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    Why Did the Indie Film Studio A24 Buy an Off Broadway Theater?

    The Hollywood upstart has upgraded the Cherry Lane Theater for plays and more. Coming this fall: films chosen by Sofia Coppola, food from Frenchette and the voice of Barbra Streisand.In the two years since A24, the artistically ambitious film and television studio, purchased Manhattan’s Cherry Lane Theater, the historic West Village building has been dark, at least from the outside. But inside, the company behind “Moonlight,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and “Euphoria” has been quietly overhauling the facility, and in September Cherry Lane will reopen as the first live performance venue run by the indie powerhouse.The company says it plans a wide-ranging slate of programming, prioritizing theater — Cherry Lane describes itself as the birthplace of the Off Broadway movement — but also featuring comedy, music and film.Another attraction: food. A24 has enlisted the Frenchette Group, which runs several lauded eateries in Manhattan (including Frenchette, Le Rock and Le Veau d’Or), to open a small restaurant and bar at Cherry Lane. The restaurant, called Wild Cherry in a nod to the theater’s name, will be Frenchette’s second collaboration with a downtown cultural institution — it also operates a bakery cafe inside the Whitney Museum.Among the initial programming highlights will be a Sunday film series curated by Sofia Coppola (first film: Adrian Lyne’s “Foxes” from 1980) and a five-week run of “Weer,” a one-woman show from the clowning comedian Natalie Palamides (each half of her body plays a different partner in a romantic couple). There will also be a week of opening events, starting Sept. 8, that includes comedy, music, a play reading and a block party. The venue does not plan to announce a season, or to have subscribers — it wants the nimbleness to extend or add events as it goes.In keeping with theatrical tradition, Cherry Lane has a ghost light, which is used for practical and supernatural safety when other lights are off.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“First and foremost, we really want this to be a place where people can be sure they’ll see a great, good quality piece of live performance,” said Dani Rait, who spent a decade at “Saturday Night Live,” helping to book hosts and musical guests, before A24 hired her to head programming at Cherry Lane. “And it’s an opportunity for discovery — for artists to have a stage and connect with audiences in a really intimate way.”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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    Why ‘Jaws’ Works

    A new documentary explores how Steven Spielberg’s hit reshaped the movie industry 50 years ago and why it resonates today. Hint: It’s not the shark.On the most basic level “Jaws” is a movie about a relentless great white shark, terrorizing the residents of a beach community during a Fourth of July weekend. It was the razor-toothed beast who adorned the onslaught of T-shirts and other merchandise when the film came out 50 years ago, premiering in June 1975 and all but creating what we think of as the modern blockbuster. It was the shark who got the two-note tuba treatment from John Williams’s ominous score.But the new National Geographic documentary “Jaws @50,” now streaming on Disney+ and Hulu, makes one thing as clear as a summer day on Amity Island: “Jaws” is primarily about flawed people, not a scary fish. The real villain is not the shark, who, after all, would be happy to be left alone. (As the shark conservation biologist Candace Fields says in the documentary, “The sharks are not infesting the water. The sharks live in the water”).The bad guy is the avaricious mayor (Murray Hamilton), who insists on keeping the beaches open during peak season rather than shutting down for safety. The three heroes — the police chief Brody (Roy Scheider), the sea captain Quint (Robert Shaw), and the oceanographer Hooper (Richard Dreyfuss) — form a carefully drawn triangle, written with a depth that has eluded most post-“Jaws” spectacles to this day.For Laurent Bouzereau, the author and filmmaker who directed “Jaws @50,” the human touches were what made “Jaws” a classic, and what guided a young Steven Spielberg as he turned Peter Benchley’s best-selling novel into a runaway hit movie.“The humanity of Steven’s approach to everything in his career started emerging in a movie like ‘Jaws,’ where it’s much more about people’s reaction to a crisis rather than the crisis itself,” Bouzereau said in a video interview. “You feel like you know these people, and they all stand out.”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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    ‘Rematch’ Recreates a Cultural Touchstone

