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    Billy Crudup Makes the Sale in ‘Hello Tomorrow!’

    Billy Crudup’s father, Thomas Henry Crudup III, was a gambler, a hustler, an occasional loan shark and a bookie of questionable gift. Sometimes on the way to his son’s weekend soccer practice, he would stop the car on an interstate shoulder and deal king crab out of the trunk. He sold red-and-white-striped umbrella hats, coffee additives, Farrah Fawcett posters, an inflatable ice chest.“Which is not a flotation device,” the younger Crudup clarified in a video call on a weekday afternoon in January.Despite two and a half decades in entertainment, this Crudup, 54, has lived a somewhat more conventional life governed by rigorous professional ethics. The risks he takes are mostly artistic. To watch his early films — “Stage Beauty,” “Without Limits,” “Almost Famous” among them — is to see a performer making audacious choices, executed with deep feeling and meticulous control.He’s an indifferent gambler. (The actor Hank Azaria, a poker buddy, confirmed this: Crudup, a performer who often trades in inscrutability, apparently has no poker face.) Then again, his whole career has been a kind of gamble, a long game. Though he has movie star looks, he bet that they wouldn’t last, and so the parts he took, often character parts, were designed to secure career longevity by demonstrating his aptitude and range.In one way, he lost that bet. As I broke it to him, his looks have held up very well. “I appreciate that,” he said, strong-jawed and elfin beneath a Yankees cap. “A lot of niacin and B-root.” (Niacin and B-root? “Those are the first two things that came into my head,” he said.)But in another way, it paid off: In his 50s, he is enjoying the best roles of his life. Since 2019, he has played Cory Ellison, a bright-eyed, coldblooded network news exec in the Apple TV+ series “The Morning Show.” Now he has added Jack Billings, a fast-talking slickster who heads a lunar time-share concern in “Hello Tomorrow!,” another Apple TV+ show, which debuts on Feb. 17.In “Hello Tomorrow!,” Crudup’s character leads a team selling lunar properties in a development called Brightside. (With Haneefah Wood and Hank Azaria.)Apple TV+An evangelist, a huckster, a consummate salesman, Jack reminds Crudup of his father, who died in 2005. Traveling salesmen are akin to gamblers, Crudup argued, always playing the odds, always counting on the big win.“I get to be in some proximity to my dad, by playing a version of him,” Crudup said.There are two narratives that people like me tend to spin around Crudup: that fame has always eluded him and that he never wanted it anyway. He acknowledges that both are somewhat true. He didn’t avoid mainstream projects (see: “Watchmen”), as long as he could play flawed and fractured characters within them.But while acting is a kind of selling, Crudup has always resisted selling himself. For years, he wore his own clothes to award shows. He mostly skipped the talk show circuit. He has tried to keep his personal life private. (“Billy Crudup has a personal life?” his friend and “Morning Show” co-star Jennifer Aniston joked.) A decade or two ago, he would have submitted to an interview like this, if he submitted at all, only out of contractual obligation and under sufferance. A New York Times writer, interviewing him in 2004, wrote, “He shields his life from would-be inspectors as if it were a nuclear facility in North Korea.” This avoidance was partly in service of that gamble. He wagered that a public persona would make receding into roles more difficult. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said. Avoiding publicity was, he said, “a protective mechanism.”It was also a way to protect himself when the tabloids swarmed. In 2003, Crudup left his girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker, to pursue a relationship with his “Stage Beauty” co-star, Claire Danes. He has not spoken publicly about this, just as he doesn’t speak about what seems to be his current relationship, with the actress Naomi Watts. He could set a few records and Wikipedia pages straight, he said. But he prefers not to.“Because that’s a lifelong pursuit, constantly trying to manage how people think about me as opposed to thinking about my work,” he said.The work has been consistent, but in the 2010s it became less visible. In films like “Jackie,” “20th Century Woman” and “Spotlight,” he inhabited characters so fully that he didn’t seem to be acting at all. It was easy to admire his performances without thinking much about them. That changed with “Harry Clarke,” a 2017 Off-Broadway play about a diffident, pansexual con artist. The play has a dozen roles. Crudup played all of them.Leigh Silverman, who directed the play, was surprised at how much Crudup struggled during rehearsals. In his films, he had made it look so easy. “I was so captivated, really, by his suffering, and his continuing to show up every day,” Silverman said in an interview. But during previews, Crudup began to suffer less, abandoning himself to the various roles, switching fluently between them. To anyone watching him alone onstage, his reach and capacity were irrefutable, as was his charisma.“He’s both holding you at a distance and beckoning you forward, which is so sexy,” Silverman said.In “The Morning Show,” Crudup (with Jennifer Aniston) plays a charismatic news executive. “Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, said.Apple TV+One of those watchers was Aniston, who immediately turned to her producing partner, Kristin Hahn, and told her that Crudup had to be in “The Morning Show.” Cory had been originally envisioned as a 30-year-old villain. But when Crudup flew out to Los Angeles to meet with Kerry Ehrin, the original showrunner, she was quickly convinced.