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    Late Night Celebrates Obama’s First White House Visit in Five Years

    Stephen Colbert joked that he hoped “they locked the doors to keep him in.”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.Obama in the HouseFormer President Barack Obama made his first return to the White House in five years on Tuesday.“Then, hopefully, they locked the doors to keep him in,” Stephen Colbert joked.“He was there to promote Obamacare and to get that pack of smokes he forgot in the Lincoln bedroom.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Former President Barack Obama today visited the White House, and out of habit, Jeanine Pirro called for his impeachment.” — SETH MEYERS“Yep, Obama said he would have visited sooner, but gas prices were too expensive.” — JIMMY FALLON“But it was fun to see the former president at the White House. Obama felt like a guy who was visiting his old high school, and Biden was like the old gym teacher who never left.” — JIMMY FALLON“It was great to see him today. It was like the ‘White Men Can’t Jump’ reunion at the Oscars.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Obama was there celebrating the 12-year anniversary of the Affordable Care Act, Obamacare, and also to help Joe set up his Roku.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s really got to bother Trump. All these lies and schemes and lawsuits to get back to the White House, Obama just strolls right in there.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (On Bezos’ Grave Edition)“Over the weekend, workers at an Amazon fulfillment center in Staten Island were able to successfully unionize. It’s the first Amazon union. And the new president of the union said something funny. The president of the union said, ‘We want to thank Jeff Bezos for going to space, because when he was up there, we were signing people up.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This is great news. That is fantastic. And Amazon is now going all out to make sure it doesn’t happen again.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The app essentially censors anything that’s controversial at Amazon, including the word ‘restroom,’ which, you know, may not be missed. Many Amazon workers are more familiar with the phrases ‘empty Powerade bottle’ or ‘on Bezos’ grave.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on Amazon’s new internal messaging app“So these are all words Amazon will not allow: ‘Unions,’ ‘strike,’ ‘wages,’ ‘restrooms,’ ‘pee bottles,’ ‘empty Dasani,’ ‘bladder infections,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘life outside of work,’ ‘home,’ ‘going home,’ ‘I think I live at home but can’t remember,’ ‘help,’ ‘help us,’ ‘penis rocket,’ ‘overcompensating,’ ‘dork,’ ‘space dork,’ ‘bald space dork,’ and ‘I want to have sex with Alexa.’” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Tuesday’s “Tonight Show,” Amanda Seyfried shared how she mastered Elizabeth Holmes’s falsified deep voice for “The Drop Out.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightNicki Minaj will join James Corden for the return of “Carpool Karaoke” on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutTony Hawk, left, and Sam Jones as seen in Jones’s new documentary, “Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off.”Sam Jones Pictures/HBO Documentary FilmsA new documentary about the professional skateboarder Tony Hawk explores his compulsion to continue skating at all costs. More

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    Alan J. Hruska, a Founder of Soho Press, Dies at 88

    A litigator for 44 years, he was also a novelist; a writer, director and producer of plays and films; and helped establish the independent publishing house Soho Press.Alan J. Hruska, a corporate litigator who had a second, wide-ranging career as a founder of the independent publishing house Soho Press, which invests in serious fiction by unsung authors; as a novelist; and as a writer, director and producer of plays and films, died on March 29 at his home in Manhattan. He was 88.The cause was lymphoma, his daughter, Bronwen Hruska, the publisher of Soho Press, said.Even before Mr. Hruska retired from his day job at Cravath Swaine & Moore in New York in 2001 after four decades there, he published his first novel, in 1985. The next year, with his wife, Laura Chapman Hruska, and Juris Jurjevics, a former editor in chief of Dial Press, he founded Soho Press.Soho Press made its reputation by welcoming unsolicited manuscripts from little-known writers. Its ambitions, Mr. Jurjevics said, were “not to have a certain percentage of growth a year and not to be bought by anybody.”Soho Press, based in Manhattan, has specialized in literary fiction and memoirs with a backlist that includes books by Jake Arnott, Edwidge Danticat, John L’Heureux, Delores Phillips, Sue Townsend and Jacqueline Winspear. The company also has a Soho Teen young adult imprint and a Soho Crime imprint that publishes mysteries in exotic locales by, among others, Cara Black, Colin Cotterill, Peter Lovesey and Stuart Neville.Mr. Hruska (pronounced RUH-ska) often said that there was less of a vocational disconnect between lawyering and literature than met the eye. Both, done successfully, he said, are about storytelling, whether arguing a case in a legal brief or writing a novel, script or screenplay.“I was a trial lawyer, and, while I would expect my actors to remember their lines better than my witnesses did, there is less disparity between the two professions than might be thought,” he said in an interview with a blogger in 2017.