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    George Newall, a Creator of ‘Schoolhouse Rock,’ Dies at 88

    He was the last surviving member of the team that produced the educational cartoon for ABC-TV that informed Generation X.George R. Newall, an advertising executive who was the last surviving creator of “Schoolhouse Rock,” the animated musical snippets that taught young Generation X television viewers grammar, math, civics and science for a few moments during otherwise vacuous Saturday-morning commercial programming, died on Nov. 30 at a hospital near his home in Hastings-on-Hudson, N.Y. He was 88.The cause was cardiopulmonary arrest, his wife, Lisa Maxwell, said.“Schoolhouse Rock,” series, which ran from 1973 to 1984 and was revived in the 1990s, used quirky cartoons and upbeat music to furtively transform rote learning into euphonious fun during regular programming and before the government, in the 1990s, mandated that stations broadcast a modicum of educational and informative fare.The show won four Emmy Awards.The series spawned books, recordings, live singalong shows and a nostalgia cult that will mark the show’s 50th anniversary next year when the Walt Disney Company presents a prime-time television special; rereleases “The Official Schoolhouse Rock Guide,” written by Mr. Newall and Tom Yohe; and publishes an adult coloring book featuring all of the program’s characters.Among the show’s perennial favorite songs were “Three Is a Magic Number,” celebrating tripods, triangles and even a couple producing a baby; “Interjection!” which depicts a cartoon character getting stuck in the posterior with a big needle; and Mr. Newall’s “Unpack Your Adjectives.”“Schoolhouse Rock” originated in the early 1970s when David McCall, president of the McCaffrey & McCall advertising agency, complained to Mr. Newall, a creative director there, that his young sons couldn’t multiply, “but they can sing along with Jimi Hendrix and the Rolling Stones.”Could Mr. Newall put the multiplication tables to music? he asked. Mr. Newall’s search for a quirky musician who might help led him to Ben Tucker, who played bass at the Hickory House in New York, which Mr. Newall frequented regularly.“I asked Ben, and he said, ‘Oh yeah, my partner, Bob Dorough — he can put anything to music!’” Mr. Newall told The New York Times Magazine in 2018.‘He told me Bob had written a song based on the words on the mattress tag that say, ‘Do not remove under penalty of law,’” Mr. Newall recalled. “So I brought Bob in, and David gave him the assignment. He came back about two weeks later with ‘Three Is a Magic Number,’ and we were all knocked out by it.”The song inspired Mr. Yohe, the agency’s art director and a cartoonist, to start doodling. What was originally conceived as an educational phonograph record morphed into a series of three-minute films that the creative team presented to Michael Eisner, then the director of children’s programming at ABC, a client of the agency.Mr. Eisner happened to be meeting with Chuck Jones, the immortal Warner Bros. animator.“After we played the song and Tom showed them the storyboards, Eisner looked at Jones and said, ‘What do you think?’” Mr. Newall told The Times in 1994. “And Jones said, ‘I think you should buy it right away.’ It was probably the quickest deal in television history.”The first season was followed with themed series on grammar, government (to coincide with the American Bicentennial celebration), science and computer technology.In 1976, Carol Rinzler wrote in The Times, “The ‘ABC Schoolhouse Rock’ animated bits, which teach math and reading concepts and, this year, American history, are a joy. It’s worth sitting in front of your TV all morning to catch the one in which the Constitution is set to music.”Three-minute “Schoolhouse Rock” cartoons like “Conjunction Junction” tried to teach children grammar, math, civics and science.ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content, via Getty ImagesMr. Eisner later became chairman and chief executive of the Walt Disney Company, which acquired “Schoolhouse Rock” in 1996 (including new segments produced in the 1990s with J.J. Sedelmaier Productions) when it bought Capital Cities/ABC.Mr. Newall and Mr. Yohe were the executive producers and creative directors of the original episodes and worked with other collaborators. Mr. Newall composed 10 of the songs.In 1996, Atlantic Records released an album featuring alternative musicians like Moby (who croons a brassy version of “Verb: That’s What’s Happening”), and in 2002 the Disney Company issued a DVD of all the “Schoolhouse Rock” episodes and a timely lyrical explication by Mr. Newall of why some states in a presidential election are more equal than others.In 2013, Mr. Newall spoke about the show and Mr. Dorough performed “Schoolhouse Rock” songs at a free concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington.Mr. Yohe died in 2000, Mr. Dorough in 2018.George Robert Newall Jr. was born on June 17, 1934, in Lakewood, N.J. His father was a builder. His mother, Louise (DeNyse) Newall, worked for the school board in Brick Township.After attending Point Pleasant Beach High School and serving in the Army’s 11th Airborne Division Band at Fort Campbell, Ky., Mr. Newall graduated from Florida State University with a bachelor’s degree in music composition in 1960. He moved to New York City, where, starting in a mailroom at $50 a week, he worked for a number of ad agencies, including Ogilvy & Mather and Grey.At McCaffrey & McCall, he conjured up the Hai Karate brand of men’s toiletries for Pfizer with an advertising campaign that parodied the industry’s customary romanticized appeal to raw sexual passion by including self-defense instructions to fend off libidinous women.In 1978, he and Mr. Yohe started a company to produce animated educational programming. They won another Emmy for “Drawing Power,” an animated series for NBC, and awards for cartoons that promoted nutrition, cartoons that urged young viewers to read (“When You Turn Off Your Set, Turn On a Book”) and cartoons that were praised for being neither sexist nor racist.In the 1980s, Mr. Newall joined Wells Rich Greene, where he produced TV commercials in which Alan Alda pitched Atari computers.Mr. Newall is survived by his wife, the artist and singer Lisa (Chapman) Maxwell; a stepson, Lake Wolosker; and his sisters, Jessie Newall Bissey, Kathy Newall Hogan and Anne Newall Kimmel. More

