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    ‘The Consultant’ Review: When Your Start-Up Goes to Hell

    Christoph Waltz plays a very, very bad boss in a dark tech-industry satire from Amazon Prime Video.“The Consultant,” an amusing trifle on Amazon Prime Video that burns through most of its dark-comic capital before its eight episodes are up, is set during a critical moment at a tech company: when new, “competent” management takes over for the brilliant but callow founder.It’s a Tim Cook-Steve Jobs scenario — there’s even a scene involving a sledgehammer, to reinforce the Apple connection — with a twist that both gives the show its satirical energy and limits the reach of its dark humor. The evil new boss, a silver-haired suit named Regus (Christoph Waltz), is actually evil: He arrives, like Old Scratch, with a contract and finagles the leader of a struggling video-game company into signing it, thereby bartering away the business. (The young technocrat doesn’t appear to have a soul to give up.)“The Consultant” was created and written by the British screenwriter Tony Basgallop, based on a novel by Bentley Little, and it is in the vein of his previous American series, “Servant” on Apple TV+. Basgallop dresses up basic horror premises with curlicues of mordant, deadpan humor, and creates an ambient pea soup of unease that, for his well-employed but economically insecure young characters, constitutes a reign of terror. Key to the formula is the coy refusal to specify whether what we’re seeing is supernatural malevolence or simply really bad behavior.“Servant,” a creepy-babysitter drama that counts M. Night Shyamalan among its executive producers, succeeded in its early going largely on the basis of Lauren Ambrose’s antic, fearless performance as a frantic tiger mom. “The Consultant” doesn’t have that kind of energy at its center — Waltz, recycling his oddball cultivated-creepy persona for the umpteenth time, is amusing but not much more as the coldblooded, possibly diabolical capitalist.You can’t really blame Waltz, though, because there’s not much to the character beyond the idea of boss as devil. Basgallop and his collaborators, who include the director Matt Shakman (“WandaVision”), seem to have started with that notion and then worked, with diminishing results, to stretch it out in a way that didn’t answer any questions and left open the possibility of a second season.The satire of the tech industry is microchip thin, though often clever in its specifics. The almost entirely faceless staff of CompWare are uniformly indolent and feckless; Regus, who knows nothing about the product or the business, treats the office as a jungle and sets the workers against one another like players in one of the company’s games. In an industry that prides itself on its unconventionality, he’s the real chaos agent. But he’s also an unrepentant Luddite, or maybe just an ancient soul — he refers to a phone as “your hand device” and lovingly, manually sharpens a long row of pencils. (The pencils, like the stairs leading to Regus’s office, are a suggestive blood red.)Just a handful of performers, besides Waltz, have roles of any significance. His primary co-stars are Brittany O’Grady (“White Lotus”) and Nat Wolff (“The Stand”) as Elaine, an executive assistant, and Craig, a coder. They are the only employees who bother to act on their suspicions of Regus, whose plans appear to extend beyond CompWare in lurid and possibly apocalyptic ways.Their investigation of him provides most of the show’s plot as well as a semblance of thematic complexity. Elaine is a loyal corporate soldier who tries to temper Regus’s crueler impulses while angling for a better title; Craig is a smart but lazy man-child opposed to any exercise of authority that threatens his good times. (Wolff gives the show’s liveliest performance.) The ability of the two to work together for a larger good is a test of Regus’s beliefs about human nature.Some of Basgallop’s ideas pay dividends — Regus’s tone-deaf commitment to keeping his bargain with the CompWare founder has droll results — and there’s pleasure in the arch, offhand way Waltz puts across his character’s old-world weirdness. (When Regus discovers that one of his employees is lesbian, he tells the assembled work force, “Ursula lies with a woman.”) But Basgallop’s cross of “Silicon Valley” and “The Devil’s Advocate” doesn’t come together because he hasn’t invested sufficiently in the dramatic infrastructure. We’re left waiting for Regus’s mask to come off and wondering if there will be anything there when it does. More

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    Alexander Zeldin Brings ‘Love’ to the Park Avenue Armory