    A series dramatizes the 1997 chess match between a world champion and an IBM computer, a precursor of modern anxieties about artificial intelligence.It is rare that chess grabs the public’s attention — most people consider it to be too slow or too arcane to be engaging. But every now and then, the game transcends those obstacles, as it did in 2020, when Netflix released “The Queen’s Gambit,” about a girl genius who rises up to conquer the game of kings.It happens with real chess matches, too. It happened in 1972, when against the backdrop of the Cold War, a match for the world championship was played in Iceland between the American Bobby Fischer and the Russian Boris Spassky. Fischer won.And it happened again in May 1997, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played a match against a black, six-and-a-half-foot tall, 1,500-pound computer named Deep Blue, developed at IBM.The last event is the subject of another television series, called “Rematch,” now streaming in Britain on Disney+. (It is not currently streaming in the United States; Disney declined to say when or if it would.) The six-part series walks viewers through what led up to the weeklong match held in midtown Manhattan and the unfolding drama culminating in (spoiler alert) Kasparov’s historic loss.Spinning a tale of human drama, corporate skulduggery, double-dealing and even espionage, “Rematch” also makes several explicit references to the attention that the match received, including by weaving in actual clips from contemporaneous news broadcasts.Though there are some fictional elements in the series, the hype was real.It was not hard to understand. The match pitted man against machine, something right out of science fiction. (In one scene in “Rematch,” characters joke about naming Deep Blue after sinister robots from “Alien” or “Terminator.”)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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    Late Night Fact-Checks Trump on His Uncle and the Unabomber

    Jordan Klepper and other hosts poked holes in the president’s claim that his uncle had been the future terrorist’s professor at M.I.T. 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.Weird Flex, BroAt an A.I. conference in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, President Trump said his uncle, John Trump, had been the “longest-serving professor in the history of M.I.T.” and held “three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math.” Trump added that his uncle’s students had included Ted Kaczynski, who he described as being “seriously good.”“Wow, we went from zero to Unabomber like that,” Jordan Klepper said on Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” snapping his fingers.Klepper pointed out that while the president’s uncle had indeed been a well-known M.I.T. professor, he was not the longest-serving one, nor did he have degrees in “nuclear, chemical and math” (he had a Ph.D. in electrical engineering). He said it was also highly unlikely that he had told his nephew Donald a story about teaching the Unabomber, “because nobody knew who Kaczynski was until 1996, and Trump’s uncle died in 1985.”“Kaczynski did not go to M.I.T. He went to Harvard. [imitating Trump] ‘Yes, but sometimes old Ted would take the crosstown bus over to M.I.T, then he would go around correcting people. He’d say, ‘I actually didn’t go to school here, you know, you don’t actually know me. I’m a figment of the imagination of your dumbest nephew.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So the whole thing we just heard wasn’t just a small lie, it was like a full hallucination.” — SETH MEYERS“Now, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe Trump just misspoke, made a slip. I mean, who among us hasn’t accidentally told people that our uncle taught the Unabomber?” — JORDAN KLEPPER“What I’m saying is, isn’t it great that we finally have a president whose brain works perfectly?” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Punchiest Punchlines (Snoozefest Edition)“But the big story today is that Trump lashed out at his own supporters who are criticizing him over the Epstein files, calling them ‘weaklings who have bought into B.S. hook, line and sinker.’ Trump hasn’t been this mad at the people he loved since McDonald’s introduced salads.” — JIMMY FALLON“No, he’s right. The Epstein saga is a total snoozefest. I mean, the most powerful man in the world is blocking information about a cabal of the rich, the famous and the royal befriending a con man, who regularly flies off on his private plane to his private island to do super-illegal sex stuff. Then the con man is arrested, people are afraid he’s going to name names, but before he can, he mysteriously dies right after being taken off of suicide watch in a federal prison during the administration of the guy who is blocking the release of the information. Boring!” — STEPHEN COLBERTWe 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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    Broadway’s ‘Gypsy’ Revival, Starring Audra McDonald, Will Close