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    The 10 Best Actors of 2022: Michelle Yeoh, Daniel Kaluuya and More

    Welcome to our portfolio of paradoxes. The first is that artists emblematic of great acting in moving images have been captured in still photographs. Another involves the state of the art itself. We chose 10 performances and could easily have doubled that tally, yet all of that talent finds itself in an iffy place. There are no guarantees for a screen actor anymore. There are no guarantees for a screen actor’s audience. We’re not even sure what we mean by “screen.” Read More

    We walked into “The Woman King” intrigued (what, exactly, would a machete-and-sandal melodrama starring Viola Davis look like?) and left astonished. A great performance can amount to something in addition to craft — personality, zeal, observation, lunacy, exactitude, risk, freedom. And that movie had all of those right there in almost every performance. Davis, for instance, did her usual bruising work — an actor at peak intensity. But not only did the film showcase and redouble the might of an established star; it also made one out of Thuso Mbedu, who plays Davis’s — well, just treat yourself.

    Here is someone whom we moviegoers deserve to get to know for years to come. But in what kinds of movies? As what sorts of people? Mbedu can act. But there just isn’t the variety of movies that could sustain all the acting she and many of the performers in the portfolio that follows could do — names you may not know, like Freddie Gibbs and Frankie Corio and, loosely, Vicky Krieps — but who once upon a time would have had a few chances to show what else they’re made of.

    Those chances feel imperiled. And not for the old reasons (for being a woman, for not being white) — although there’s still some of that. The peril is industrial shortsightedness. There’s diminished interest in the human scale of storytelling, particularly in American movies, which increasingly feel the need to go big or risk the audience’s staying home. Perhaps that’s why we’ve turned, along with many an actor, to television, where the ground feels more fertile. Maybe to the point of feeling overgrown.

    And that may be yet another paradox: a state of wild abundance that can seem a lot like scarcity. Talk of the “golden age” of television has receded in the face of the streaming gold rush. There are so many characters and narratives to keep track of. In an economy of scale, the aesthetics of scale can get out of whack. Stories that might have filled out a feature are stretched into six episodes. Eight-episode limited series flop into multiseason epics.

    Yet, somehow, acting thrives in this environment. Mediocre shows and films are often made watchable by the gift and grit of performers (George Clooney and Julia Roberts in “Ticket to Paradise”; Adrien Brody and Rob Morgan in “Winning Time”). There is enough outstanding work on television alone to fill a portfolio twice or three times the size of this one. To that end, we enfolded limited series into the survey and collided with Jon Bernthal, who, on “We Own This City,” managed to turn crooked-cop work into a feat of appalling macho cheer; and were blown away by Toni Collette on “The Staircase,” for which, despite centuries of actors’ simulating death, she invented at least four new and distressing ways to perform dying.

    But there is still, in the midst of all of that, the special lure and allure of the movies, which haven’t actually gone anywhere. Yes, you can stream “The Woman King” at home, but you would miss the bubbling joy of the families with kids — daughters and sons alike — when Davis and Mbedu get in each other’s faces and then join forces to purge their land of slavers.