    Because his shows are based on research and interviews, and are grounded in pressing social issues, the British writer and director Alexander Zeldin is often said to practice docu-theater.The first part of his “Inequalities” trilogy, “Beyond Caring” (2014), is about zero-hour contracts (a British term for when an employer does not have to offer a minimum number of hours), while “Faith, Hope and Charity” (2019) is set at a community center for the poor and the homeless. Zeldin’s “Love,” which starts previews at the Park Avenue Armory on Saturday, and opened in 2016 at the National Theater in London, takes place in a temporary-housing facility. “The whole project is to write the tragic knot of our time,” Zeldin said.Yet he grimaced when that docu-theater label came up in a video conversation from London, where he was rehearsing “Love” — so popular across the Atlantic that it has traveled to eight European countries since its premiere, including France, Austria and Serbia, and was filmed by the BBC in 2018 — before its American debut.“I don’t see what I do as docu-theater at all,” he said, adding, “My script is about music. It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”For Zeldin, 37, subject and form are inextricably linked. In “Love,” for example, the house lights remain on and the actors portraying the people at the shelter often sit amid‌ or walk around audience members, as if to say they are us and we are them, separated only by circumstance. Meanwhile, the narrative is carefully built in a tragic arc.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.“The structure is very classical and that’s very, very deliberate,” Zeldin said. “It’s rooted in life with an ambition to be judged or experienced as theater, not as testimony.”Amelda Brown during rehearsals. Her character in “Love” is losing control over her mind and body.Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesZeldin grew up in Britain as the son of an Australian mother and a Jewish refugee father who was born in Haifa, Israel. His death when Zeldin was 15 created instant turmoil.“I was in trouble at school and all sorts of things that made me find theater, a place where I could have a real concentration of life,” Zeldin said. “I was very drawn to how it was making me feel life with the intensity that I felt in the most intense moments in my own life, which were quite a few at that time.”He started exploring theater at 17; his first play was an adaptation of the Marguerite Duras novel “Moderato Cantabile.” After studying at Oxford, Zeldin roamed the world, soaking up theater cultures and making works in countries like Georgia, Egypt, South Korea and Russia. In 2012 he became an assistant to the revered director Peter Brook and his longtime collaborator, Marie-Hélène Estienne, and started teaching at the London acting school East 15, where he began developing the hyper-real style of the “Inequalities” trilogy.“My script is about music,” Alexander Zeldin said. “It’s about rhythm. Very modestly, that’s the ambition.”Lauren Fleishman for The New York TimesA big preoccupation was the austerity programs implemented by Prime Minister David Cameron, so Zeldin hit the pavement and conducted extensive research. For “Love,” he went to shelters and reached out to organizations like the housing and homelessness charity Shelter. He was put in touch with Louise Walker, now 47, who inspired the characters of Emma and Dean, a young couple marooned at the shelter with Dean’s children.After Walker lost her home, Zeldin learned, she and her children ended up in housing that was meant to be temporary but lasted for months. She faced Kafka-esque bureaucratic labyrinths and had to juggle contradictory administrative demands, which we discover with horror in the play. “I do think that the whole system is designed to make you feel extremely uncomfortable and unworthy and just to stay in the squalor that this society put you in,” Walker said in a video chat.“In every part of the process, Alex was like, ‘You’ll be involved and tell me if I’m relaying correctly the things that you’re saying to me,’” she said. “He allowed us to very much tell our story.” (She and her daughter Renée are in the BBC film.)Zeldin wrote sketches of scenes, which he refined into an outline through a series of workshops. “We bring in 30 or 40 people, we pay them to be involved, and then we go out into the world working with families in their homes, understanding their situation,” he said. “Because I was doing so much work with community groups anyway, it felt natural to me that that should be part of the artistic process, that there should be a room, a great radical mix of people in the room.”This is represented onstage as well. While some people in the cast have theater experience — like Amelda Brown, who joined the cast in 2021 and whose character, Barbara, is losing control over her mind and body — some don’t. It’s an important semantic distinction that Zeldin prefers to “professional” versus “amateur.”Hind Swareldahab and Naby Dakhli during a break from rehearsals.Lauren Fleishman for The New York Times“Hind’s a big professional,” he said, referring to Hind Swareldahab, who plays Tharwa, a Sudanese refugee like herself. “She’s performed at the Odéon twice, she’s performed at the Vienna festival, Geneva, the National Theater. She’s got a great C.V. and she’s a brilliant actor, but she’d never been in a theater before she worked with me. She didn’t know there was a front of house, she didn’t know there was a stage. And so that brings you face to face with the question of, What is the theater for? And unless we ask this question, if we rely on habit, we will die.”Swareldahab, 46, who works as a pharmacist, heard about one of the “Love” workshops in an email from the Refugee Council, a charity and advocacy group. She has done the play many times now, and still marvels at its emotional toll. “Every second, every line, we feel it,” she said. “It’s not easy to watch. Every country, people cry. Everything is real. It’s hard to watch.”At the same time, it should be clear that the show is not a huge downer but is about resilience and our shared humanity — and it pulses with the power of a good yarn.“I want theater to be useful to the world, and I passionately don’t think that that is against poetics, against great storytelling, against entertainment, against accessibility,” Zeldin said. “I’m very lucky that ‘Love’ sells out. It’s a show that people want to see, and that’s very important to me.” More

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    Obie Awards Honor ‘English’ as Best New Play