“A trial and a play are both productions,” he added. “Putting each together involves telling a story. So does writing a brief or making an oral argument to a panel of judges. If you don’t tell a story, you will very likely put them to sleep.”Mr. Hruska made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005.Joan MarcusAlan Jay Hruska was born on July 9, 1933, in the Bronx and was raised in Far Rockaway, Queens. His father, Harry Hruska, was in the textile business. His mother, Julia (Schwarz) Hruska, was a homemaker.While he was undecided on a profession, Alan had a penchant for filmmaking that took hold when he was 8. As a youth, he would ride the subway into Manhattan to attend double features at first-run movie theaters.After graduating from Lawrence High School on Long Island, he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from Yale in 1955 and was persuaded to apply to Yale Law School by a college professor who was impressed by his skills in logic and rationalization. He, in turn, found the law to be an ideal vehicle for his writing and reasoning.He graduated from the law school in 1958, the same year he married Laura Mae Chapman, one of three women in their law school class.She died in 2010. In addition to their daughter, he is survived by two sons, Andrew and Matthew; his wife, Julie Iovine, a former reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, whom he married in 2013; and six grandchildren.Mr. Hruska borrowed from his litigation experiences in major cases in writing a number of his novels, including “Wrong Man Running” (2011); “Pardon the Ravens” (2015); “It Happened at Two in the Morning” (2017), which The Wall Street Journal said showed the author “at his thriller-writing best”; and “The Inglorious Arts” (2019).Michael Cavadias as the cross-dressing character Wendy in a scene from the romantic comedy “Nola,” a 2003 film written and directed by Mr. Hruska.Samuel Goldwyn FilmsHe also wrote and directed the film “Nola,” a romantic comedy starring Emmy Rossum which opened at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2003.Other films of his include “The Warrior Class,” a comedy about a rookie lawyer that premiered at the Hamptons International Film Festival in 2005; and “The Man on Her Mind,” an existential comedy based on his play of the same name, which premiered at the Charing Cross Theatre in London in 2012.He made his theatrical debut directing an Off Broadway revival of “Waiting for Godot” in 2005. Ten years later, when a surreal play of his about love, marriage and an impending hurricane opened, the critic Alexis Soloski wrote in The Times in 2015, “If an existentialist philosopher ever attempted a light romantic comedy, it might sound a little like ‘Laugh It Up, Stare It Down,’ Alan Hruska’s quaintly absurdist play at the Cherry Lane Theater.”Mr. Hruska oversaw a wide range of civil litigation at Cravath in the 44 years before he retired in 2001. He was named senior counsel in 2002. He also served as secretary of the New York City Bar Association.Asked by The American Lawyer in 2015 whether he ever felt that the law was not his true calling, he replied: “Not at all. I had a great experience. I did about 400 cases, won 200 and settled 200. I’m particularly proud of the settlements because they can put people in a much better position than winning a case.” More

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    June Brown, a Mainstay of Britain’s ‘EastEnders,’ Dies at 95

    As the memorable Dot Cotton, she appeared in thousands of episodes of the hugely popular soap opera over 35 years.June Brown, who appeared in thousands of episodes of the British soap opera “EastEnders” across 35 years, portraying Dot Cotton, one of the more memorable residents of the fictional Albert Square, died on Sunday at her home in Surrey, near London. She was 95.Her death was announced on the show’s Twitter account. In one of many tributes shared by that account, Natalie Cassidy, another star of the show, called Ms. Brown “the best character actress ‘EastEnders’ has ever seen or will ever see.”Ms. Brown was classically trained at the Old Vic drama school and had a decent career in the theater until she and her second husband, Robert Arnold, whom she married in 1958, began having their six children.“Touring was difficult with children,” she told The Daily Telegraph of London in 1995, “so I did a great deal of television work. And, in 1985, ‘EastEnders’ and Dot came along.”Dot was the mother of the villainous Nick Cotton. Ms. Brown was originally contracted for three months.“Then I was asked if I wanted to be a permanent character,” she told The Express of Britain in 2020, the year her character was finally written out of the series. “I had no idea it was going to be for 30-odd years.”Ms. Brown, left, in an episode of “EastEnders” with, from left, Wendy Richard, Ian Lavender, James Alexandro and Natalie Cassidy. AFP/Getty ImagesIt turned out that audiences found Dot, a chain-smoking bundle of prejudices, oddly endearing. The Daily Telegraph, in the 1995 article, called her “the holy-rolling hypochondriac, one-woman moral majority of Albert Square.”Ms. Brown enjoyed creating a flawed character — so much so that in 1993, after playing Dot for eight years, she left the show when she felt the writers were dialing back some of Dot’s more objectionable characteristics.