    Or you would miss the sound of a stranger in the next seat sobbing into his mask during the final shot of “Aftersun,” Charlotte Wells’s memory film about a father and his daughter on holiday in Turkey. All you’re looking at is Corio, playing an 11-year-old Scottish sprite named Sophie, mugging for the camera that her father, Calum (Paul Mescal), is holding as she prepares to board a flight home from their vacation. It’s a jumpy, grainy amateur image (the film takes place in a not-so-distant pre-smartphone past), but it’s also cinema in the most exalted sense.

    Obviously, we hunger for what an actor can do for a movie: for the gruff poetry of Brendan Gleeson in “The Banshees of Inisherin”; for the salty sibling rivalry of Keke Palmer and Daniel Kaluuya in “Nope”; for the pizazz and poignancy of Michelle Williams in “The Fabelmans.” The year’s biggest hit stars Tom Cruise, and its staggering popularity is emphatic proof of what his stardom continues to mean to us. Cate Blanchett, meanwhile, playing a problematic maestro in “Tár,” matched and perhaps even exceeded the character’s mastery. Forget about the multiplex: That’s a performance fit for a concert hall.

    So now that we’ve poured one out for movie-industry scarcity and rebattened the hatches for gushingly abundant TV, what is our true task here? It can’t be lamentation. We’re worried — it’s a critic’s job to be worried — but not yet woebegone. We want to applaud, marvel at and salute the achievement of screen acting, the increasing miracle of it in challenging and confusing circumstances. Because to watch the 10 artists here is to sense that acting remains in fine shape; to watch them is both life-giving and life-affirming. In one montage in “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” time warps everything around Michelle Yeoh except the astonishment on her face. Her surprise — which inspires our own — is proof of the beautiful mystery of the art form, and a reason to reconsider a longtime star’s endurance. How — how — did she pull that off?

    This issue of the magazine is testament to our inability to answer that question. Every great performance is a unique amalgam of training, talent, collaboration and luck. In the end, we don’t know how they do it. What we do know is that we can’t stop watching. More

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    ‘Events’ Review: There’s Kool-Aid in the Water Cooler

    Bailey Williams’s comedy is a sharp-toothed, sometimes bewildering satire of all-consuming workplace culture.“No one is being murdered before the gala.”It’s the kind of directive that wouldn’t be necessary at most companies — even, perhaps, most high-strung, high-design event-planning firms, even at the height of gala season. But nerves have been extra frayed lately at Todd David Design. People’s imaginations might be running away with them.Or maybe, when Todd — the company’s pseudo-visionary leader — was patched in on speakerphone from a beach in Miami, his team back in New York really did hear him start to get murdered. Hard to say. In any case, his second in command, the imperious Christine, is not having it. So: “No one is being murdered before the gala,” she tells them all. They have a deadline to meet. Back to the task, everyone.All-consuming workplace culture is the satirical target of “Events,” Bailey Williams’s sharp-fanged new comedy at the Brick in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Directed by Sarah Blush, this co-production with the Hearth is off the rails — and that’s both a compliment and a critique.The show is as vibrantly nuts as Todd’s own pretentious ridiculousness (“I am thinking already of florals,” he says airily, musing on the gala) but also tangled, occasionally bewildering and larded with too much corporate-speak. A little of that goes a long way; even when it’s being skewered, simply hearing it can have a deadening effect.On a set by the design collective dots that includes an absurd foam-encased chair with a tiny tag on one leg, ordering people not to sit in it because it is art, “Events” takes place in two divergent realities. There is the brightly lit, well populated world of the office, and then there is the skulking realm of a woman called Itchy, dimly lit with just a single hanging lamp. (Lighting design is by Masha Tsimring.)Itchy is part of Todd David Design, too, or at least she used to be. Played with soft, confiding intensity by Zuzanna Szadkowski, she speaks her series of monologues directly to the audience, and is a riveting storyteller. Itchy, we learn, has not been doing so well at the company. She is convinced that someone there has been poisoning her, which is what’s causing her terrible itch. And that’s why she’s gone to the empty office on a Friday night, dressed in a dollar-store version of hazmat gear — plastic rain poncho, goggles, multiple shower caps — to decontaminate the place.Itchy is disaffected and quite possibly delusional. She may also be dangerous. But in her raw and wounded certainty, she is human and entirely fascinating.The others — Todd (Brian Bock), Christine (Claire Siebers) and their beleaguered team (Dee Beasnael, Julia Greer, Derek Smith and Haley Wong) — have signed on to the office’s culture of surface-shininess, reflexive obeisance and total commitment, even when their guru-boss is objectively detached from reason. But what if, in their devotion to creating events for their clients, they’re missing the main event — their own finite lives? And what if they’re losing themselves in the process?“Girl,” one colleague says to another, cutting through the nonsense at last. “You shouldn’t have brought your soul here. That’s your well-being. That’s your meaning-making.”EventsThrough Dec. 18 at the Brick, Brooklyn; bricktheater.com. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    In ‘White Lotus,’ Beauty and Truth Are All Mixed Up