“Billy has an intensity to him, an energy to him, that felt really right for the character,” Ehrin said.Cory is staunch in his determination to win the ratings game. But there’s a volatility to the man, an unpredictability. “The Morning Show,” like “Harry Clarke” before it, allows Crudup to live in the contradictions that have made him a thrilling performer: his boldness and precision, his childlike enthusiasm married to a coolness that borders on opacity. Crudup enjoys these tensions. His co-stars do, too.“It’s electric,” Aniston said of acting opposite him. “Every time, I’m going, Oh, I wonder what’s going to happen next?”This electricity impressed Amit Bhalla and Lucas Jansen, the creators and showrunners of “Hello Tomorrow!” Set in a retrofuturist world in which hovercrafts are a given and travel to the moon commonplace, the show centers on a group of salesmen hawking lunar properties in a development called Brightside. They’re led by Crudup’s Jack, who attacks the project with missionary zeal. Other actors had shown interest in the role. They’d seen Jack as a smoothie, a charmer. Jansen recalled Crudup’s take: “He said, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t a salesman; he’s a priest.’”The truth about those lunar properties remains elusive though much of the season. What’s important is that Jack believes in them, and his belief is so unswerving and sincere that it has a way of inspiring those around him.“Jack’s a genuine believer that providing somebody with a little bit of hope during the day is a true commodity worth valuing,” Crudup said.Here are some of the things that make Jack a good salesman: his energy, his flexibility, his superlative people skills. These are qualities Crudup’s father shared. They are also among the abilities that make Crudup a great actor. Like an actor, Jack is selling people on a story. He believes in the dream so that others can believe it, too.Crudup has generally sought to avoid publicity. “I figured the more people knew about me, the harder it would be for me to convince them that I was somebody else,” he said.Philip Cheung for The New York Times“Good salesmanship is truly believing what you’re saying,” Crudup said. And Crudup has that belief. It’s why he can deliver a line like “Chaos, it’s the new cocaine” in “The Morning Show” with absolute conviction. It’s why his Jack can conjure intimacy even when surrounded by computer-generated automatons.“Sometimes giving folks a new dream to dream can make all the difference,” Jack says. And in Crudup’s mouth it sounds just about plausible.His co-stars Azaria and Haneefah Wood noticed this early in the shoot, during a scene in which Jack delivers a seminar-style version of his moonage daydream. Even having read the script, Azaria found himself weeping during the performance. His character, an insider on Jack’s team, would not have wept.“I had to hide from the camera that he had made me cry,” Azaria said.After the director called cut, Wood, who plays the team’s savvy accounts manager, approached Crudup. “And I was like, ‘[Expletive] you, Billy,’” she recalled. “‘Now my game has to step up so far, to be on just the same level.’”“But he gives you that energy,” she added. “He gives you the desire to just want to go all the way.”Whether or not Crudup has gone all the way, he has come pretty far. His career has been the opposite of a Ponzi scheme: He put the work in early on and he kept working. It’s only now, in these rich continuous roles, that he is seeing the return on his investment. And knowing he has made good has allowed him to hold himself a little more lightly. He’ll wear anyone’s shirt to an awards show now, he told me.“I feel less protective because I’ve been able to establish the career that I hoped to,” he said. Raking in the chips feels good. Maybe not as good as cornering the highway king crab market, but pretty good all the same.“It is miraculous to me,” he said. More

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    Late Night Is Still Concerned About That Balloon

    “AT&T told their customers, ‘Relax, they can’t spy on you if you can’t get a signal,” Jimmy Fallon said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Going Over Like a Lead BalloonOn Thursday, the State Department revealed that the Chinese spy balloon the U.S. downed last weekend was capable of monitoring Americans’ electronic communications.“When they heard that, Siri and Alexa were like, ‘Oh, hell no, that’s our job!” said Jimmy Fallon.“Yeah, they were tracking all of our communications, including phone calls and text messages. The balloon was like, ‘Based on what we’ve gathered, we should invest in eggplants.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Meanwhile, AT&T told their customers, ‘Relax, they can’t spy on you if you can’t get a signal, you know what I’m saying?’” — JIMMY FALLONOn “The Daily Show,” Chelsea Handler reported that China was demanding that the balloon be returned.“[Expletive] you, China! You sent the balloon over here to spy on us — we found it, and now it’s ours! You don’t get to demand that we return it, just like the guy who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband doesn’t get his hammer back.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“And I don’t know about you guys, but I’m not scared about the supposed explosive self-destructing capability on a balloon. All balloons have a self-destructing capability — it’s called deflating.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Sorry, China, but that’s confusing. Usually, when you release things, it’s for the entire world to enjoy, like Covid.” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Nepo Baby Edition)“North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was joined onstage yesterday by his 9-year-old daughter at a military parade unveiling the country’s new missiles. So I guess Bring Your Daughter to Work Day has officially jumped the shark.” — SETH MEYERS“Yes, this girl is speculated to become Kim’s successor. Who would’ve ever thought that North Korea would have a female leader before America? And she’s a minority!” — CHELSEA HANDLER“I have to say, I am so sick of these nepo babies. First we have Lily-Rose Depp and then Willow Smith, and now this girl? Whatever happened to becoming a nuke-wielding tyrant on merit? You know how many girls are out there working hard, learning how to fire missiles and starve an entire population who will never have an opportunity to lead a regime?” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Bits Worth WatchingGordon Ramsay taste-tested Super Bowl snacks on Thursday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey” features Craig David Dowsett as a demented version of the children’s character.Jagged Edge ProductionsIn the horror film “Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey,” friendly animal icons from childhood turn sadistic when Christopher Robin leaves for college. More

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    Review: How to Shoot Your Parents, in ‘Pictures From Home’

    In a stage adaptation of Larry Sultan’s photo memoir, Nathan Lane stars as the father everyone’s aiming at.Several weekends a month, from 1982 to 1992, the photographer Larry Sultan visited his parents in Southern California in search of a story. Was it a mark of his failure or his overachievement that, instead of one, he found many?In any case, in “Pictures From Home,” the 1992 photo memoir that resulted, Sultan created a classic of visual polyphony. Whatever he believed the work to be — a family portrait, a marital inquest, a takedown of Reagan-era masculinity — it was so much more by being all of them at once.But a book of staged photographs, home movie stills and discrepant first-person narratives was also, by the nature of the medium, flat: the better to ponder its mille-feuille of contradictions. The camera, after all, stops time.That would seem to make Sultan’s “Pictures From Home,” however brilliant, an unlikely source for stage adaptation, the stage being where time can never stand still. And indeed, the play by Sharr White that opened on Thursday at Studio 54, in a production directed by Bartlett Sher, has not made it all the way from two dimensions to three. Though honorable, thoughtful and wonderful to look at, with crafty performances by Danny Burstein, Zoë Wanamaker and especially Nathan Lane, it caulks so many of the book’s expressive cracks that the best thing about it — its mystery — is sealed out.Part of that is inevitable insofar as actors must have something concrete to act. To provide it, White has developed scenes from tiny cues in Sultan’s text, turning the subterranean Oedipal conflict between father and son, and to a lesser extent the conjugal one between husband and wife, into obvious rhubarbs, skits and lectures.For actors like these, such carvings are raw meat, no matter that the carcass gets stripped. Burstein has a field day with Larry, who begins the play by announcing to the audience that “this project will become one of my hallmark achievements.” As his chest puffs out, Burstein puffs it back in: “I know that’s not a modest thing to say.”It’s a peculiar choice to write Larry as a nervous pedant, proud yet endlessly defensive. But what he’s defending himself against immediately becomes clear upon Lane’s entrance as the father. “Are you still here?” is his first line.Burstein has a field day with Larry, our critic writes, and Lane’s peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining impression of Larry’s father, Irving.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the book, Irving Sultan is a glamorous remnant of the cocktails-at-lunch era of American business; at the peak of his career, he was a vice president at Schick. But having been put out to pasture some years before the photos were taken, his silver fox suaveness is mottled with flop sweat.As in his earlier plays — including “The Other Place” (a haunting Laurie Metcalf vehicle) and “The True” (catnip for Edie Falco) — White prioritizes playability over subtlety. Here he pulls at the threads of Irving’s vanity and petulance, unwinding them from his other qualities to provide the lurid outlines of a personality. That’s sufficient for Lane, of course, whose peerless verbal and physical clarity make for an entertaining if somewhat black-and-white impression. Each argumentative thrust and deflection is as sharp as an actor can render it, and anything faintly funny is primped into a generous laugh.That’s good news for the audience but less so for the real Irving, who was already skeptical about how his son would portray him, without having imagined how a playwright and Nathan Lane would. (Irving died in 2009 — as did Larry.) That the book’s tough bird winds up onstage a lovable bellyacher is one of the mysteries to be filed under “lost in translation.”Translation is even unkinder to Larry’s mother, Jean Sultan, whom Wanamaker plays with pinpoint sociological precision. (The costumes by Jennifer Moeller and the wigs by Tommy Kurzman help immensely.) What Wanamaker cannot do, because the script does not permit it, is restore dignity to a woman who deserves it. After raising Larry and his two brothers, then watching her husband short-circuit his