    A ceremony for the awards, celebrating work Off and Off Off Broadway, will be held Monday, but organizers decided to announce the winners in advance.The Obie Awards, back on track after a lengthy pandemic hiatus, are naming “English,” an acclaimed comedic drama set in an Iranian test-prep classroom, the best new American play staged Off Broadway over a two-year period.The play, written by the Iranian American playwright Sanaz Toossi, depicts four students, each at different stages of life and with different motivations, struggling to master English well enough to pass the Test of English as a Foreign Language. The play was staged in New York early last year as a coproduction of the Atlantic and Roundabout theater companies. In The New York Times, the critic Jesse Green wrote, “Both contemplative and comic, it nails every opportunity for big laughs as its English-learning characters struggle with accents and idioms. But the laughter provides cover for the deeper idea that their struggle is not just linguistic.”Strong reviews have led to subsequent productions that are currently running in Washington and Toronto; another production is scheduled to begin performances next month in Berkeley, Calif.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The Obie Awards, founded by the Village Voice and now presented by the American Theater Wing, honor theater staged Off and Off Off Broadway. This year’s ceremony will be held Monday night at Terminal 5 and will recognize work presented in person or online between July 1, 2020, and Aug. 31, 2022. The Wing decided to announce the award recipients in advance to allow the evening to focus on a celebration of theater’s resilience. Acceptance speeches are being posted on the Wing’s YouTube channel.The Obies, by tradition, do not have established categories; instead, the judges each year give out awards as they see fit. This year the judging panel, headed by the director David Mendizábal and the critic Melissa Rose Bernardo, is giving 37 awards.Among the winners: Martyna Majok, already a Pulitzer winner for “Cost of Living,” is being granted an Obie for playwriting in recognition of “Sanctuary City,” an immigration drama. Presented by New York Theater Workshop, the show got through a week of previews before being forced to close by the pandemic and then resumed performances 18 months later.Performance awards will go to Stephanie Berry and Lizan Mitchell for “On Sugarland” at New York Theater Workshop; Brittany Bradford for “Wedding Band” at Theater for a New Audience; Kara Young for “Twelfth Night” at the Classical Theater of Harlem; and Arturo Luís Soria for “Ni Mi Madre” at Rattlestick Theater. Also, sustained achievement in performance awards will be given to Billy Eugene Jones for “Fat Ham” at the Public Theater and “On Sugarland”; and to Andrea Patterson for “Cullud Wattah” at the Public, “Confederates” at Signature Theater and “Seize the King” at the Classical Theater of Harlem.The Obies are bestowing multiple special citations, including for members of the teams that created “English” and “Fat Ham” as well as “Oratorio for Living Things” at Ars Nova; a musical adaptation of “As You Like It” for Free Shakespeare in the Park; “The Nosebleed” at Lincoln Center Theater and the Japan Society; and a trio of digital, virtual or hybrid productions: “Circle Jerk,” “Russian Troll Farm” and “Taxilandia.” Also getting citations: the comedian Alex Edelman, for “Just for Us”; the playwright Richard Nelson, for his series of 12 plays set in Rhinebeck; and the costume designer Qween Jean, for work on seven shows.A full list of winners is here. More

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    ‘Party Down’ Gets It: Food Service Is No Party

    The reboot of the Starz sitcom about the mundane lives of L.A. cater waiters comes at the right moment, when restaurant work has shed much of its glittery image.In their baby-pink bow ties and crumpled white shirts, the catering crew on the Starz series “Party Down” works event after wretched event across Los Angeles: dismal rich-kid sweet 16s and backstage parties for jaded superstars, awkward and unsuccessful suburban orgies, singles seminars for seniors, bland corporate retreats.But none of these workers take their jobs too seriously — catering isn’t their real life, it doesn’t count, it’s just keeping them afloat until their dreams of becoming screenwriters, actors and comedians come true. This means that there is always time for vodka shots (so many shots!), running lines and reading scripts, agonizing over auditions, making out and popping whatever pills might be hidden in people’s bathrooms.The series premiered in 2009, and was canceled after two seasons of abysmal ratings. But it found a cult following gradually, over the last 13 years, and returns this week with a new six-episode season. What really struck me, watching new episodes about my favorite bunch of food-service slackers, is how completely different “Party Down” feels from so much of the chef-focused TV and film that followed its initial run.Though Season 3 does introduce a tormented, misunderstood catering chef, played by Zoë Chao, who believes that food is art and it “should change the way you think and feel,” the show doesn’t fetishize food or cooking at all.Unlike, say, “The Bear” or “The Menu” in which a chef’s fierce intensity and ambition drive the business, “Party Down” features food workers who don’t really care about the job, and the food itself is almost entirely beside the point.In 2009, that seemed like a good read on a microcosm of the Los Angeles catering scene, but now it feels sharper, more perceptive and possibly more honest about food service as a whole. For a generation of workers who survived the pandemic and sought more balanced, healthy lives, the inequities, demands and tedium of the industry have never been clearer.“Party Down” is a goofy workplace sitcom, but it’s also that rare show that centers food-service workers, rather than chefs, owners or wealthy clientele. At the heart of the series is a crew of caterers and the mess of their ordinary, cringe-worthy, tangled-up lives — breakups, financial strains, humiliations. Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an English teacher in the middle of a divorce, who has given up on acting (or has he?). Roman (Martin Starr) is devoted to “hard sci-fi” and still working on his opus, which he started writing on a roll of toilet paper while very high. Ken Marino plays their impossibly optimistic and awkward manager, Ron Donald, who is always on the verge of unraveling.Adam Scott plays Henry, an English teacher going through a divorce, with Jennifer Garner appearing as a producer, catering client and love interest.Leroy and Rose Agency, via StarzIn earlier seasons, clients often romanticized the lifestyles of the young cater-waiters, and the freedom (read: insecurity) of working from gig to gig. “I could have been you,” a wealthy suburban dad tells Henry with a sigh, feeling trapped in his own cushy life. In another episode, a glam-rock star called Jackal Onassis confesses to Henry that he has “a fake life.”“You know what I wish I could buy?” he says. “This! Being you guys. A real guy with an ordinary job.”Henry, who notes that the star will be taken by his driver to a luxury hotel room to party with several women after the event, finds that hard to believe. But Jackal Onassis, out of his stage makeup, perfectly disguised in a white shirt and pink bow tie, loves playing bartender for the evening at his own party. He relishes being insulted by a guest, and later, even enjoys being fired.It’s painful for Henry to see the work he already resents treated like a fun little game, but the show is particularly great at drawing out the brief, intense tensions and alliances that can form over the course of one night between workers and guests. The caterers have a bad habit of getting involved, giving a 16-year-old a pep talk when her friends don’t show up to her party, or attempting to walk a very drunk and disoriented guest home.When the new season begins, years have passed and characters have aged, but they continue to reassure themselves, and one another, that their misery is temporary: Their real job and their real life are just around the corner.Or are they? “Party Down” doesn’t seem to believe in the vague, Hollywood dream of “making it.” The show is more interested in the unlikely sweetness and meaning and friendship that can come from all of the time that’s not supposed to count, moment to moment, day to day, year to year, before some imagined big break.Most of the show’s scenes take place in the liminal spaces of clients’ homes and venues — back kitchens, garages, tents, hallways and lots. The comedy unfolds as the characters cut limes and unpack plates and silverware, light the flames for chafing dishes, put the final garnishes on snacks, or pack up the van and break down the bar.The show, which premiered in 2009, refused to glorify the food industry.Leroy and Rose Agency, via StarzThe story is here, in the prep time and side work. It’s in all of the hours usually skipped over onscreen for being too boring, too repetitive, too unremarkable, so that viewers can get right to the glitter and speed of service — the cooks in fresh whites fussing at the pass, the servers deployed like clockwork.The beauty of “Party Down” is that it has always refused to glorify the food industry, pulling us instead into the endless, unglamorous, in-between time that adds up to, well, something. The profound comedy and tragedy of the absolutely mundane. Or at the very least, a hundred thousand limes, cut into wedges.Henry’s love interest in the first two seasons is Casey, another caterer played by Lizzy Caplan, and she once asked him a question that still drives the show: “How do you know the difference between a dumb job that’s legitimately a dumb job, and a dumb job that gets you somewhere?”The answer is in every episode, new and old: You don’t.Follow New York Times Cooking on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Pinterest. Get regular updates from New York Times Cooking, with recipe suggestions, cooking tips and shopping advice. More