    This season focuses on the willful delusion of the wealthy — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.Early in the second season of “The White Lotus” — Mike White’s HBO satire of the leisure class, currently set in a five-star Sicilian resort — there’s a sequence that offers an overt, shot-for-shot homage to a scene in “L’Avventura,” from 1960, the first film in Michelangelo Antonioni’s “Trilogy of Decadence.” Coolly removed and virtually plotless, Antonioni’s three films were intended as an indictment of the entropic passivity of wealth. All starred Monica Vitti, the glamorous Italian actress with whom Antonioni was romantically involved. In “L’Avventura,” she plays Claudia, a young woman whose best friend, Anna, disappears during a yacht trip off the coast of Sicily. As Claudia and Anna’s boyfriend, Sandro, search for the missing girl, they drift into an unconvincing relationship. When they arrive at the lone hotel in the town of Noto, Claudia, suddenly worried about facing her friend, tells Sandro to search inside without her.What we are looking at is the experience of being looked at.The scene “The White Lotus” recreates takes place outside, in the piazza, where Claudia is accosted by a horde of leering men. The aesthetics are disconcerting: Antonioni uses the town’s baroque architecture to pile men around and atop Claudia. She looks afraid, for a moment, but then has a sort of detachment from reality. Walking slowly through the crowd, she seems to give herself over to the experience, allowing herself to become a spectacle, subject to the men’s (and the audience’s) scrutinizing, consuming gaze.Welcoming You Back to ‘The White Lotus’The second season of “The White Lotus,” Mike White’s incisive satire of privilege set in a luxury resort, begins on HBO on Oct. 30.Michael Imperioli: The “Sopranos” star is enjoying a professional renaissance after years of procedurals and indies. In the new season of “The White Lotus” he tries his hand at comedy.Season 1: The series scrutinized the interactions between guests and staff at a resort in Hawaii. “It’s vicious and a little sudsy and then, out of nowhere, sneakily uplifting,” our critic wroteUnaware Villain: The actor Jake Lacy plays Shane, a wealthy and entitled 30-year-old on his honeymoon, in the first season. Here is what he said about bringing to life the unsavory character.Emmys: The series scooped up five Primetime Emmys on Sept. 12, including for best TV movie, limited or anthology series, and best supporting actress for Jennifer Coolidge’s breakout performance.Even before “The White Lotus” fully replicates this image, though, we see one character — a batty gazillionaire named Tanya McQuoid, played by Jennifer Coolidge — explicitly name-check Vitti. Describing her fantasy of a day in Italy to her husband, Greg, she stays resolutely on the surface: “First, I want to look just like Monica Vitti,” she says. “And then this man in a very slim-fitting suit, he comes over and he lights my cigarette. And it tastes really good. And then he takes me for a drive on his Vespa. Then, at sunset, we go down really close to the sea, to one of those really romantic spots. And then we drink lots of aperitivos and we eat big plates of pasta with giant clams. And we’re just really chic and happy. And we’re beautiful.” Greg obligingly rents a Vespa. But Tanya is not the character who will feature in the Antonioni homage.“L’Avventura” is not the only film referenced in “The White Lotus,” which is positively haunted by movies and the fantasies they engender. As Tanya casts herself in her superficial version of an Italian film, Bert Di Grasso — a grandfather whose family trip to Sicily has been upended by the women in the family’s refusing to come — is exalting the ethos of “The Godfather,” in which he sees men who are free to do as they like. After her ill-fated Vitti cosplay leaves her alone and betrayed, Tanya takes up with Quentin, part of a group of “high-end gays,” as she calls them, who recast her as a tragic heroine. Quentin tells her about his own lost love, but it sounds like