    The show is the sixth musical to announce a closing date since last month’s Tony Awards, reflecting financial challenges facing producers.A boundary-breaking Broadway revival of “Gypsy” starring Audra McDonald will end its run on Aug. 17, much earlier than its producers had hoped.The run was originally open-ended, meaning that no closing date had been set, and tickets were on sale through Oct. 5. But on Wednesday night, the production announced the new closing date; at the time of its final performance, it will have played 28 preview and 269 regular performances at the Majestic Theater.The show is the sixth musical to announce a closing date since last month’s Tony Awards (following “Boop!” “Cabaret,” “Dead Outlaw,” “Real Women Have Curves” and “Smash”), reflecting Broadway’s difficult financial dynamics (nonmusical plays have been faring much better). “Gypsy” was nominated for five Tony Awards, including as best musical revival and for McDonald’s performance, but won none.The revival, directed by George C. Wolfe, was highly anticipated because McDonald, with six Tony Awards, is Broadway’s most-honored contemporary performer, and she is the first Black actress to play on Broadway the lead role of Rose, the ur-stage mother whose daughter becomes a stripper. The musical, with a book by Arthur Laurents, music by Jule Styne and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, was inspired by the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee; it first opened in 1959 and is generally considered one of Broadway’s best golden age musicals.When the revival opened in December, it received overwhelmingly positive reviews. In The New York Times, chief theater critic Jesse Green named the show a critic’s pick and wrote of McDonald, “Doing a psychological striptease, showing more of the character’s rage than her predecessors, she is stupendously affecting.”At the box office, the show seemed to be selling well for much of its run, grossing well over $1 million most weeks in its early months, and peaking at $1.9 million during a week in mid-January.But the show is costly to run, thanks to a large orchestra and sizable cast that includes children, who can be costly to employ because they require supervisors who need to be hired by the production.“Gypsy” also lost a substantial amount of potential revenue over the normally lucrative Christmas holidays when illnesses forced the cancellation of seven performances. Its weekly grosses have been heading in a troubling direction — last week the show sold only 61 percent of its seats and grossed $816,086.And musicals have been fetching much lower ticket prices than starry plays. For example, during the week that ended June 1, when all three shows were running, the average ticket price at an “Othello” revival starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal was $425, and at “Good Night, and Good Luck,” starring George Clooney, it was $339. The average ticket price for “Gypsy” was $114. More

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    Everyone’s Obsessed With True Crime. Even Prisoners Like Me.

    As the genre has boomed on cable, the incarcerated have found themselves watching more and more of it.In the early aughts, when I was waiting on Rikers Island to be tried for murder, I had to watch what everyone else in the communal day room was watching on TV: shouts of “Jer-ry! Jer-ry!” and announcements that “You are not the father.”After I was convicted, in 2004, and sentenced to 28 years to life in prison, TV would occupy even more of my time. Prisons do get cable: Normally, the population pays via things like fund-raisers and the profits from visiting-room vending machines. At Clinton Dannemora, a maximum-security prison near the Canadian border, I bought a 13-inch television from the commissary, and it felt like a privilege to watch what I wanted, alone in my cell. In Attica, where I transferred in 2007, we had the Oxygen channel, on which everyone would watch reality shows like “Bad Girls Club.” I enjoyed all the gossiping and scheming on “Big Brother” and “Survivor,” and when I put an ad on a dating website for prisoners I listed “The Bachelor” as my favorite show. The women who wrote to me related. I eventually married one.Her name was Danielly, and she watched a lot of true crime. It made her so paranoid that she hung a bell inside her front door to alert her to intruders. Once, while she was visiting me, I noticed her peering behind us — she had recognized another prisoner from an episode of “20/20.” This happens to me now too: I’ll be in the mess hall or the yard and recognize someone from a true-crime show. He’ll be scooping oatmeal or exercising, and I’ll remember the re-enactment of his crime, the bludgeoning or the burying.In 2016, I transferred to Sing Sing. By then, Oxygen had shifted from reality shows to true crime; the channel’s logo was even redesigned to resemble police tape. It would soon be airing a seemingly nonstop run of shows like “Buried in the Backyard.” For a few years I was transferred to a smaller prison in the Catskills, where we didn’t have in-cell TVs — but when it closed and I landed back in Sing Sing, I found that true crime had come to dominate what felt like every station. NBC American Crimes ran reruns of “Dateline,” “American Greed” and “Lockup,” which I once heard described as “prison porn.” (It’s strange to walk down the tier, look through the bars of someone’s cell and see a TV turned to “Lockup” — an inside look at prison for someone who is already inside a prison.) Merit TV had “Crime Stories With Nancy Grace.” As I write this, Court TV is running a marathon of “Interview With a Killer.”More than half of Americans now watch true crime, according to one YouGov poll. (The F.B.I. reports that between 1993 and 2022, meanwhile, the rate of violent crime in the United States fell 49 percent.) We watch those shows in here, too. As true crime exploded in popularity, the demand for fresh content had producers searching for stories to tell, exhuming murder cases from years and even decades ago. This is how Danielly eventually found herself watching a true-crime show about me, a drug dealer in prison for killing a rival.Some watch with the prison hierarchy in mind.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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    Williamstown Theater Festival Was in Crisis. Here’s How It’s Changing.