“In the early days Dot was a terrible racist,” Ms. Brown explained in the 1995 interview. “But she gradually became more and more politically correct, which was disastrous for the character and the program. It’s no good having a program that is supposed to reflect society but covers it all up and pretends that everything in the garden is lovely.”She returned in 1997. As the years rolled by, Dot continued to change, becoming less gossipy and more like the fictional world’s matriarch, and Ms. Brown was given some meaty story lines — a request from a friend for Dot’s help with euthanasia, for instance, and Nick’s death from a heroin overdose.A much-praised episode in 2008 was devoted solely to Ms. Brown, as Dot made a 30-minute tape recording for her comatose husband. The Observer called it “an absolutely brilliant 30 minutes of prime time — beautifully written, economically directed and faultlessly, movingly performed by June Brown.”Ms. Brown recently dealt with macular degeneration in real life, something that was incorporated into scripts. The character disappeared in 2020 without much fanfare — Dot moved to Ireland. The show’s producers said a return was always possible, but Ms. Brown wasn’t interested. “I’ve sent her off to Ireland and that’s where she’ll stay,” she said of Dot.In 2001, Ms. Brown and her fellow cast member Barbara Windsor were visited on the set of “EastEnders” by Queen Elizabeth II.Pool photo by Fiona Hanson“EastEnders” Twitter posts said she had appeared in 2,884 episodes.“There was nobody quite like June Brown,” Nadine Dorries, Britain’s culture minister, said on Twitter. “She captured the zeitgeist of British culture like no other in her many years on our screens.”June Muriel Brown was born on Feb. 16, 1927, in Suffolk, England, to Henry and Louisa (Butler) Brown. Her father owned an electrical engineering company, and her mother worked in a milliner’s shop.Ms. Brown’s childhood was marked by loss. A brother died in infancy. She was particularly close to an older sister, Marise, who died of an ear infection when June was 7, an event that affected her more deeply than her parents seemed to realize.“People weren’t concerned with psychology then,” Ms. Brown wrote in her autobiography, “Before the Year Dot” (2013). “Perhaps it was better because you learnt to survive without sympathy.”Ms. Brown grew up in Ipswich. A career in acting was not at all on her mind.“I once played the Virgin Mary at school,” she told The Daily Telegraph, “but only because my teacher thought I’d look lovely in blue.”During World War II she joined the Women’s Royal Naval Service — the Wrens — where one of her jobs was showing training films to airmen. She also performed in a touring revue that performed for troops.“We took it ’round the Southern Command area and I really enjoyed it,” she told The Independent in 2010. “I got laughs, and that was when the bug got me.”After the war she studied at the Old Vic and began appearing in plays. By the late 1950s she was turning up in roles on “ITV Television Playhouse” and similar TV programs. In the early 1970s she appeared in several episodes of “Coronation Street,” another long-running British soap.She credited Leslie Grantham, an original “EastEnders” cast member, with suggesting her for the role of Dot.“He’d seen me in an episode of ‘Minder,’” another British show, she told The Daily Mirror in 2003. “I’ll always be grateful to him.”A few dozen episodes into the series, Dot made her first appearance. At the 2005 British Soap Awards, Ms. Brown received a lifetime achievement honor for her work on the show. “EastEnders” has also been seen on various outlets in the United States for years.In 1950 Ms. Brown married John Garley, a fellow actor, who died in 1957. Her second husband, Mr. Arnold, also an actor, died in 2003. Her survivors include five children, Chloe, Naomi, Sophie, Louise and William. More

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    ‘Garbageman’ Review: Just a Couple of Straw Men

    In Keith Huff’s new play, two friends head to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but this production substitutes unfunny cartoonishness for the characters’ humanity.The title of Keith Huff’s new play, “Garbageman,” shouldn’t be taken at face value, even though Huff pretty much asks you to.The garbageman in question isn’t Buddy Maple, a 30-something white guy who has spent his career in sanitation: first right out of high school, working for his unnamed American city; then, hooked on OxyContin, managing a recycling plant where he found — and kept — a preserved human head that seems to speak to him. After that, he started driving a garbage truck in another town, where he, oops, ran over someone.Nor is the garbageman Dan Bandana, Buddy’s poisonous, well-armed old pal — also addicted to OxyContin, by the way — to whom he relates this series of events the way a person might to a stranger in a bar. Still, Dan is such an obnoxious creep that the surprise in his back story isn’t that his wife has left him. It’s that he was able to persuade anyone to be with him in the first place.The true title character in this dark, meandering sociopolitical comedy is both unseen and unnamed, at least formally. Dan and Buddy call him “The Guy.” They voted for him. And when “Garbageman” takes them on a road trip with Dan’s guns, it’s to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 insurrection. The leathery human head, its mouth permanently agape, is stashed in the trunk.Over the top though the play is, it wants to get at something urgent about a spreading rot in American culture, fed by festering resentments around class, race and gender. But Greg Cicchino’s world premiere production for the Chain Theater in Manhattan has mostly omitted the characters’ human elements in favor of aggressively unfunny cartoonishness that makes “Garbageman” easy to dismiss.The tone isn’t quite one-note, but maybe one and a half. Kirk Gostkowski, the theater’s artistic director, is so relentlessly belligerent as Dan, and Deven Anderson is so blandly flat as Buddy, that it’s hard to believe in them as people, let alone swallow the idea of these two guys as friends. Even when they make a murder pact, nothing seems at stake.Huff, best known as the author of the Broadway play “A Steady Rain,” a box-office hit in 2009 that starred Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman as Chicago cops, has spent his stage