career, she took up her own because somebody had to; in her first year as an independent real estate agent, she sold $18 million in property.Some of the book’s most trenchant photographs trace that transformation. (Projected at huge scale by 59 Productions against the back wall of Michael Yeargan’s slope-roofed, garishly green trompe l’oeil set, they look fantastic.) In them we see Jean, in late middle age, emerging from her housewifey past to become a serious breadwinner, with all the attendant anxieties. How this threatens Irving’s sense of privilege and primacy is clear enough on paper.The triple portrait of the Sultans in the play deviates from what is presented in the memoir, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet in the play Jean is reduced to third banana and comic relief. She floats in and out of the men’s arguments and dithers in search of lost To Do lists. In one particularly unfortunate bit, elaborated from an innocuous sentence in the book, she is made to perform schtick like a bawdy 1960s comedienne about the size of the zucchini Irving grows in a garden. “He’s so proud of how huge it is,” she brays.For all I know, Jean, who died in 2004, really talked like that; White has said he had “many conversations” with Kelly Sultan — the artist’s widow — about her husband’s process and “the many complexities of Irv and Jean.” But even if accurate to life as lived, the triple portrait of the Sultans in the play feels inaccurate to life as recorded in the memoir. For one thing, Larry himself is made, if sympathetic, insufferable. As he gassed on fatuously about image and illusion, I too found myself impatiently asking, “Are you still here?”At just 1 hour and 45 minutes, with no intermission, a play should not feel padded, but it does. Still, it is hardly without its pleasures: It’s funnier than expected, and Sher’s poetic naturalism as he creates stage pictures is always moving to watch. Jennifer Tipton’s lighting reminds me of her superb work for dance.Nor does “Pictures From Home” lack for pathos — less so when it jerks the audience’s tears, at the end, than when it lets the questions of a son’s need for his parents, even well into their old age, sit patiently in frame. Stopping time with his camera, Larry tells us, was a way of not letting them die. How odd that a living thing like a play does the opposite.Pictures From HomeThrough April 30 at Studio 54, Manhattan; picturesfromhomebroadway.com. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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    How Many Comics Does It Take to Joke About a Dim Bulb?

    Nate Bargatze, Chase O’Donnell and the star of “Cunk on Earth” find smart nuances in pretending that they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.If there’s one group of people who have been made fun of more than any other, it’s the stupid.From Homer Simpson to Zoolander to Rose from “The Golden Girls,” no satirical target has produced more laughs. Jokes about the dumb are ancient and show up in nearly every country. Certain kinds go out of fashion (you don’t hear Polish jokes much anymore), but the idiocy of others has proved universally funny.Why don’t we feel guilty about this? Sometimes, we do. But savvy comics have always found ways to mitigate the cruelty and condescension of mocking the moronic. And these days, when audiences can be particularly sensitive to the direction comedy is punching, the dumb joke often requires a lighter touch. Two deft new stand-up specials dig into stereotypes about the unintelligent, dust them off and renovate them for a new era, while a new mockumentary gets even bigger laughs through the stunt of placing a fool in a variety of intellectual arenas.Nate Bargatze — whose new special, “Hello World,” is his first hour for Prime Video after breaking out with two popular and well-crafted Netflix efforts — told The Daily Beast that he wanted his comedy to be “the right amount of dumb.” His brand of clueless Christian dad self-deprecation isn’t buffoonish. He presents himself as a little slow in a world that seems far too fast. He speaks with a hint of a drawl, and his delivery moseys as he settles into a gem of a story about the time he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the light in a hotel room.Nate Bargatze in his new special, “Hello World.” He presents himself as a little slow, not buffoonish.Amazon PrimeBargatze, 42, says he knows he utters  idiotic things, with a bit of bashfulness. “I try to keep it in front of large groups,” he explains in the special. “When you say something dumb one on one, it’s a lot for that person.”The moment is characteristic: thoughtful about his lack of thought. Bargatze, who has a gift for making something out of seemingly nothing, has emerged as one of the finest clean, family-friendly comics in America, firmly in the conversation with Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Brian Regan. His last three specials begin with his adorable daughter introducing him. But he’s putting an updated spin on another comedy tradition, the Southern rube, poking fun at his own dimness but also at those who would look down on him.Bargatze draws attention to his roots (a previous special is called “The Tennessee Kid”), but unlike Larry the Cable Guy or Jim Varney, he doesn’t lean on exaggerated accents or dopey language. When he tells you Andrew Jackson is from his town, it’s to set up a scene in which a snotty interviewer informs him that Jackson was a bad man. “I stopped him and was like: We didn’t, like, know him or anything,” Bargatze says, the slightest touch of defensiveness mixed with minor annoyance. “We didn’t move there because we were fans.”There