arrangement of edibles.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, that’s right, the Eagles’ parade is this Friday. It’s great for fans ’cause there’s no work the next day, but bad because they can’t see a judge till Monday.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJesse Eisenberg discussed his film “A Real Pain” on Tuesday’s “Daily Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightJon Hamm will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Night with Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutSandra Bezic, Carolyn Taylor and Kurt Browning hit the ice in “I Have Nothing.”PeacockThe Canadian comedian Carolyn Tyler tries to fulfill a lifelong dream by choreographing a figure skating routine in “I Have Nothing,” a new six-part series on Peacock. More

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    ‘I Have Nothing’ Is a Wacky and Moving Docu-Comedy

    In this six-part Peacock series, the comedian Carolyn Taylor tries to choreograph a figure-skating routine, despite being barely able to skate.Comedians’ quixotic quests to delve into childhood obsessions or achieve strange dreams well outside their areas of expertise are typically relegated to the podcast format, and the Canadian series “I Have Nothing” (on Peacock) has that same ramshackle, worlds-collide style. Luckily it’s a TV show, because its premise is a visual one: the creation and performance of a pairs figure-skating routine set to Whitney Houston’s “I Have Nothing.”The comedian Carolyn Taylor (“Baroness von Sketch Show”) was a kid during the 1988 Calgary Winter Olympics, and those Games left a real impression, especially the figure skating. The Battle of the Brians, Katarina Witt, Gordeeva and Grinkov — the highest of highs. Decades later, with no connection to the sport whatsoever, Taylor hears Whitney Houston on the radio and is struck by a vision, one that she and perhaps only she can make real in the world. She wants to create a pairs program to Houston’s banger, and she can picture the whole thing: the jumps and the lifts, the footwork sequences, the open-armed glides and intense expressions.So she decides to answer this calling, to choreograph a routine for Olympic-level skaters. She can barely skate and does not know any of the terminology, but she forges ahead. “Can’t this be a ‘buffoon makes good’ story?” she asks her pal, the comedian Mae Martin.It can; it is; “buffoon makes good” is a perfect way to describe the six-part docu-comedy. Taylor goes right to the top and enlists the Canadian choreographer, broadcaster and skater Sandra Bezic as a mentor, and much of the show is built on Bezic’s expertise (and, seemingly, Rolodex). A few false starts feel like filler at the beginning. But by Episode 3, things are really happening, and somehow the Olympic champions Ekaterina Gordeeva and David Pelletier are on board to skate the program.If you are a person who values preparedness, “Nothing” will fry the hair off your head with Taylor’s lack thereof — though eventually her madness reveals its methods. Much of the show is played for cringe, but everyone’s enthusiasm tends to melt that awkwardness. Several figure-skating legends contribute expertise and advice, and two Canadian skaters Taylor worshiped in her youth, Kurt Browning and Brian Orser, even get on the ice with her to help codify her ideas. The good nature on display here is genuinely moving, and the figure skating ain’t bad either.SIDE QUESTSIf you are craving more figure skating, the documentary series “Harlem Ice,” about the coaches and young skaters at Figure Skating in Harlem, debuts Wednesday, on Disney+.Pelletier is one of the main subjects of the terrific documentary series “Meddling” (on Peacock), about the 2002 pairs figure-skating judging scandal.“Baroness von Sketch Show” is available on the Roku Channel. More