career telling Chicago stories. He deliberately leaves the city in “Garbageman” unspecified, but the nearby town where Buddy works is called Gurnee — which in real-world Illinois is home to a Six Flags amusement park called Great America. Huff doesn’t mention that detail, but there’s mordancy in it; this is a play about the state of the nation.The desire to make a broader statement may be why he doesn’t call Dan and Buddy’s hometown Chicago, but it’s a mistake to blur the geography. It leaves productions free not to bother being rooted in particularity, accents and all. The rhythms of Huff’s dialogue are the rhythms of Chicago. Take them away and three dimensions collapse into two, as they have in this production.I could not tell, after seeing it, whether the play might work as written. So I read it in a Chicago accent — with Bill Murray, circa “Stripes,” playing Dan in my head, and John Candy (Canadian, true, but he did Chicago movies, and his accent passed easily for Upper Midwestern) as Buddy. Fantasy casting did the trick: Outrageous comedy suddenly coexisted with pathos. These two extreme screw-ups were still dangerous, even more so now because they had personal appeal.Dan and Buddy are broken American Everymen, but they’re broken Chicago-style.GarbagemanThrough April 16 at the Chain Theater, Manhattan; chaintheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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    Noah Reid Preps for Parenthood With Plants and Nina Simone

    The “Schitt’s Creek” star makes his Broadway debut this month in Tracy Letts’s new comedy “The Minutes.”Noah Reid will be on the video call in a minute, his publicist tells me. The 34-year old “Schitt’s Creek” star, who played Dan Levy’s lover, Patrick Brewer, across four seasons of the Canadian comedy, just got home from a rehearsal for “The Minutes,” the new Tracy Letts comedy he’s starring in on Broadway. Then … Bam!He looks like he’s calling from the inside of a greenhouse.“These are my landlord, Marie’s,” Reid, his brown curls tucked in a black beanie, says of the half-dozen plants — there are more out of the frame — crawling up the door and stretching toward the early evening sunlight in pots on a table of his Ridgewood apartment in Queens. “I can’t tell if I’m more nervous for my Broadway debut or to keep these plants going.”“The Minutes,” a dark comedy about a small-town city council meeting that was originally slated for March 2020 at the Cort Theater, opens at Studio 54 on April 17. Reid, who plays the clean-scrubbed outsider Mr. Peel, replaced Armie Hammer, who left the production last spring amid accusations of rape and sexual assault, which he has denied.“It’s probably been four years since I’ve done a play,” said Reid, who has been a frequent presence on Canadian stages. “I’d completely forgotten how much physical, mental and emotional energy it takes.”He has a busy spring on the horizon, taking on the role of Billy Tillerson in the new Amazon Western mystery thriller series “Outer Range,” which he spent seven months filming in New Mexico. (The series premieres April 15.) He also has a sophomore album out, “Gemini,” which touches on his acting experiences and is reminiscent of the stream-of-consciousness style of 1970s singer-songwriters.Over the course of 45 minutes, he shared how Charlie Chaplin’s film “The Great Dictator” relates to events in Ukraine, the show he would play any part in and why his favorite piece of art is hanging on his refrigerator. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Nina Simone’s Live Recordings Her voice feels like it comes out of the center of the earth; it’s like a direct passage to the soul. As a pianist, she can navigate so many different genres: classical, jazz and blues. She plays with such confidence. And that’s what makes her live recordings so incredible, her ability to just, stream-of-consciousness, drop into her complete truth.2. David Shrigley’s “The Book of Shrigley” David Shrigley is somewhere between stand-up comedy and cave paintings. He does these brilliant esoteric, simple drawings — you might even say bad drawings. Part of it is that you feel like you could do the drawing, but you haven’t done the drawing — you haven’t found that moment of truth. There’s something incredible about the simplicity of it.3. Leonard Cohen’s Book of Poems “Stranger Music” When I first heard his music as a kid — this guy with this weird dark voice and these synthesizers — I didn’t understand why anyone would want to listen to this. And then, when I was in high school, I started reading his poems, and I was able to see the humanity, the spirit, the sense of humor. It became clear that music was a way for him to put his poetry into the world in a more easily consumed way.4. Sol e Pesca Restaurant in Lisbon It’s in an old tackle shop about the size of a shoe box on this little road in Lisbon. It feels very tucked away. You go in and sit on this tiny stool, they bring you a basket of bread and you order a few tinned fish items. They put them in a bowl so you’re not just eating out of the tin, and they have Vinho Verde on tap. It’s the simplest, most beautiful meal I’ve ever had.5. The Detroit Industry Murals by Diego Rivera My sister did her master’s in Detroit, and we went to the Detroit Institute of Art and saw these fresco paintings by Diego Rivera. There are 27 murals that are all 360, with a big skylight above you. It’s a tribute to Detroit’s manufacturing industry, and you have people pushing and pulling on machines, the fire and the uniforms. It’s so character driven, and the detail of each individual person — I was dumbstruck. I didn’t want to leave.6. Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator” Charlie Chaplin said later that he wouldn’t have made the film if he had known what was going on in Nazi Germany at the time, but I’m glad he did. It was an entry point for me to understand how the arts can both start conversations about meaningful things — and make fun of them. It takes a turn for the serious and he gives this impassioned speech, this kind of plea for humanity at the end that people have been rediscovering and posting on Instagram. It’s one of the great speeches of all time. And it still has so much relevance, especially when we see what’s going on in Ukraine. There’s a line that’s like, ‘You are not machine men.’ It’s a plea to the army to put down your weapons.7. Canyon de Chelly I used to take part in the gold rush of pilot season, when all the Canadian actors would flock down to Los Angeles to try to scare up some work. I would drive down and take a different route each time because I thought it would be interesting to see a little bit of America. I did this walk down into this canyon, in the Navajo Nation in Arizona — it’s about an hour to the bottom — and it’s red soil and trees and there are buildings built into the cliffs from probably 1,000 years ago. I was just standing there and having this tangible realization that this country is ancient.8. “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” by Eugene O’Neill When I was in 11th grade, I saw the Bob Falls Broadway production with Brian Dennehy, Vanessa Redgrave, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Robert Sean Leonard. I bought the play shortly after and was completely obsessed with it. It’s certainly not my family history, but there are things in every family that it feels that you can’t talk about or, or things that are difficult to talk about or behavioral patterns that drive you crazy. I fantasize about getting to play any part in that play some time in my life.9. Spiral Arc on Lake Huron My parents bought this vacant piece of land overlooking Lake Huron in southwestern Ontario the year I was born, and it became our family cottage. That was in 1987, and over the next two decades, they spent countless hours designing and building the strangest building in Huron County. The neighbors call it the spaceship — it’s shaped like half a heart, and it’s clad in metal and it’s mostly windows and the sun sets over this uninterrupted view of Lake Huron. It’s my favorite place in the world.10. The Ultrasound This is my favorite piece of media at this moment. It’s an ultrasonic photograph of my son in his mother’s womb, and it’s occupying the gallery on my fridge right now. I’m completely obsessed. He’s about four months out from being born. I have a name in mind, but I might have to do some work with my wife to get it over the finish line, so I don’t want to say what it is yet! More

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    Jimmy Kimmel Mocks Donald Trump’s Endorsement of Sarah Palin

    “Trump endorsing Palin is like paste eating endorsing glue sniffing,” Kimmel joked.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.Consider the SourceSarah Palin announced on Friday that she would run for Congress, and she already has the support of former President Donald Trump, who released a statement saying, “Sarah Palin is tough and smart and will never back down.’”“Even from Trump, it’s pretty impressive to fit three lies into an 11-word sentence,” Jimmy Kimmel joked of Trump’s “bigly endorsement.”“I guess the ‘Masked Singer’ money dried up and Sarah is running for office.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Trump endorsing Palin is like paste eating endorsing glue sniffing. It’s ridiculous.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I saw that Sarah Palin has announced that she is running for Congress in Alaska, which is good news for Republicans and great news for Democrats.” — JIMMY FALLON“You know, for someone who could see Russia from her house, she should have known years ago what Putin was up to, don’t you think?” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Special Message Edition)“Last night was the 64th annual Grammy Awards. And I think — I think it was a good night overall because nobody’s watching the uncensored Japanese version on Twitter, and that’s a good thing.” — JIMMY FALLON“Doja Cat nearly missed her acceptance speech, because she was using the bathroom. See? This is why they need litter boxes under the seats — I’ve said it a million times.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It was a fun night, hours and hours of musicians performing for free, or as that’s also known, Spotify.” — JIMMY FALLON“Ukrainian President Zelensky made an appearance on the Grammys. He gave a heartfelt address to the Grammys audience. He said, ‘The silence of ruined cities and killed people. What is more opposite to music?’ Which is very profound: What is more opposite to music? I thought he was going say Nickelback, which would have been a sick burn. But this was better — keep it focused.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And I got to say as a 48-year-old man, I was just happy to see someone at the Grammys whose name I knew.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden lamented the lack of great comedies like “Romy & Michele’s High School Reunion,” which starred Monday night’s “Late Late Show” guests, Mira Sorvino and Lisa Kudrow.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightOscar Isaac will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe Polaroid wall in Jennifer Venditti’s office, covered with images of models and personalities and local eccentrics. Ryan Lowry for The New York TimesA new book about Jennifer Venditti, a casting director, goes behind the scenes of her work on projects like “Euphoria” and “Uncut Gems.” More

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    Review: In ‘Take Me Out,’ Whose Team Are You On?

    Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play about baseball and homophobia gets a fine revival starring Jesse Williams and Jesse Tyler Ferguson.Not for nothing is Darren Lemming, the fictional center fielder of a team called the Empires, also at the center of “Take Me Out,” Richard Greenberg’s gay fantasia on the national pastime.Said to be a “five-tool player of such incredible grace he made you suspect there was a sixth tool,” Lemming surpasses even Derek Jeter — on whom he is to some degree modeled — in versatility, steadiness and the kind of arrogance that, arising from excellence, adds up to charisma. He’s a natural star for baseball and, when he decides to come out as gay, a natural irritant for drama.At its best, “Take Me Out,” which opened on Monday in a fine revival at the Helen Hayes Theater, is a five-tool play. It’s (1) funny, with an unusually high density of laughs for a yarn that is (2) quite serious, and (3) cerebral without undermining its (4) emotion. I’m not sure whether (5) counts as one tool or many, but “Take Me Out” gives meaty roles to a team of actors, led in this Second Stage Theater production by Jesse Williams as Lemming and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as his fanboy business manager.True, dropping a few flies along the way and throwing some wild pitches — forgive the baseball metaphors, which the play indulges with the zeal of a convert — makes “Take Me Out” a bit baffling in parts. It’s not the kind of work that benefits much from postgame analysis, which reveals flaws in construction and logic. But in performance, now no less than in 2002, when it had its New York debut at the Public Theater, it is mostly delightful and provocative. Perhaps especially for gay men, it is also a useful corrective to the feeling of banishment from a necessary sport.Jesse Tyler Ferguson, center, as a business manager overjoyed with his new superstar client who awakens in him a love of the game.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBy that I don’t mean baseball itself but the examination of masculinity through its lens. In “Take Me Out,” Lemming’s announcement that he’s gay, prompted by no scandal and involving no lover, is essentially a pretext for a disquisition on maleness. What it finds in the locker room, where the Empires change, shower, snap towels and squabble, is as despairing as what it finds on the field is still hopeful and good.Connecting them, Lemming is a figure of godlike mystery. Aside from his purely technical skills, he is the kind of person, as his teammate Kippy Sunderstrom (Patrick J. Adams) floridly describes him, from whom mess does not “flow forth.” Lemming assumes that whatever he does will redound to his benefit, and that unlike most people for whom coming out is momentous, his gayness will be just another of “the irrelevancies” in his life, like being handsome and biracial.What he hasn’t counted on is the way, for his teammates, the revelation dims his aura of perfection while exposing cracks in their less perfectly airtight psyches. Their nudity now feels different to them, which is why the audience is asked to consider it as well. (But not the wider world; patrons are required to put their phones in Yondr pouches to prevent photography.) However well built he is, a man wearing nothing is inherently undefended.As a result, the Empires, formerly on track for the World Series, begin to lose cohesion and, soon thereafter, games. Homophobia bubbles up from the dark places of other men’s souls; even Lemming’s closest friend, Davey Battle, a religious man who plays for an opposing team in more ways than one, comes unglued by it. And, with the arrival of Shane Mungitt, a pitcher called up from the minor leagues, the confusion erupts in a shockingly violent act.Adams, left, as the veteran player Kippy Sunderstrom, and Michael Oberholtzer as Shane Mungitt, a talented pitcher carrying a ton of baggage. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesYet “Take Me Out” is not only about that descent into chaos on the playing field; it is also, in the story of the business manager, Mason Marzac, about the elevation of the spirit in the same locale. Marzac, the kind of gay man who feels he has no place in the heterosexual world or even the gay community — “I’m outside them. Possibly beneath them,” he says — is overjoyed when Lemming, his new client, comes out. In that act he sees the possibility of a reintegration into the mainstream of Americanness, and soon develops a maniacal interest in the game.That his newfound fandom is mostly a way of redirecting an impossible crush does not make it any less meaningful; that kind of sublimation may indeed be an unspoken aspect of many sports manias. Ferguson makes that feeling legible in a softer, less biting take on Marzac than the one originated by the brilliant Denis O’Hare, who won a Tony Award for the 2003 Broadway production. Ferguson brings out Marzac’s woundedness in