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    How Hard Is It to Paint Like Vermeer? TV Contestants Find Out.

    Amateur and professional artists are competing to recreate some of the old master’s lost works in a Dutch reality show that coincides with a blockbuster Vermeer exhibition in Amsterdam.Here’s the assignment: Recreate a painting that doesn’t exist, based only on a description jotted down centuries ago. And also: Make it look like a Vermeer.That’s the starting bell for a Dutch reality TV show, in which two professional painters and dozens of amateur artists compete to reinvent the lost works of the 17th-century master. The results are judged by Vermeer experts from the Rijksmuseum, the Dutch national museum in Amsterdam, and from the Mauritshuis, a collection of old masters in The Hague.The show, “The New Vermeer” (“De Nieuwe Vermeer”), which began on Feb. 12, is timed to coincide with a blockbuster exhibition of the painter’s work at the Rijksmuseum, featuring the largest collection of his works ever shown. But the hourlong TV show is aimed, in part, at viewers who might not feel comfortable walking into a museum.The mash-up of highbrow culture and mass entertainment has been an instant sensation in the Netherlands, with 1.3 million viewers (in a country of 17 million) tuning in for the first episode. The six-episode series ends March 19.Two contestants, Maudy Alferink and Nard Kwast, center, conferring with Abbie Vandivere, right, a conservator from the Mauritshuis museum who is another of the TV show’s judges.Omroep MAX“This program scores better than most of the other programs we broadcast — documentaries and drama series included,” said Jan Slagter, chief executive of Omroep MAX, which broadcasts the series. “What’s important is that it’s about art and culture, but that it’s made in a very accessible way,” he noted.The success of “The New Vermeer” reflects surging interest in the artist during the Rijksmuseum run, said Pieter Roelofs, the exhibition’s curator and one of the TV show’s judges. “The idea that people from all around the globe are arriving for this exhibition makes the Dutch understand that this is really something special,” Roelofs added. Vermeer “is beloved, and now people want to know more.”The museum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for the Vermeer show in less than four days — a response that Roelofs compared to a pop concert or sporting event.Roelofs said that the museum was working on finding ways to release more tickets, either by extending opening hours or by allowing more visitors through the doors for each time slot. Additional tickets will be released on March 6, and they’re likely to be snatched up quickly.The Rijksmuseum sold out the more than 450,000 tickets for its Vermeer show in less than four days.Melissa Schriek for The New York TimesThose lucky enough to get in will see 28 Vermeer paintings, about three-quarters of the 35 or so works that still exist. It is known that Vermeer painted at least six more paintings, which have subsequently been lost. Some of them haven’t been seen since the 17th century, and one was stolen from a museum decades ago and never recovered.The premise of “The New Vermeer” is for contemporary artists to bring those works back to life.There are two categories of artists who compete. For each episode, producers have chosen two professional painters, who go head-to-head to create a painting that looks like something Vermeer might have painted. They were given four months to complete the task, with guidance from art experts and curators who provided them with tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Each episode also features four amateur artists who create modern interpretations of the missing work, competing in what they call the “free category.” They can work in any style they wish, and the resulting images are judged on how well they reflect the spirit of Vermeer’s work.Two artworks — one from each category — are selected as winners in each episode. The judges are Roelofs, from the Rijksmuseum, and Abbie Vandivere, a Mauritshuis paintings conservator who has spent years studying that museum’s most famous item, “Girl with a Pearl Earring.”The show’s experts give contestants tips and clues about Vermeer’s painting techniques, materials, and the props he used.Mark de Blok/MAXWe know about five of the missing Vermeer works only because they were described in inventories or auction records from around the time of the artist’s death, in 1675, Vandivere said.Two famous urban scenes painted by Vermeer still exist, for example: “View of Delft” and “The Little Street,” both currently on display in Amsterdam. But a 17th-century auction catalog notes that he painted a third, described only as “a view of some houses in Delft.” In Episode 2, the contestants attempted to recreate this work, which they referred to as “The Second Little Street.”Another Vermeer painting, “The Concert,” hung in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until 1990, when it was stolen in one of the world’s largest unsolved art heists. It has never been recovered. In Episode 4, artists will try to recreate that work based on photographs.Slagter, the broadcasting executive, said that focusing on Vermeer’s missing paintings allowed viewers to engage their imaginations. “Everyone who watches the show, young and old, can use their own fantasy to imagine a painting that doesn’t exist,” he said.Part of the fun of the show is cheering on the amateurs, who hail from across the Netherlands and work in different styles, using stained glass, printmaking and even Lego. To recreate the Vermeer street scene, one artist used small pieces of driftwood; another arranged knickknacks and childhood toys into a three-dimensional assemblage.The weekly live TV broadcasts are supplemented with a podcast, an online gallery of all the works featured on the show and an invitation to viewers to send in their own contemporary interpretations of Vermeer, which are shared on the show’s website.The six winning amateur artworks from each episode will be displayed at the Museum Prinsenhof, which is housed in a former church in Delft, Vermeer’s hometown. The winning paintings created by the professional artists will be exhibited at the Mauritshuis.Nard Kwast, a painter from the central Dutch city of Apeldoorn, won the professional category in the first episode with an oil painting of a domestic scene that Roelof said reminded him of Vermeer’s famous “The Milkmaid.”“What’s really Vermeer-like in this picture is the light, and you’ve done that so beautifully,” Vandivere commented when judging the work.Nard Kwast’s reimagining of a lost Vermeer painting that won him the professional category in Episode 1.DeNieuweVermeer.nlIn an interview, Kwast said that he had been fascinated with 17th-century painting techniques since the age of 8. He now works as a painter who produces pieces in the style of the 17th-century masters, creating replicas of paintings by Rembrandt and Ferdinand Bol, for example, on commission for private clients.Kwast said that he couldn’t really imagine a higher honor than to see his contemporary painting hang alongside the old masters.“It wasn’t my neighbor who was saying my work was good — it was experts from the Rijksmuseum and Mauritshuis,” he said. And to have his work compared to Vermeer’s? “This is the biggest compliment you can possibly get,” he said. More

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    They Invited Shakespeare to the Cookout. They Got ‘Fat Ham.’