is a gentleness to his ignorance, one that taps into a fertile area for laughs: childhood anxieties. Even his joke about struggling to turn off the light is designed not to make you laugh at him but relate to him. He acts out a kind of helplessness that we all once had and often still do. It’s a dumb joke that makes you feel if not smart, then at least less alone in your stupidity.While perhaps not as old as punch lines about country folk, the dumb blond joke has been around as long as America. Scholars trace it to a 1775 French one-act satire, “Les Curiosités de la Foire.” The archetype boomed in the middle of the last century with the stardom of Marilyn Monroe in movies like “Gentleman Prefer Blondes.” As that title suggests, blonds have favorable stereotypes attached to them, which makes poking fun at their intelligence, as well as their superficiality, a little more palatable. Because we think blonds have more fun, people can have more fun with them. And yet this has been under some scrutiny lately, reconsidered in movies about objectified stars like Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears and Monroe herself. (The recent drama about her was titled “Blonde” as if her hair color was her Rosebud).The performer Chase O’Donnell plays more ditsy then dumb, but she leans into it. Years ago, she starred in a cabaret double act called “Too Blondes,” and her new special, “People Pleaser,” an enjoyable YouTube distraction, is full of self-deprecating jokes and precisely timed malapropisms. Her most faithful strategy is to begin a joke, pause, bug out her eyes in an innocent glare, then shift direction to upend expectations. When a date tells her to dye her hair, she acts offended. “I literally died,” she says, glaring. “My hair the next day.”Chase O’Donnell in “People Pleaser.” She specializes in precisely timed malapropisms.Steve NguyenThe quality of her joke-writing is not as assured as her persona. It’s a low-budget production with rough edges, but like Bargatze, O’Donnell finds laughs in being more innocent than those around her. There are some darker undercurrents if you want to look for them, which you probably won’t. A show about the consequences for a woman who can’t say no is not what this breezy act is going for. And credit where it’s due: It’s hard to stay this light. She performs obliviousness with enough savvy to make you not quite believe it.In the hilarious “Cunk on Earth” (now on Netflix) Diane Morgan performs imbecility in an entirely different way. She’s an actor, not a stand-up, and as the spectacularly ill-informed anchor Philomena Cunk, she doesn’t wink at the audience. She commits, brilliantly. Dressed stylishly in an overcoat and boots, speaking in the sober and dispassionate cadences of high-toned public television, she stands in the desert, musing pensively: “Looking at the pyramids tonight, it’s hard not to be struck by the thought they are just big triangles.”This five-episode series, produced by the “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker, is based on a simple idea — place a dummy among posh, smart elites — but it’s exactingly executed. The show is beautifully shot and edited, impeccably deadpan and dense with jokes. In episodes that explore the history of civilization, our most popular religions or our greatest inventions, it captures a refined BBC aesthetic: staged in front of sweeping landscapes, inside museums or near ruins and featuring a collection of academics, authors and other intellectuals. How fully realized this world is only makes it funnier when Morgan, sitting across from a professor of Middle Eastern history, asks: “Were numbers worth less in ancient times?”As with so many artists in the growing documentary comedy genre, Morgan uses real people as foils for her scripted lines. But in this case, they belong to a single class of experts whose tasteful clothes and thick spectacles project intelligence better than any design department could muster. There’s cringe comedy in their fluster opposite her flamboyant imbecility. At no point does she break character. Her confidence is impenetrable, though sometimes she does use vulnerability strategically, as when she tells an academic she’s worried that her question will sound stupid before asking about Aristotle saying, “Dance like no one’s watching.” This is a cagey manipulation that extends the scene and shifts the dynamic into something more polite than it otherwise would be.It’s a reminder of a piece of wisdom from David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, the metal band at the center of the greatest mockumentary: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” More

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    Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Tries Reality TV to Find ‘the Next Great Artist’

    Seven artists compete for an exhibition at the museum in a series it produced with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.“One of you will show your work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and will take home $100,000.”At least that’s the promise made by Dometi Pongo, the host of a new reality television series, “The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist,” about the making of an art star. The first season is six episodes, produced by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn together with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.The program, which starts March 3, focuses on seven rising artists from around the country who were selected by Hirshhorn curators. Each week, the artists are commissioned to make a themed work — such as an exploration of gender — that is evaluated by Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director, and a team of guest judges (the artists Adam Pendleton, Kenny Schachter and Abigail DeVille are among them).