a wonderfully detailed comic performance that is nevertheless full of yearning and unexpected elation.But if Lemming and baseball take Marzac out of his shell of protective pessimism — one of the many meanings packed into the grand-slam pun of the title — Marzac also takes Lemming out of his shell of aloofness. Oddly it is this element, the most fantastical in real life, that feels most believable onstage, and only in part because the locker-room drama, which involves too many obvious tensioning devices as well as too many morons, slightly collapses as the story develops. A late scene added for this production, between Lemming and two policemen, doubles down on that problem.Williams, left, and Brandon J. Dirden in the first Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s 2002 play, a Second Stage production.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut as Lemming and Marzac form a bond — not romantic but not untender, either — the ideas that Greenberg is juggling, about integration on the ball field and integration of the psyche, fully pay off. Williams, a stage novice but a longtime star of the television series “Grey’s Anatomy,” nails the way the glamour of the gifted can keep them from full lives; perhaps the seeming effortlessness of his own career gives him insight into the downside of too much ease.Under Scott Ellis’s assured and sprightly if visually underpowered direction, the other cast members make excellent utility players, moving swiftly between spotlight moments and background work as members of the team. In particular, Michael Oberholtzer, as Mungitt, seems to disappear into his damaged self when he isn’t spewing bizarre biographical tidbits or hatred. And as Battle, Brandon J. Dirden, just off a stellar turn as a factory foreman in “Skeleton Crew,” gives a perfectly etched performance at the other end of the spectrum, finding in his faith a sanctimony that supersedes even love.It is in fact Battle who unintentionally sets the plot in motion, telling Lemming that to be a full human he should want his “whole self known.” Ultimately, “Take Me Out” is about the danger that challenge poses to some people — a danger others may know nothing about. Still, Greenberg shows us, it is crucial to happiness, and not just for gay men, even if it introduces immense difficulties. A game needn’t be perfect to be won.Take Me OutThrough May 29 at the Helen Hayes Theater, Manhattan; 2st.com. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. More

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    A Century of the BBC, a ‘Quasi-Mystical’ Part of England’s Psyche

    David Hendy’s “The BBC” looks back at 100 years of wartime reporting, dramas, satires and weather reports.THE BBCA Century on AirBy David HendyIllustrated. 638 pages. PublicAffairs. $38.The British Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC — the Beeb — turns 100 this year. “Hullo, hullo, 2LO calling, 2LO calling,” a few thousand listeners heard through the hissing ether at 6 p.m. on Nov. 14, 1922. “This is the British Broadcasting Company. 2LO. Stand by for one minute please!” What followed were short news and weather bulletins, read twice, the second time slowly so that listeners could take notes.David Hendy, in his thorough and engaging new book, “The BBC: A Century on Air,” writes that you can’t understand England without understanding the BBC. It occupies, he says, “a quasi-mystical place in the national psyche.” It’s just there, like the white cliffs of Dover.The BBC sparked to life in the wake of World War I. Its founders included wounded veterans, and they were idealists. Civilization was in tatters; they hoped, through a new medium, to forge a common culture by giving listeners not necessarily what they wanted, but what they needed, to hear.The audience was fed a fibrous diet of plays and concerts and talks and lectures; sports included Derby Day and Wimbledon. Announcers wore dinner jackets as well as their plummy accents, “as a courtesy to the live performers with whom they would be consorting.” Catching the chimes of Big Ben before the evening news became a ritual for millions.Equipment was primitive. A framed notice by the microphone warned guest speakers, “If you sneeze or rustle papers you will DEAFEN THOUSANDS!!!”Radio was new; the BBC felt that it had to teach people how to listen. “To keep your mind from wandering,” it advised, “you might wish to turn the lights out, or settle into your favorite armchair five minutes before the program starts; above all, you should remember that ‘If you only listen with half an ear, you haven’t a quarter of a right to criticize.’”The BBC gained a reputation for being a bit snooty, and soporific. One complaint can stand for many: “People do not want three hours of [expletive] ‘King Lear’ in verse when they get out of a 10-hour day in the [expletive] coal-pits, and [expletive] anybody who tries to tell them that they do.”The BBC took it from both sides. To