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    Did a TV Show Hurt You? ‘Fix-Its’ Offer Justice

    This article includes spoilers for “Daredevil: Born Again,” “Severance,” “The Last of Us” and “The White Lotus.”As a longtime player of the Last of Us video game series, Sam Gaitan knew the death was coming. Still, the brutal murder of Joel in a recent episode of the HBO adaptation hit her hard. It was already midnight when she went on Tumblr to read fan reactions. Then, in a fit of inspiration, she started writing.“I was a wreck, and I needed to get those strong emotions out,” Gaitan, a tattooist and artist, said in a recent phone interview. By 5 a.m., she had written 3,761 words featuring Joel and Red, an original character Gaitan had previously created, and an alternative scenario that spares Joel from his onscreen fate.Writing under the alias oh_persephone, she posted the story on AO3, an online repository for fan fiction and other fan-created art, and crashed until her dogs woke her up the next morning.“It probably wasn’t the most coherent thing I’ve written,” she said, laughing. “But I figured other people could use it as much as I did.”In this alternative plot to “The Last of Us,” Joel, the beloved male lead played by Pedro Pascal, avoids being detained and murdered by a rival group.He is saved by Red, an invented heroine who convinces the gunmen that Joel is already dead and sends them off.“Joel’s eyes were on her, watching, a breath away from being up and ready to fight if needed,” oh_persephone writes. “They were both tightly wound coils, waiting to explode.”

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    Trump Seeks to Eliminate the NEA

    The president’s budget proposal also called for getting rid of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences.President Trump proposed eliminating the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities in the budget he released Friday, taking aim once again at two agencies that he had tried and failed to get rid of during his first term.The endowments, along with the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences, were among the entities listed in a section titled “small agency eliminations” in his budget blueprint for the next fiscal year. The document said that the proposal was “consistent with the president’s efforts to decrease the size of the federal government to enhance accountability, reduce waste, and reduce unnecessary governmental entities” and noted that Mr. Trump’s past budget proposals had “also supported these eliminations.”In 2017, during his first term, Mr. Trump proposed eliminating both the arts and the humanities endowments. But bipartisan support in Congress kept them alive, and in fact their budgets grew during the first Trump administration.Since Mr. Trump returned to office this year, his administration has taken aim at the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, canceling most of their existing grants and laying off a large portion of their staffs. But the arts agency had yet to announce major cuts.The proposal to eliminate the endowments drew a quick and furious reaction from Democrats. One, Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, vowed to fight the plan to eliminate the N.E.A. “tooth and nail.”Representative Chellie Pingree of Maine, who serves as the top Democrat on the House subcommittee overseeing the N.E.A., said in an interview that Mr. Trump was “making a broad-based attack on the arts, both for funding and content.” She cited his proposals to eliminate the endowments as well as his takeover of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and his efforts to influence the Smithsonian Institution.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Stephen Mo Hanan, Who Played Three Roles in ‘Cats,’ Dies at 78

    He sang arias on the streets of San Francisco, performed on Broadway and collaborated on a musical about Al Jolson, which he also starred in.Stephen Mo Hanan, a vibrant performer who sang arias and other music as a busker in San Francisco before playing Kevin Kline’s lieutenant in the acclaimed 1981 Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance” and three felines in the original Broadway cast of “Cats,” died on April 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.Gary Widlund, his husband and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack.At his audition for “Cats,” Mr. Hanan (pronounced HAN-un) told Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, and Trevor Nunn, the director, that he had spent several years singing and accompanying himself on a concertina at a ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.“As a matter of fact, I’ve brought my concertina,” he recalled telling Mr. Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. “He said, ‘Give me something in Italian.’ Well, I’ve never had a problem with shyness. I sang ‘Funiculi, Funicula.’”Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Puccini’s “Turandot.”During rehearsals, Mr. Hanan kept a detailed journal, which he published in 2002 as “A Cat’s Diary.”Mr. Hanan was cast in the original production of “Cats.” During rehearsals, he kept a detailed journal, which he later turned into a book.Smith & KrausIn an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Mr. Nunn: to “pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Wants to End With a Message of Hope

    In interviews, Elisabeth Moss and other stars and creators of the groundbreaking drama discuss its impending conclusion and ongoing connection to American politics.Though it was conceived in the Obama era, “The Handmaid’s Tale” arrived on Hulu in the early months of the first Trump presidency. Eight years later, it is concluding at the dawn of the second as an enduring, if initially accidental symbol of feminist resistance.Like the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel it is based upon, “The Handmaid’s Tale” focuses on the violence inflicted on women in Gilead, a place plagued by low birthrates and environmental disasters that divides women, based on age and fertility, into Wives, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts, Econowives and Unwomen.From the beginning, the show has invited interpretation as a running commentary on real-world gender politics — female activists nationwide wore the Handmaid’s uniform of red cloaks and stark white bonnets in protests, and “The Handmaid’s Tale” made history as the first streaming series to win the Emmy for best drama, in 2017. And its dystopian conceit of a nation claiming complete control over women’s reproductive rights became only more ominous as more U.S. state legislatures passed abortion restrictions, culminating in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.“The Handmaid’s Tale” debuted in 2017 and became a symbol of feminist resistance.George Kraychyk/Hulu“The Handmaid’s Tale” will end on May 27. (A spinoff series called “The Testaments” is currently in production.) The sixth and final season is focusing on the power of collective action, including unanticipated collaboration between the former enemies June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) in attempting to destroy Gilead and restore American democracy. (As a former Handmaid, June was routinely sexually assaulted by Serena’s husband, a high-ranking official.)Multiple members of the creative team talked about “The Handmaid’s Tale” in recent video interviews, including Strahovski and Moss, who is also a producer and director on the series; Bruce Miller, the creator; Warren Littlefield, a producer; and Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman, the Season 6 showrunners (both were writers in earlier seasons).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,’ a Party for Writers and Weirdos