“This TV partnership was really about an expansive idea of art — radical accessibility,” Chiu said in a telephone interview, adding that the show will be “bringing new light to artists and artwork.”The show’s host, Dometi Pongo, left, with three of its judges: Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn; Kenny Schachter, an artist and writer; and Keith Rivers, a Hirshhorn trustee and collector.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyThe artist Jennifer Warren inside Barbara Kruger’s “Belief + Doubt” (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum during filming.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyWhether audiences find the making of art compelling television remains to be seen. Chiu said she hopes the show will help “demystify what it means to be an artist.”The artists are Jamaal Barber, Misha Kahn, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Baseera Khan, Clare Kambhu, Jillian Mayer and Jennifer Warren.The weekly series will feature artwork from the museum’s collection, including pieces by Harold Ancart and Jacqueline Humphries and an exhibit by Barbara Kruger. Chiu said the program was part of the museum’s mission to serve as “the national museum of modern art” and builds on its recent initiatives, including the revitalization of its Sculpture Garden with a design by Hiroshi Sugimoto that connects to the National Mall.Recently, the museum also appointed the Colombian pop star J Balvin as a global cultural ambassador to work with teens in its Artlab education center. And the museum recently created the Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), which allows visitors to point their phones at a work of art and see a video of the artist talking about it.Having the TV series broadcast on both MTV and the Smithsonian Channel (there are no plans to stream it) will allow the Hirshhorn to reach both “a younger demographic as well as a more mature demographic,” Chiu said, adding that she hoped the program would reveal more about “what the museum does, but also the artistic process.” More

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    Chelsea Handler Thanks Republicans for Enlivening a Dull Night

    After her antics during the State of the Union address, Handler wondered when Marjorie Taylor Green would join the cast of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta.”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.Republicans Gone WildPresident Joe Biden delivered his first State of the Union address of 2023 on Tuesday night, where Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene heckled him and called him a liar.On Wednesday’s “The Daily Show,” the guest host, Chelsea Handler, found it wasn’t as boring as she thought it would be, saying the Republicans were acting like wild animals — and she liked it.“Keep this up, guys. You finally made a State of the Union watchable,” Handler said.“Marjorie Taylor Greene stood up during the screech and screamed out, ‘Liar!’ and then George Santos stood up and is like, ‘Over here!’” — CHELSEA HANDLER“When are they gonna put this woman on ‘Real Housewives of Atlanta’?” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Why is she wearing a white fur coat to the State of the Union address? She looks like an old rapper’s first wife.” — SETH MEYERS“It was a busy night for Marjorie. She went right from the State of the Union to getting her 102nd Dalmatian.” — JIMMY FALLON“If you’re going to heckle the president, definitely do it while you’re dressed like a Disney villain.” — JAMES CORDEN“The list of people harassed by Marjorie Taylor Greene now includes President Biden and any bartender at every T.G.I. Fridays.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (More State of the Union Edition)“Well, as I mentioned, last night was President Biden’s State of the Union address and I saw a poll that said 72 percent of people responded favorably to his speech. That’s amazing. We can’t even get 72 percent of Americans to agree on what an M&M should wear.” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden delivered his second State of the Union address last night and spoke for 73 minutes. Which sounds like a lot, but I feel like Biden could speak for 73 minutes to a wrong number.” — SETH MEYERS“Yep, Biden’s speech was passionate and energetic. He basically went from decaf green tea to Mountain Dew Code Red.” — JIMMY FALLON“At one point in his speech, Biden said, ‘Covid no longer controls our lives.’ He was like, ‘Now that honor belongs to TikTok.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Biden also talked about the strong jobs market. He said people are working as bankers, real estate developers, dancers, philanthropists, Broadway producers — and that’s just George Santos.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingQueen Latifah and Jimmy Fallon played the whisper challenge on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightMeagan Good, a star of “Harlem,” will pop by “The Late Late Show” on Thursday.Also, Check This OutRihanna, a social media natural, has been particularly adept at playing along with fans’ agonizing waiting game for new music.Axelle/Bauer-Griffin and FilmMagic, via Getty ImagesRihanna’s fans have been patiently waiting for a new album while the singer pursued other projects, but her Super Bowl halftime show should satisfy them for the time being. More

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    Bob Orben, One-Man Gag Factory and Speechwriter, Dies at 95