    The playwright James Ijames and the director Saheem Ali built a “Hamlet”-inspired play, opening in April on Broadway, around their artistic friendship.When James Ijames and Saheem Ali, the playwright and director of the Broadway-bound Pulitzer Prize-winning play “Fat Ham,” talk about their projects, they do so in the kind of shorthand of longtime friends: incomplete sentences, phrases punctuated with laughs and a whole vocabulary of glances.It’s a frigid February day, and they have settled into a booth at the Library restaurant at the Public Theater. Ijames is a bit guarded — speaking carefully, his posture showing a certain reserve. Ali radiates energy — beaming as he listens to Ijames, occasionally tapping him on the arm in excitement.“We’re always, always, always ideating, always brainstorming,” Ali said. “It’s kind of wonderful.”Ijames gently contradicts Ali: “Yeah, I am not thinking about anything else.”“You just sent me a new draft —” Ali starts.“That was a while ago!” Ijames protests.“It was like two weeks ago!” Ali insists. Both of them crack up.The back-and-forth is a hallmark of the creative partnership that now finds them preparing to make their Broadway debuts with “Fat Ham,” a co-production of the National Black Theater and the Public Theater. When the show opens at the American Airlines Theater on April 12, it will be the first National Black Theater production to appear on Broadway and the only work by a Black playwright on Broadway this spring.“I remember we announced that we’re coming and then the climate really kind of shifted after that,” said Ali, 44, acutely aware of the commercial pressures that have left new stories by Black playwrights struggling to find staying power on Broadway. “What are we walking into?”A riff on “Hamlet” in the form of a Black family gathering in North Carolina, the story follows a college student named Juicy, who is stuck at a barbecue that doubles as a wedding celebration for his mother, Tedra, and her new husband, Rev, a pit master and the brother of Tedra’s recently deceased ex-husband. Juicy’s the sullen outcast; he’s gay, emotionally aware, intellectual and not the embodiment of Black manhood that Rev expects him to be. When the ghost of Juicy’s father appears, demanding Juicy avenge his wrongful killing at his brother’s hand, the “Hamlet” story commences.More on N.Y.C. Theater, Music and Dance This SpringMusical Revivals: Why do the worst characters in musicals get the best tunes? In upcoming revivals, world leaders both real and mythical get an image makeover they may not deserve, our critic writes.Rising Stars: These actors turned playwrights all excavate memories and meaning from their lives in creating these four shows, which arrive in New York in the coming months.Gustavo Dudamel: The New York Philharmonic’s new music director, will conduct Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in May. It will be one of the hottest tickets in town.The show’s world premiere, a filmed production for the Wilma Theater in Philadelphia, was streamed digitally in 2021, at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. The play then had a critically acclaimed Off Broadway run in 2022 at the Public Theater. Just weeks before opening, it won the Pulitzer Prize for drama.Ijames, 42, who grew up in North Carolina and lives in Philadelphia, where he is the co-artistic director of the Wilma, is known for his examinations of Blackness and how it has been shaped by our nation’s prejudices. He strikes right at the foundations, often drawing on what are now viewed as the hypocrisies of the heroes of U.S. history like Thomas Jefferson (in “TJ Loves Sally 4 Ever”) and George and Martha Washington (in “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington”).Ijames’s first play for the National Black Theater, 2017’s “Kill Move Paradise,” imagines a waiting room in the afterlife where four young Black men are trying to understand their deaths.“He’s helping create a visible space for us to bear witness to the trauma, the pain, the amount of lost bodies, but also the amount of hope,” said Jonathan McCrory, the National Black Theater’s executive artistic director. “We needed that. We needed someone to help us rethink and re-articulate the space in which our grief was amalgamating.”It was also the show that brought Ijames and Ali together. Ali, who has since directed Jocelyn Bioh’s “Merry Wives” and a revival of Anna Deavere Smith’s classic “Fires in the Mirror,” had attended a table read in 2016. Ijames remembers being drawn to how Ali spoke about the text and interacted with the actors.They didn’t have much face time beyond that first meeting, though Ijames and Ali texted and called each other. (“This was before Zoom” became popular, Ijames noted.) Opening night was the first time Ijames saw Ali’s staging of his work. He loved it, but decided that in the future he didn’t want to miss the chemistry that occurs when the playwright is actually in the room for the rehearsal process.When they decided to collaborate again, Ali and Ijames gravitated toward Shakespeare. Both had developed an interest in the flexibility of the text at an early age; each cited “Romeo and Juliet” as the play that un-ruffed and de-frilled Shakespeare for them, allowing them