    Williamstown Theater Festival, long one of the nation’s most highly regarded summer theaters, has been fighting for its life recently, struggling to regain its footing after complaints about its workplace practices, leadership turnover and the economic challenges that have vexed other performing arts organizations.This summer, the Western Massachusetts nonprofit’s latest leadership team has opted for a radically new and risky reboot: Instead of a summer-long season with two shows at a time, the company is leaning into the “festival” part of its name, offering eight shows simultaneously, but only for three long weekends, starting July 17 and ending Aug. 3.The shows — which include dance, opera and music as well as theater — are being curated by Jeremy O. Harris, the audacious playwright best known for “Slave Play,” and several of the productions are based on stories written by, or inspired by, Tennessee Williams. Most unexpected: an ice dance show inspired by a Williams novel.Why does Williamstown matter?This summer’s festival includes two plays by Tennessee Williams, “Not About Nightingales” and “Camino Real.”Tony Cenicola/The New York TimesThe Williamstown Theater Festival had been a destination not only for culture-loving visitors who flock to the Berkshires every summer, but also for theater performers, writers and directors seeking to hone their craft and develop new work. It was also an important training ground for many aspiring theater industry workers. Numerous shows moved from Williamstown to New York, including, during the last full prepandemic season, three that transferred to Broadway: the plays “Grand Horizons” and “The Sound Inside” as well as a revival of another Tennessee Williams play, “The Rose Tattoo.”Why has the festival been struggling?At the start of the pandemic, following the death of George Floyd, the calls for a social justice reckoning that rocked many corners of society also shook theater. Staff and alumni of the festival objected to the nonprofit’s history of relying on young workers who were often unpaid or underpaid; there were also complaints about how the company responded to safety concerns. The turmoil, chronicled by The Los Angeles Times, led to the departure of the festival’s artistic director, Mandy Greenfield, and a review of the festival’s practices. Ultimately, the festival decided all staff would be paid; that decision was followed by a sharp reduction in programming.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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    Jimmy Fallon Fans the Flames of Burning MAGA Hats

    People torched the hats in videos, apparently upset about the Jeffrey Epstein case. “People in China were like, ‘Oh, come on, we worked so hard making them,’” Fallon said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Burning UpPresident Trump is still getting flak, from longtime supporters and others, for not releasing more information about the Jeffrey Epstein case. Some social media users expressed their feelings by posting videos of burning MAGA hats.“As of now, Trump is keeping the information totally classified, a.k.a. in the bathroom at Mar-a-Lago,” Jimmy Fallon said of the so-called Epstein files.“Yeah, the excuses are getting worse and worse. Today, Trump was, like, ‘A dog ate the Epstein files, then people in Ohio ate the dog.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, they’re burning the MAGA hats. People in China were like, ‘Oh, come on, we worked so hard making them.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (With Friends Like These Edition)“In fact, Epstein’s infamous little black book included 14 different numbers for Trump and his representatives. I mean, he had 14 separate ways to contact Donald Trump. I mean, when I drop my kid off at camp, I give two emergency contact numbers and one of them is fake because I don’t need that hassle.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Do you know how creepy with women you have to be for Donald Trump to pick up on it? I mean, that’s a real your-drunk-friend-taking-the-car-keys-from-you moment.” — JORDAN KLEPPERThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Too Much” star Megan Stalter started “a big rumor” on Tuesday’s “Late Show with Stephen Colbert.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightThe country superstar Jelly Roll will guest-host “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutAdam Scott, left, and Britt Lower in “Severance,” on Apple TV+. Both were nominated for Emmys.Apple TV+The dystopian Apple TV+ workplace drama “Severance” scored the most Emmy nominations this year. More