    He wrote tens of thousands of jokes in his career. Among those who told them were Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton — and, for a while, President Gerald R. Ford.Bob Orben, who after writing jokes for Dick Gregory, Jack Paar, Red Skelton and others in the 1960s found a new avenue for his wit when he became a speechwriter for President Gerald R. Ford in 1974, died on Feb. 2 in Alexandria, Va. He was 95.His death, at a nursing home, was confirmed by his great-niece, Yvette Chevallier.Mr. Orben was a one-man gag factory. He wrote joke books. He dispatched one-liners to entertainers, politicians and disc jockeys through his subscription newsletter, Current Comedy. And he wrote a column, My Favorite Jokes, for Parade magazine.“I don’t mean to blow my own horn,” he told The Washington Post in 1982, “but between Johnny Carson’s monologues, the political cartoonists such as Herblock and Oliphant, and me, if we all decide what the hot subject in the country is, that’s what it is.”In 1968, Gerald Ford, a Michigan Republican who was then the House minority leader, needed someone to spice up a speech he was going to give to the Gridiron Club, an organization of journalists whose annual dinner was an opportunity to lampoon political figures. George Murphy, the former actor and United States senator, knew Red Skelton, for whom Mr. Orben was a writer, and recommended him.Mr. Orben’s goal was to make Ford funny, or at least funnier than Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, another speaker at the dinner. After listening to tapes of Ford’s delivery, Mr. Orben came up with a few zingers.“Ford was the surprise hit,” Mr. Orben recalled in 2008 in an oral history interview with the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation. Among the Orben lines Ford delivered was the observation that he had no interest in the presidency, except that “on that long drive back to Alexandria, Virginia, where I live, as I go past 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, I do seem to hear a little voice within me saying, ‘If you lived here, you’d be home now.’”Mr. Orben continued to feed jokes to Ford during his vice presidency. When Ford became president in 1974, after President Richard M. Nixon resigned, he hired Mr. Orben.A 1975 profile of President Ford in The New York Times Magazine quoted him reading aloud from a speech written by Mr. Orben that he was going to give to the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association. It included references to a prominent Democratic senator and an agriculture secretary known for his off-color remarks.“I have only one thing to say about a program that calls for me to follow Bob Hope,” he read. “Who arranged this? Scoop Jackson? It’s ridiculous. Bob Hope has enormous stage presence, superb comedy writing and the finest writers in the business. I’m standing here in a rented tuxedo — with three jokes from Earl Butz!”Mr. Orben cautioned the president not to pause when delivering a good one-liner.“Watch Hope,” he told him. “You’ll see he really punches through a line.”Mr. Orben fed Ford self-deprecating lines that suited his personality. One of those lines, also delivered in 1975, played off something Lyndon B. Johnson had famously said about him.“It’s a great pleasure — and great honor — to be at Yale Law’s Sesquicentennial Convocation,” he said. “And I defy anyone to say that and chew gum at the same time.”Mr. Orben became the director of the White House speechwriting staff in early 1976 and served through the end of the Ford administration.Mr. Orben at the White House with President Ford in 1976. He fed jokes to the president and coached him on how to deliver them.Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library.John Mihalec, a speechwriter for President Ford during the 1976 presidential campaign, said it was not surprising that a comedy writer should excel at writing speeches.“Comedy writing is so precise — the setup and the punch line and everything has to be at exactly the right volume and in the right place,” Mr. Mihalec said in a phone interview. “It’s good training for the precision of presidential speechwriting.”Robert Orben was born on March 4, 1927, in the Bronx to Walter and Marie Orben. His father was in the hardware business. Bob was smitten by magic at an early age, and when he was 12 he and his brother, Walter, performed a mentalist act in the Catskill Mountains, “The Boy With the Radio Mind.” It flopped.After graduating from high school in 1943, he attended Drake Business School. He also started his short-lived career in magic.He was hired as a magic demonstrator in a shop in Manhattan, but he found his métier not in performing magic but in writing about magicians; he was impressed by one magician’s onstage comedic patter, which led him to publish a pamphlet, “The Encyclopedia of Patter,” in 1946.Over the next decade he would publish books like “Blue Ribbon Comedy,” “The Working Comedian’s Gag File,” “Tag-Lines,” “Bits, Boffs and Banter” and “The Emcee’s Handbook.” He published dozens of joke collections in his career.He began writing his comedy newsletter in 1958, and in the 1960s he wrote for “The Jack Paar Program” and then for “The Red Skelton Hour.”After coming to the attention of the groundbreaking Black comedian Dick Gregory, Mr. Orben said, he sent him a page of jokes every day. Another one of Mr. Orben’s clients was someone very different from Mr. Gregory: the conservative Arizona Republican senator Barry Goldwater, for whom he wrote during his unsuccessful campaign for the presidency in 1964.“One of the jokes that I wrote for Greg was talking about Goldwater,” Mr. Orben said in the Ford Presidential Foundation interview. “And as you know, the campaign slogan was, ‘In your heart, you know he’s right.’ And Greg used to say, ‘In your heart, you know he’s white.’”Mr. Orben never returned to the White House. But he kept writing joke books, among them “2500 Jokes to Start ’Em Laughing” (1979), “2100 Laughs for All Occasions” (1983) and “2000 Surefire Jokes for Speakers” (1986).He also continued to write his newsletter through 1989, as well as writing speeches for business executives and working as a consultant to IBM.Mr. Orben’s wife, Jean (Connelly) Orben, died last year. He leaves no immediate survivors.In 1974, Mr. Orben was helping Vice President Ford rehearse his speech for the Gridiron Club dinner. One line, about Ronald Reagan, who was then the governor of California, worried Ford: “Governor Reagan does not dye his hair. Let’s just say he’s turning prematurely orange.”He asked Mr. Orben, “Do you think the governor would take offense at that?”“Now, I’m looking at this blockbuster joke of the year go up in smoke, but I think I gave him a fair, honest answer,” Mr. Orben said in the 2008 oral history interview. “I said, ‘You know, Mr. Vice President, Reagan has been in show business a good part of his life. He has gone through a thousand roasts and I’m sure he has heard dyed-hair jokes. So I really don’t think so.’”To Mr. Orben’s relief, Vice President Ford delivered the line. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Lucy’ Review: There’s Something About the Babysitter

    A workplace comedy set at home, this cleverly detailed production explores child care as both labor and primal instinct.Hiring a babysitter is a high-stakes leap of faith. How well can you really know someone before trusting them with your kids? And what’s going to happen when you’re not at home? Maybe she won’t quite be Mary Poppins, but let’s hope the glint in her eye doesn’t remind you of the unassuming villain in a psychological thriller.With her Pre-Raphaelite curls, plinking bangles and wide-eyed smile, the candidate who sweeps through the door in “Lucy,” which opened at the Minetta Lane Theater Monday night, appears closer to the former ideal. Ashling (she’s distantly Irish) calls herself a career nanny with 40 years of experience, despite seeming not quite as old herself. Played with a sly incandescence by Lynn Collins, Ashling colors her speech with generous emphasis, insisting that child care keeps her young and that she considers her role on par with a co-parent.The client, Mary, looks like she could give birth at any minute, and has let her search for help come down to the wire. Played with delicate, white-knuckled composure by Brooke Bloom, Mary is an overworked radiologist and single mother with a 6-year-old daughter (Lucy, for whom the play is named) and a son on the way. She is the sort of tightly wound person motherhood has only somewhat unraveled; when she offers Ashling the job, it comes with a stack of guidelines as thick as a novella.Written and directed by Erica Schmidt, “Lucy” is seamlessly layered, extraordinarily entertaining and tricky to classify. A cleverly detailed exploration of child care as both a kind of labor and a primal instinct, it is a workplace comedy set at home, where boundaries are porous and personal stakes are exceedingly high. When Mary discovers, for example, that she can smell Ashling’s perfume on her infant son at night, it feels like an intimate intrusion. But when Mary awkwardly confronts her, Ashling is breezily evasive.“Lucy” is also an irresistible, engrossing slow burn, as tension between the two builds under pressure. Laughs increasingly double as sighs of relief as the suspense of discovery escalates through the show’s taut two-hour running time. Mary is undoubtedly a micromanager. Ashling, meanwhile, relishes her freedom, reminding Mary of what she has sacrificed to become a mother. And though Ashling’s strangeness is undeniable, it’s also slippery to pin down. The most telling clues may come from Lucy (Charlotte Surak, adorable), but how reliable can a young child be?Schmidt, who recently adapted “Cyrano” into a stage musical and whose play “Mac Beth” recast Shakespearean tragedy among vicious high schoolers, has a way of uncovering and magnifying the profundity simmering underneath everyday conflict. On the surface, “Lucy” is a tug-of-war between opposing personalities. At its core, it confronts questions of power, possibility and human nature.Schmidt’s staging, produced by Audible, is a crisply orchestrated slice of Manhattan life, impeccably designed to reveal her precisely drawn characters. The tasteful austerity of Mary’s open-plan kitchen-living room aptly reflects her strict minimalism, as does her understated, mostly black wardrobe (the set is by Amy Rubin and costumes by Kaye Voyce). Cha See’s dynamic lighting underscores the play’s subtly eerie shifts in mood, and there’s unexpected humor in the music from sound designer Justin Ellington (perhaps a nod to the play’s future release as an audio play).“Lucy” is also a kind of inventory of the roles women are expected to play, whether they become mothers or not, and the systems that assign value to them accordingly. That draws even more attention to the fact that Bloom and Collins hardly seem to be playing roles at all; the actors are so thoroughly committed and convincing that any hint that things may not be as they seem feels all the more destabilizing. It’s the sort of feeling that might arise after trusting your life to someone else’s hands and then realizing they’re a total stranger.LucyThrough Feb. 25 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; lucytheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More