to see the different language, lives and cultural experiences that could be welcomed into the text. For Ali, it started with performing Shakespeare with his peers in Kenya, where he was born and raised. “It was malleable. It was playable. It was completely adaptable,” he said. “Coming to the States, Shakespeare is this other thing: mostly white people, very few people of color, and they speak a certain way.”He began inviting playwrights to work on Shakespeare adaptations with him. “I was like, ‘I want someone whose profession it is to work on the language. And I can talk about the world and the concept.’”Ijames had already been drafting something along those lines, working on what would become “Fat Ham” in 2017. He had picked his favorite Shakespeare play, “Hamlet,” forming the idea from King Claudius and Queen Gertrude’s wedding celebration in the second scene of the first act.Set at a North Carolina backyard barbecue, “Fat Ham” unpacks themes of homophobia and toxic masculinity in a blend of colloquial language and Shakespearean English.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I was like, ‘What if you could spill all of ‘Hamlet’ into that party, that celebration, and tell the whole story there? What would change? What ultimately would these people find out and explore about each other in that pressure cooker of time?’” Ijames said.The tragedy of “Fat Ham” is multifaceted, rooted not in murder and intrigue but in themes of homophobia, self-hatred and toxic masculinity. Ijames unpacks it all in a chili-and-cornbread combo of colloquial language and Shakespearean English, with characters that reflect an authentic Black experience.“Black people of the diaspora, in America, on the continent, anywhere else in the world — we speak with music, we speak with meter,” Ijames said. IN SPEAKING ABOUT building the show, Ali and Ijames described how they complemented and trusted each other. Ijames mentioned Ali’s transformation of the karaoke scene in “Fat Ham,” staging it with an otherworldly theatricality. The lights shift, the characters’ movements slow down and Ali infuses the scene with what Ijames calls a “physical vocabulary” — an unexpected choreographed sequence that includes metal-style headbanging. Ali noted his admiration for the spaces Ijames provides in the script for the director to extend his imagination. He cited the stage directions at the end, which begin, “The play cracks open.” What the audience sees is what the story evoked in Ali’s mind — and it’s a joyous, glamorous break from what audiences may have come to expect. In other words, a party.“Any time I get to collaborate with him I’m happy, because I don’t have to explain things to him,” Ijames said. “He just understands.”The word “trust” surfaces frequently among the show’s producers and cast members. “Lord knows Black folks endure a lot of contorting to fit in spaces that were not made for ourselves,” said Sade Lythcott, chief executive of the National Black Theater. “So trust becomes almost like the alchemy or the catalyst for how we can communicate to each other and build something as beautiful as ‘Fat Ham.’”Marcel Spears, who portrayed Juicy Off Broadway and is returning to the role, describes an almost psychic “synchronicity” between Ijames and Ali in the rehearsal room. “It’s like mom and dad,” he said.This will also be Spears’s first time on Broadway, and four other cast members are making their Broadway debuts as well. “Everybody’s walking into it with a sense of urgency and pride and joy,” he said.Still, “Fat Ham” faces a commercial environment that is challenging for new productions — especially plays by and about people of color. In the 2021-22 season, Broadway made history with the premiere of seven plays by Black playwrights. Yet many suffered financial losses (though not unusual for Broadway plays, particularly damning for work by already underrepresented artists) and a couple closed early, exacerbated by the surge in Omicron cases.“I’m shaking in my boots! Your boy is nervous,” Spears said with an anxious laugh. He mentioned a good friend, Jordan E. Cooper, the playwright and star of “Ain’t No Mo’,” and the early closing last fall of that show, which had a mostly Black creative team. “I was disheartened because as a Black theater artist, I want our work to be seen as just as valuable and as important and as immediate to Broadway audiences as anything else.”Lythcott, reflecting on those closures, said: “I think the way commercial theaters look at diversifying their audiences and appealing to culturally specific demographics, it still sometimes feels like Black folks are an idea and not living, breathing people. That’s the magic of James’s piece that he wrote: People can identify Tedra and Juicy; those are people that we know.”For his part, Ijames said he hopes that “Fat Ham” will attract a diverse, “game” New York audience who will enjoy what’s happening onstage. His expectations are those of an artist shaped by a scrappier regional theater scene: “We make the thing and then hopefully people come and hopefully it enlivens the community in which we’re making the thing. And so I hope that it’s going to do that. I hope that little stretch of 42nd Street is a little more Southern, a little more country.” More