the plot of “Brokeback Mountain,” and he takes her to the opera to see “Madama Butterfly,” which, in this context, can’t help but call to mind “M. Butterfly,” and a very specific form of romantic deception. As the line blurs between stories and lies, the vibe shifts closer to “The Talented Mr. Ripley.” If the first season of “The White Lotus” was about the casual destructiveness of wealth, this one seems to be about its willful delusion — and how easily preyed upon people who evade reality can be.In Antonioni’s film, Vitti’s wealth and beauty grant her character access to a world of glamour, but they also trap her in a lie, concealing a real world of rot and corruption. “L’Avventura” means “the adventure” — ironic, since nothing much happens in the movie, and its central mystery is never solved — but an “avventura” is also a term for an illicit affair, often one entered out of boredom, for kicks. This is precisely how everyone in this season of “The White Lotus” gets into trouble. For both show and film, “love” is a dance of deception and self-delusion, in which it’s hard to tell who’s the mark.The only character who still clings to purity — the only innocent left to corrupt — is Harper Spiller, played by Aubrey Plaza. And she is the one who ends up in Noto, recreating the Monica Vitti scene in the piazza. Like Claudia, Harper has drifted here by accident — by virtue, another character observes, of being pretty. The newly rich wife of a tech founder, she has come on a luxury vacation at the invitation of his college roommate. Harper is suspicious of the whole endeavor: of getting rich quickly, of old friends who materialize suddenly after you get rich, of rich people who spend their lives disengaging from the world and drifting from one fantasy locale to the next. In Noto, she finds herself alone and surrounded by men, exactly like Vitti. Just as in the film, the scene feels over the top and surreal — part paranoid fantasy, part dissociative experience, and even stranger now that it’s 2022, not 1960, and Aubrey Plaza doesn’t cut quite so otherworldly and surprising (for Noto) a figure as the statuesque blonde Vitti did.As we watch Harper drift through the crowd, what we are looking at is the experience of being looked at. Along with Tanya — who aims to imitate Vitti but is instead brutally compared, by a tactless hotel manager, to Peppa Pig — she offers a metaphor for how thoroughly we can give ourselves over to imposture.Antonioni started working during the Italian neorealism movement, when films were shot on location, making use of nonactors, telling stories about working-class people and poverty and despair. But it was “L’Avventura,” with its focus on the alienation of the moneyed, that made him internationally famous. I know this because I took an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year abroad in Paris, and — not surprisingly, I suppose, for the kind of person who takes an Italian-neorealism class during a junior year in Paris — I, too, preferred Antonioni’s trilogy about disaffected rich people to the stuff that had come before: children stealing bicycles, Anna Magnani worrying about unpaid bills, that sort of thing. Struggle is hard to watch; it is much more pleasant to have our moral judgments projected into a world of aestheticized, escapist pleasure.We carry a desire to inhabit images we’ve seen, reified symbols of love, glamour, happiness, success. The “White Lotus” scene in Noto is a perfect representation of this recursive fakery and its nightmarish endpoint. Like so many travelers in the Instagram age, the show’s characters drift through their adventures without any real purpose other than to reproduce the pretty scenes and special moments they’ve seen elsewhere, trying to locate themselves in endless reflections. Among them, it is only Harper who remains unaffected by visual culture. Her scene in Noto feels like an inflection point. It is easier than ever to mistake beauty for truth — or pretend to. Which, the show asks, will Harper choose?Source photographs: HBO; Cino del Duca/PCE, Lyre. More