mandarins like Virginia Woolf, it was irredeemably middlebrow; she referred to it as the “Betwixt and Between Company.” The BBC loosened up over time and took increasing account of working-class and minority audiences, and of audiences who simply wanted to laugh.The broadcaster was created by a Royal Charter; it has never been government-run, yet it must answer to government. Hendy recounts attempts to limit its editorial independence. Churchill and Thatcher were especially vocal critics: They felt there was something a bit pinko about the whole enterprise.The BBC’s scrupulous reporting during World War II gave it lasting prestige across the world. It largely lived up to the motto of R.T. Clark, its senior news editor: to tell “the truth and nothing but the truth, even if the truth is horrible.”During wartime, the company occasionally broadcast from a safer perch. When announcers intoned “This is London,” with British phlegm, they were often in a countryside manor. The London headquarters took a direct hit from a bomb in October 1940; the reader of the evening news “paused for a split second to blow the plaster and soot off the script in front of him before carrying on with the rest of the bulletin.” Seven people were killed in the attack. After the war, the BBC’s foreign services became a prop to the Commonwealth, the new euphemism for “empire.”One of this book’s best set pieces is of the BBC’s wall-to-wall televised coverage of Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation in 1953. One reporter referred to it as “C-Day.” This sort of thing had never been on TV before. The hard part, Hendy writes, was “persuading royal officials that mere subjects had a right to witness the ceremony in the first place.”Over time the BBC’s tentacles grew longer and more varied: Clusters of radio and television stations catered to different demographics. Competitors crept in.The satire boom of the postwar era arrived, led by “The Goon Show,” which ran from 1951 to 1960. There were TV dramas from iconic talents like Ken Loach and Dennis Potter. The BBC began to take the critic Clive James’s advice: “Anemic high art is less worth having than low art with guts.”From left, Peter Sellers, Harry Secombe and Spike Milligan, members of “The Goon Show,” which aired on the BBC from 1951 to 1960.Mirrorpix via Getty ImagesLanguage battles fought at the company are never dull to read about. For decades, “bloody” could be used only rarely and “bugger” not at all. One internal stylebook, Hendy writes, “included a ban on jokes about lavatories or ‘effeminacy in men’ as well as any ‘suggestive references’ to subjects such as ‘Honeymoon Couples, Chambermaids, Fig leaves, Prostitution, Ladies’ underwear, e.g. winter draws on, Animal habits, e.g. rabbits, Lodgers, Commercial travelers.”The eclectic and influential disc jockey John Peel was brought in; so, alas, was the cigar-chomping comic Jimmy Savile, the zany-uncle host of shows like “Top of the Pops,” who was found after his death in 2011 to have molested dozens if not hundreds of children across five decades. An inquiry found that the BBC did not do nearly enough to stop him.The BBC’s nature documentaries were pathbreaking, and big hits. (They left James “slack-jawed with wonder and respect.”) Hendy walks us through how, under David Attenborough, these things got made. They take years, enormous staffs and a global network of freelancers willing to sit out in the cold and rain to get the money shots.Attenborough was told, early on, that he couldn’t appear onscreen because his teeth were too big. Richard Dawkins has written, in his memoirs, about how difficult it is to talk while walking backward, a crucial skill for any BBC documentary host.More recent BBC hits include the reality series “Strictly Come Dancing,” the brainy documentaries of Louis Theroux and the comedy-drama series “I May Destroy You.”The right has retained its distrust of the BBC, including up-to-date complaints about wokeness; it would like to see it become smaller and more “distinctive,” in the manner of PBS and NPR. These American stations have had nothing like the BBC’s cultural impact — though Greg Jackson, in his story collection “Prodigals,” was correct to refer to Terry Gross as the “Catcher in the WHYY.”Hendy can be critical of the company, but at heart he’s a fan. He reports that across any given week, more than 91 percent of British households use one BBC service or another. He cites academic surveys showing that the broadcaster’s news output is, if anything, tilted slightly to the right.The BBC can still be snoozy. I’m not the only person I know who, at least before Putin rattled the world’s cage, listened to the BBC World Service app at bedtime because it’s an aural sleeping pill.I deserve to lose style points for borrowing Hendy’s last lines for my own, but he puts it simply about the BBC’s precarious position: “We sometimes never know just how much we need or want something until it is gone.” More