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    ‘Star Trek: Picard,’ Season 3, Episode 2 Recap: Another Next Generation

    Jean-Luc Picard has not traditionally been much of a family man, but that may be changing.Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Disengage’Um, wait, what? WHAT?!A lot happened in this episode, but I’m mostly focused on the ending.Jean-Luc Picard and Beverly Crusher had a kid together?And that son, Jack, is named after Beverly’s first husband? The one who died and was a close friend of Jean-Luc’s?Let’s break this down, because it is an interesting revelation on several levels. Before “Picard,” Jean-Luc had long kept his career at the forefront of his existence, at the expense of family and love. The closest he came to embracing a family came in the classic episode “The Inner Light,” where Picard is struck by an energy beam and somehow lives the life of someone completely different. It showed Jean-Luc what his life could have been. Romance has historically been rare for him, though there have been some brief flings, including Anij from “Star Trek: Insurrection,” but never officially with Beverly.Also, Jean-Luc has generally hated children. In “Encounter At Farpoint,” the “Next Generation” pilot, he lectures Beverly that children aren’t allowed on the bridge — which is amusing now given that in the future, she will be the mother of one of his children. (Let’s not forget one of the worst written lines in “Trek” history: Picard yelling, “Shut up, Wesley!” to Wesley Crusher.)There was the time Jean-Luc was turned into a child, in the hilarious “Rascals” episode. And he also seems to be a father figure to his nephew René, who dies in “Star Trek: Generations.”Picard was married to the Enterprise. He never seemed to want more than that.But people grow and change. Look at Beverly, who has spent several years traversing the galaxy as a rogue doctor with her son. In some ways, she was the most levelheaded member of the Enterprise crew. She was rarely impulsive and always thoughtful, which made her an ideal match for Jean-Luc. So it must have taken something serious for her to evolve to this.In “Picard,” Jean-Luc appears to be more interested in being a father and family generally. He has a romance with Laris and is essentially a father figure to Dahj, her twin Soji and Elnor.But Jack being Jean-Luc’s son raises many questions. Did Jean-Luc know this whole time about Jack? Or did he find out when he and Beverly exchanged looks on the bridge of the Titan? (This is something likely to be addressed in upcoming episodes, but given the tendencies in the previous seasons of “Picard,” we shouldn’t assume anything.) If Jean-Luc didn’t know, why in the world did Beverly keep the knowledge of a child from his own father and one of her closest confidantes? (In the episode “Attached,” Beverly learns about Jean-Luc’s feelings for her, and that he never acted on them out of respect for her late husband. It’s possible that Beverly kept the knowledge of Jack Jr. from Jean-Luc because of that respect.)Does Jack know? I would guess no based on their conversation while in the brig. (But Jack is professional liar, so again, the assumption thing.) When Jean-Luc asks, “Who is your father?” Jack replies, “I never had one.” I thought I saw a hint of knowing remorse in Patrick Stewart’s face in response, and one could easily interpret Jack’s response as a dig at Jean-Luc for being an absentee father.And what about Wesley?There’s also the matter of Jean-Luc and Beverly actually having been together. That’s never been confirmed until this season of “Picard,” although the creative team more or less revealed this publicly in the summer.Odds and endsCaptain Vadic (Amanda Plummer) makes a solid debut as this season’s villain — she has a sinister cadence, a predatory ship and an apparent unusual familiarity with the old Enterprise crew, as well as Shaw.Maybe this is a reflection on Todd Stashwick’s charming performance, but despite the show’s best efforts to make Shaw seem like a jerk, he really is an admirable captain. Shaw agrees to save Riker and Picard from Vadic’s Shrike at great personal risk to the Titan, even though the pair had duped the ship’s crew and taken them outside of Federation space. Shaw also declines to throw Riker and Picard in the brig, though he would be in the right to do so. (Not to mention the shuttle that Riker and Picard stole, leading to its destruction.) Shaw also continues to let Seven of Nine serve aboard the ship, despite her betrayal of him. And repeatedly, he expresses — very rightfully — his concern for the lives of his crew members.Raffi, apparently now a member of Starfleet Intelligence, has been trying to figure out who attacked a lower-tier Starfleet building. She chooses her profession over her son Gabe — again. But what happened to her relationship with Seven?And it turns out Raffi’s handler is Worf, who promptly beheads the Ferengi Tony Soprano. Quite an entrance, though I fear this may be an example of “Picard” writers opting for short term payoff and forgetting who these characters actually are. Worf moderated the Klingon penchant for violence, particularly as he rose in command in “Deep Space Nine.” So much so that he was actually named ambassador to the Klingon home world at the conclusion of the series. (Then again, Worf did murder the Klingon chancellor Gowron, so maybe he is whatever the plot needs him to be.) I am certainly curious how one of the most famous Klingons in the galaxy — renowned in both Starfleet and among Klingons — ends up working in intelligence.The episode ends with a classic “Trek” trope: An outgunned Starfleet ship sneaking into a nebula to hide. More