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    Stephen Colbert Thanks Santa After Trump Organization Is Found Guilty

    Late night hosts were thrilled after the former president’s company was convicted on all 17 counts it faced, including tax fraud.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.A Christmas MiracleOn Tuesday, the Trump Organization was convicted on 17 counts of tax fraud and other crimes.“Oh, Santa, you got my letter!” Stephen Colbert riffed on the news.“Trump is bragging it’s the most counts ever.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And you know what that means? Donald Trump is going to prison — to visit all the lower-ranking people that did this without his knowledge or his permission.” — TREVOR NOAH“Nothing ever happens to Donald Trump. He’ll probably try to convince us he’s never even heard of the Trump Organization.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“All the successes and Trump’s organization, they are due to the genius of Donald Trump. All the crimes, he had no idea. He’s like, [imitating Donald Trump] ‘That’s right, folks. I have zero control over the things I run, which is why you should vote for me to run the country so I can run it like one of my companies, which I don’t even run. I don’t even run.’” — TREVOR NOAH“What happened was, top execs in the organization got around paying their fair share of taxes through a series of schemes that included off-the-books perks like luxury cars and free apartments. Because nothing makes you look less guilty than giving all your execs a getaway car and a hide-out.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“There’s no word yet on how this is going to impact Trump’s re-election campaign. The reason for that is that it probably won’t.” — JAMES CORDEN“Executives in the organization received fancy apartments, Mercedes-Benzes, even private school tuition for relatives, none of which they paid tax on. I just have to ask: Are they hiring?” — JAMES CORDEN“I don’t get this — how is the organization guilty, but not Donald Trump? This is like if McDonald’s got in trouble, but the Hamburglar got off scot-free.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Herschel Walker’s Last Push Edition)“In Georgia, Raphael Warnock and Herschel Walker are going head-to-head injury in the Senate runoff.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Walker spent the day making one final push, which is unusual for him. Usually during the final push, he’s miles away from the hospital at a Waffle House telling a waitress she could be ‘the one.’”— JIMMY KIMMEL“Voters were out at the polls all day, and at 11:35 Eastern time, with 0 percent of precincts reporting, because we taped the show at 5:30, ‘The Late Show’ is ready to project that Herschel Walker does not belong in the Senate.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The U.S. Senate is no place for people whose brains don’t work because of football injuries; it’s a place for people whose brains don’t work because they’re 1,000 years old.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It’s not like Herschel didn’t try — he spent years fathering as many voters as possible.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingAmy Poehler and Maya Rudolph appeared on Tuesday’s “Late Night,” where they challenged Seth Meyers to ask them a tough question.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe Linda Lindas will perform on Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This Out“Who am I?” asks Orlando, played by Emma Corrin, in a new production at Garrick Theater in London.Marc BrennerEmma Corrin straddles genders and centuries in Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s novel “Orlando,” now playing at the Garrick Theater in London. More

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    ‘The Brightest Thing in the World’ Review: Falling in Love, While Loving Heroin

    An addiction and recovery tale wrapped in a romantic comedy, Leah Nanako Winkler’s play insists on acknowledging the messy coexistence of joy and pain.NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Christmas whooshes in from the wings, making a festive sneak attack. One instant, a recovering addict is deep in a soliloquy about the seductions of heroin; the next, she is standing in her doting sister’s living room, surrounded by sparkle and warmth.“The Brightest Thing in the World,” Leah Nanako Winkler’s potent new play at Yale Repertory Theater, is itself a bit of an ambush, though a more gradual one. Beginning as a rom-com with all the trimmings, it intensifies into a pair of love stories — each golden in its way, each fraught with quiet fear. Directed by Margot Bordelon, this is ultimately a brokenhearted tale.But for a nice long while, it luxuriates in the fluttery pleasure of mutual crushes morphing into romance. At Revival, a cozy bakery cafe in Lexington, Ky., the charming Lane (a stellar Katherine Romans) has been subtly wooing Steph (Michele Selene Ang), one of her regular customers, with coffee and pastries on the house. Lane even bakes her the kind of cake that famously figures in the novel Steph totes around.“See my biceps?” Lane says, boasting of all the egg-beating she’s done. “They’re stronger now.”“Whoa,” Steph says, swooning adorably.Winkler knows her rom-com tropes, so Steph is not only a florist but also a journalist, albeit a fairly unobservant one. She has no idea that everyone who works at Revival is in recovery from addiction. By the time Lane becomes aware of Steph’s obliviousness and fills her in, they are already enmeshed; when they finally got together, fireworks boomed in the night sky. (The set is by Cat Raynor, lighting is by Graham Zellers, sound is by Emily Duncan Wilson.)Della (Megan Hill), Lane’s wacky older sister, actively nurtures the couple’s happiness. On the first of a few Christmases with Steph, when Lane worries that “it’s hard to be all in with someone like me,” Della reassures her.“You’re fantastic,” she says. “And a catch.”This is the play’s other love story: the devotion between Lane, who is four years sober, and Della, a one-woman cheerleading squad who holds on tight to the memories of all the beautiful things that her sister has done and been. It’s Della who recalls Lane, radiant in the audience at a concert one night, as “the brightest thing in the world.”Romans and Megan Hill as sisters who are the second of the play’s two love stories.Joan MarcusWinkler’s script is dappled with fancy and poetry, but some dialogue sounds more schematic than dramatic, as when Lane and Steph talk politics. The play also sabotages two scenes by courting laughs in life-or-death moments — first during a pivotal emergency, and later in a traumatic recollection of loss. Humans can be ridiculous even in the most somber circumstances, but the attempts at comedy undermine the emotion.Those are puzzling miscalculations for a work that is otherwise insistent on acknowledging the messy, scary coexistence of joy and pain, strength and fragility, self-preservation and self-destruction — not only in Lane but in Steph and Della, who love her tenaciously, and whom she loves back hard. It’s just that, as Lane tells Steph, she also loves heroin.Which is why a constant worry long ago insinuated itself into Della’s everyday thoughts: “What do I have to do today … is Lane dead. I need gas … is Lane dead. Do I want coffee … is Lane dead.”It is bold to stage “The Brightest Thing in the World” in the season when jolly-holiday pressures can heighten tensions for addicts and those who love them. That timing could easily make it too much for people to watch.But I’ve been dogged for years by the same dread as Della, with a different name attached. And I’ll tell you, there can be real solace in a play that speaks your own fears back to you.The Brightest Thing in the WorldThrough Dec. 17 at the Yale Repertory Theater, New Haven, Conn.; yalerep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More