    An awkward Encores! revival of the 1953 musical celebrates the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the years when oddballs could still afford to live there.Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind’s eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers.That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly “Wonderful Town,” their 1953 musical set in and around the Village’s crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it’s really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine.But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme “learned to read” with “André Gide.” And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play “My Sister Eileen,” “Wonderful Town” is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall’s 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003.The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs.It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script’s comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as “the place for self-expression.”But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make “Wonderful Town” wonderful. Rose’s way with a throwaway line, and Jackson’s delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what’s happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein’s “Ohio” with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they’re singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ruth Buzzi, Purse-Wielding Gladys of ‘Laugh-In,’ Is Dead at 88

    Ruth Buzzi, whose wary spinster wielding a vicious pocketbook to fend off male advances both real and imagined was among the most memorable characters on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the TV comedy grab bag of a show of the psychedelic era, died on Thursday at her ranch near Fort Worth. She was 88.Her agent, Michael Eisenstadt, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed 10 years ago.With an elastic, expressive face and a gift, both vocal and physical, for caricature, Ms. Buzzi had a long performing career. She played myriad roles onstage in summer stock; appeared on Broadway once, with a tripartite credit (as the Good Fairy/Woman With Hat/Receptionist) in the 1966 musical “Sweet Charity”; performed in TV variety shows; showed up as a guest star in a host of sitcoms; and had minor parts in movies, including “Freaky Friday,” the 1976 identity-swap comedy, and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again,” a loopy 1979 Disney western.Nothing in her career, however, had the enduring appeal of her determinedly unappealing “Laugh-In” character Gladys Ormphby, a combination schoolmarm, delicate codgerette and battle-ax clad in a drab brown cardigan, long skirt, saggy stockings and a hairnet with a knot in the middle of her forehead.Gladys’s regular appearances on the show — an NBC prime-time fixture from 1968 to 1973 — were generally in skits involving Tyrone, the quintessential dirty old man (Arte Johnson), who would get a little too close, breathe a little too heavily and make a little too suggestive a comment, provoking Gladys to wallop him with her purse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Idina Menzel’s ‘Redwood’ to Close Following Tony Nominations Shutout

    The Broadway musical will play its final performance at the Nederlander Theater on May 18.“Redwood,” a musical starring Idina Menzel, will end its Broadway run on May 18, an unexpectedly early closing announced just 24 hours after the show failed to garner any Tony Awards nominations.The show’s producers, Eva Price, Caroline Kaplan and Loudmouth Media, which is Menzel’s production company, announced the closing on Friday morning, acknowledging in a statement that “we had of course hoped for a longer run.” It had been scheduled to run at least until Aug. 17.“Redwood” was among 13 Tony-eligible shows that did not receive any nominations on Thursday. And although it had started off well at the box office, the show faced a worrisome decline in weekly grosses last month. It is the first production to decide to close following the Tony announcements, but it is not likely to be the last — several musicals are exhibiting signs of weakness at the box office at a very competitive and challenging time for Broadway shows, when it has become increasingly difficult for shows to become profitable because the costs of producing have risen.“Redwood” is a passion project for Menzel and her main collaborator, Tina Landau, who conceived the show with the actress and then wrote the book and directed the production. Kate Diaz wrote the music and collaborated with Landau on the lyrics. It had an initial production last year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.The musical is about a New York City gallerist, who, grieving the death of her son, drives cross-country and winds up in a redwood forest, seeking some kind of solace while tree-sitting. The set features enormous LED screens that are used to depict the landscape, and Menzel and several of her co-stars perform part of the show while climbing a large prop tree.The show was named a Critic’s Pick by Jesse Green of The New York Times, who wrote, “You have to admire the guts it takes to have put a deeply serious show about trauma and resilience on Broadway right now.” But other critics were less impressed; the reviews were mostly mixed to negative.The producers said that, during the production’s run, the show helped raise more than $2 million for charities, much of it in support of redwood forests.“Redwood” began previews at the Nederlander Theater on Jan. 24 and opened Feb. 13. At the time of its closing, it will have had 127 performances. It was capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. More

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    As Jane Austen’s Sister, Keeley Hawes Keeps a Controlled Burn

    Being cast in the mini-series “Miss Austen” began Keeley Hawes’s first venture into the Jane Austen-verse. Hawes has a résumé thick with period pieces but, perhaps surprisingly, she had never done a screen adaptation of Austen’s work — a veritable cottage industry in Britain since the late 1930s.“Of course, my husband played Mr. Darcy, so I feel like we’ve been in that world,” Hawes said, referring to the “Succession” star Matthew Macfadyen, who appeared in the 2005 film version of the classic Regency-era novel “Pride and Prejudice.”“I was delighted to join in the Austen world, and especially to do it like this because it’s not one that has been done,” she continued. “But it feels like part of the canon.”Indeed, Hawes is sneaking in through a side door: In the four-part “Miss Austen,” which premieres on Sunday as part of the PBS series “Masterpiece,” she plays a fictionalized version of Cassandra, Jane’s older sister and a somewhat controversial figure because she burned most of the writer’s letters.Like the historical novel by Gill Hornby on which it is based, the show, adapted by Andrea Gibb, speculates on what led Cassandra to her fateful act and features some very Austen-like romantic subplots. A key development cleverly brings together a friend of Cassandra’s played by Rose Leslie and Jane’s posthumous novel “Persuasion.”Based on a fictionalized account of Cassandra Austen’s life, “Miss Austen,” led by Keeley Hawes, speculates on what led Cassandra to burn her sister Jane’s letters.Robert Viglasky/MasterpieceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More