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    ‘Parade’ Producers Condemn Neo-Nazi Protest at Show About Antisemitism

    The show’s star, Ben Platt, said the “ugly and scary” display was a reminder of why they are retelling the story of the lynching of Leo Frank, a Jewish businessman in Georgia.The producers and star of “Parade,” a Broadway musical about an antisemitic lynching in Georgia a century ago, condemned a small neo-Nazi demonstration that took place outside the show’s first preview performance on Tuesday night.The show centers on the story of Leo Frank, a Jewish factory manager in Atlanta who was convicted in 1913 of raping and murdering a 13-year-old girl. Responding to an outcry about whether Frank had been wrongfully convicted in a trial tainted by antisemitism, the Georgia governor commuted his death sentence. Months later, Frank was lynched by a mob.Ben Platt, the Tony-winning actor who plays Frank, had already described the musical revival as a timely story to tell at a moment when antisemitic incidents and hate speech have been a part of political and cultural conversations in America.But the appearance of about a dozen demonstrators outside the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater, some holding a sign linking them to the National Socialist Movement, a neo-Nazi organization, further underlined the current cultural relevance, the show’s producers said in a statement on Wednesday morning.“If there is any remaining doubt out there about the urgency of telling this story in this moment in history, the vileness on display last night should put it to rest,” the statement said. “We stand by the valiant Broadway cast that brings this vital story to life each night.”Platt, who won a Tony for “Dear Evan Hansen” and also appeared in last year’s brief run of “Parade” at New York City Center, learned about the demonstration on social media after he stepped offstage on Tuesday, he said in an Instagram video after the show.“It was definitely very ugly and scary, but a wonderful reminder of why we’re telling this particular story,” Platt said.The demonstration was also condemned by Actors’ Equity Association, the union representing Broadway actors and stage managers.In a video recorded by a bystander that was posted to Twitter, the demonstrators are seen and heard targeting Frank and the Anti-Defamation League, a group fighting antisemitism that was founded in the aftermath of Frank’s conviction. Some of them stood by a banner advertising the National Socialist Movement. One masked protester handed out fliers that promoted a separate group with neo-Nazi symbols and told people outside the theater that they were about to “worship a pedophile.”Burt Colucci, the leader of the National Socialist Movement, confirmed on Wednesday that local members of his organization had been involved in the demonstration.Frank’s conviction has been the subject of renewed scrutiny: In the 1980s, he received a posthumous pardon in Georgia, and in 2019, the district attorney in Fulton County created a panel to reinvestigate the case.“Parade” had a brief initial run on Broadway in 1998 that was not a commercial success, but the musical won Tony Awards for its book (by Alfred Uhry) and score (by Jason Robert Brown). Its run last year received positive reviews, including from Juan A. Ramírez, who said in The New York Times that it was “the best-sung musical in many a New York season.”The revival, directed by Michael Arden, is scheduled to run through early August.“Now is really the moment for this particular piece,” Platt said on his Instagram video, noting that he hoped the performance on Tuesday would make a more lasting impression than “the really ugly actions of a few people who were spreading evil.” More