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    Review: In ‘Orlando,’ Emma Corrin Straddles Genders and Centuries

    In a freewheeling London adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1928 novel, Corrin plays a character whose emotions are as fluid as their identity.LONDON — The play comes perfectly matched with its leading player in “Orlando,” a freewheeling take on Virginia Woolf’s gender-bending novel that opened Monday at the Garrick Theater here.Neil Bartlett’s breezy adaptation of its 1928 source is playful, and ultimately moving, but the director Michael Grandage owes much of the production’s success to its galvanizing star, Emma Corrin, who made an acclaimed West End debut last year in the short-lived “Anna X.” Thankfully, this time, Corrin can be seen onstage for considerably longer; “Orlando” runs through Feb. 25.The fast-rising Corrin, who identifies as nonbinary and uses they/them pronouns, has made headlines recently as much for their gender identity as for increasingly prominent screen roles. After winning a Golden Globe for playing Princess Diana in “The Crown,” Corrin starred in two films this season, “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” and “My Policeman,” which was also directed by Grandage.Yet none of those roles has connected as directly to Corrin’s ongoing self-inquiry as the restless, century-straddling Orlando. “Being nonbinary is an embrace of many different parts of myself, the masculine and the feminine and everything in between,” Corrin said in a recent interview with The New York Times.Corrin has obviously spent some time with a question that Orlando asks rhetorically throughout the play: “Who am I?” We first meet the character as a young nobleman, born into Elizabethan-era luxury and a home containing 365 rooms. (The real-life inspiration for this vast property was Knole House, the countryside home of Vita Sackville-West, the author and socialite for whom an adoring Woolf wrote the novel.)But as time hurtles forward, Orlando barely ages and awakens one day from an extended slumber, age 30, as a woman. “Well, knock me down with a flipping feather,” says Orlando’s longtime housekeeper, Mrs. Grimsditch, in response. On the other hand, this loyal sidekick has seemed comfortable with gender fluidity from the start: “Ladies and gentlemen — no, sorry, everyone” she says in an early speech to the audience. The invaluable Deborah Findlay, hair disheveled but her sense of fun unimpaired, is a delight in the role.Corrin is more than game for whatever the play requires. This includes putting on and taking off Peter McKintosh’s ravishing costumes, to keep pace with the passing centuries.The youthful male we glimpse at the play’s start has an impishly androgynous allure, along with a gift for rewriting Shakespeare: “Shall I compare me to a summer’s day?” a glinting Orlando asks early on. But with age comes experience and exposure, not just to royalty (Lucy Briers makes a memorably stern Elizabeth I) but also to lovers and intimates of various genders and circumstances, including a bawdy Nell Gwyn (Millicent Wong) who tells Orlando, “For a lady, you’re really quite the gentleman.”Corrin is in full-throated voice throughout the vicissitudes of Orlando’s fraught love life — when Orlando’s heart is broken, you know it — and in moments when Orlando is taken over by fear. It’s not just that gender is fluid, we feel, but emotions are, too, and the play comes blessed with an actor who can project confidence one minute, and surrender to uncertainty the next. “Orlando” features a cast of Virginia Woolfs, who the titular character turns to to amend or amplify the story. Marc BrennerThe production features a bustling chorus of Woolfs, nine in all, bespectacled and drably attired; each of them adroitly handles at least one additional role, and sometimes more. (That supporting cast includes another nonbinary actor in Oliver Wickham, who plays Clorinda, an early crush for Orlando.)The sobriety of the author on view in this version contrasts with the vivacity of her creation. We see an anxious Orlando interacting with the lineup of women: “Come on, you wrote me,” she says, almost pleadingly, as if Woolf could posthumously amend the story. And yet the play sustains a spryness of tone.Bartlett’s adaptation is more of a sparky, affectionate pastiche, whether invoking another Woolf title, “A Room of One’s Own,” or handing a song lyric from the musical “Cabaret” — another show about shifting identity — to an especially ardent suitor, the Archduchess Harriet. (Richard Cant has particular fun with that role.)We get a synoptic survey of changes in women’s circumstances over time — I loved the sight of the Virginias producing teacups from their bags to signal the arrival of the Victorian era — and there’s a verbal lob in the direction of Britain’s governing Conservative Party that surely owes more to Bartlett than Woolf. But Corrin’s gorgeous performance lifts the 90 minutes, no intermission, well beyond anything resembling a history lesson or a night out requiring preparatory homework.“I once did love,” Orlando says wistfully, and the play leaves us hopeful that this mutable, mesmerizing character will find his, or her, or their, own way to do that again.OrlandoThrough Feb. 25 at the Garrick Theater, London; thegarricktheatre.co.uk. More

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    Trevor Noah Takes on Trump’s Attempt to Terminate the Constitution

    “There was no proof of a conspiracy to help defeat Donald Trump,” Noah said. “But you know who doesn’t care about any of that? Donald Trump.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The TerminatorOver the weekend, Donald Trump floated the idea of terminating the Constitution. He was responding to a report about Twitter, specifically its decision, during the 2020 presidential campaign, to block links to an article about Hunter Biden’s laptop.As Trevor Noah noted, some people expected the report — hyped in advance by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk — to show that Twitter had colluded with Democrats to repress the story. Instead, it seemed to show the Biden campaign asking Twitter to take down not-safe-for-work Hunter Biden photos. Still, Trump seemed to believe it proved “Massive Fraud” that justified the “termination” of parts of the Constitution, in order to reverse the election results.“There was no proof of a conspiracy to help defeat Donald Trump,” Noah said. “But you know who doesn’t care about any of that? Donald Trump.”“The Constitution is one of the documents he actually stole and took to Mar-a-Lago.” — JAMES CORDEN“Former President Trump on Saturday said that the 2020 election should be overturned and the Constitution should be terminated. Well, I’ll say this for him, he does give a memorable wedding toast.” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, that’s right. The Republican front-runner for president of the United States wants to terminate the Constitution because Twitter wouldn’t allow him to see Hunter Biden’s [expletive].”— TREVOR NOAH“Again with the Hunter Biden laptop! Give it a rest! You don’t hear anyone obsessing over the former president’s son’s laptop. And Eric’s got a good one — it’s made by Fisher-Price, and it can tell you what sound a cow makes.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So yeah, sorry, everyone, if you want to see naked people, you’ve got to go to every other website on the internet, I guess.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know, not everyone is a stable enough genius to write down their intention to overthrow democracy in a social media post, but he thinks the Constitution is something that can be terminated, like it’s Meat Loaf on an episode of ‘Celebrity Apprentice.’ It doesn’t go like that.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s only fair. Trump got to win an election through Facebook, Biden should get to win one through Twitter.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Walker’s Big Run Edition)“Some political news, tomorrow is the Georgia Senate runoff between Herschel Walker and Senator Raphael Warnock. Warnock’s supporters said that they’re voting for him because of his policies, while Walker’s supporters say they’re voting for him because it’s funny.” — JIMMY FALLON“More than 1.8 million Georgia residents have already voted, and that’s just Herschel Walker’s children.” — JIMMY FALLON“Right now, Warnock is leading Walker in the polls by about four points. Yeah, only four points. That explains Warnock’s slogan, ‘Even if I win, I’m genuinely hurt.’” — JIMMY FALLON“President Biden said on Friday that Democrats must win the Georgia Senate runoff to avoid a 50-50 split in the chamber. ‘But that would mean the end of my presidency!’ said Joe Manchin.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Monday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” Haley Lu Richardson shared the first text message she received from her co-star Aubrey Plaza before they started working together on “The White Lotus.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe all-woman tap group Syncopated Ladies will perform on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutJerrod Carmichael in a scene from his HBO stand-up special “Rothaniel.”HBOJerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel” and Atsuko Okatsuka’s forthcoming HBO Max special “The Intruder” are among the best comedy of 2022. More