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    in Theater

    Review: ‘The Hills of California,’ Alive With the Sound of Music

    In Jez Butterworth’s compelling new play, four girls trained to sing close harmony wind up as acrimonious adults.Two sounds greet you at the start of “The Hills of California,” Jez Butterworth’s relentlessly entertaining new play: the crashing of waves on the beaches of Blackpool and the tinkling of a tinny piano being tuned.Both are plot points: The story concerns a musical family operating a rundown resort on the west coast of England. “Boogie-Woogie Bugle Boy,” “It Never Entered My Mind,” “When I Fall in Love” and “Dream a Little Dream of Me” are among the marvelous oldies you’ll hear sung during the course of the action.But the crashing and tuning are thematic points, too. Though frequently funny and, even at nearly three hours, swift, “The Hills of California,” which opened on Sunday at the Broadhurst Theater, drops you deep into the devastations of time and lifts you gently into the consolations of song.It does so within a familiar stage format — familiar in life, alas, as well: the dying-parent drama. In 1976, the four Webb sisters reunite at the Seaview Luxury Guesthouse (which is neither luxurious nor within sight of the sea) as their mother, Veronica, who ran the place for decades, under several desperate versions of the name, expires upstairs.Jillian, the youngest, has failed to thrive; she’s a 32-year-old virgin who lives at home, chatters nervously and secretly smokes. The others have run as far from Blackpool as they could: Ruby and Gloria into unhappy marriages hours away; Joan, the oldest, toward a dream of fame in California. Whether she has achieved that dream is an open question; she has not been back home since she left at 15, and only Jillian believes she will return even now.All this is efficiently established in the play’s opening scene, which is so sharply and subtly directed by Sam Mendes, and so vividly performed by the cast, you hardly notice all the information you’re being fed: tics, conflicts, personalities, pecking order. Then, just as you’ve finally attached everyone’s names to their faces, Butterworth rewinds to 1955, when the sisters, played by a new set of actors, are teenagers and Veronica is a terror.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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    in Television

    ‘Days of Our Lives’ Actor, Drake Hogestyn, Dies at 70

    Mr. Hogestyn was best known for playing John Black on the daytime soap opera and appeared in more than 4,200 episodes over 38 years.Drake Hogestyn, who played John Black, the sturdy and fiercely loyal character who by turns was a spy, private investigator and mercenary, for nearly 40 years on the long-running soap opera “Days of Our Lives,” died on Saturday, a day shy of his 71st birthday.Mr. Hogestyn had pancreatic cancer, according to a statement from his family shared by the show. He died in Los Angeles, according to a publicist for the show, Andrea McKinnon.In 1986, Mr. Hogestyn first appeared on “Days of Our Lives,” which premiered in 1965 on NBC and follows various characters in the fictional Midwestern town of Salem. For a few years, he played another character, Roman Brady, but came to be known best for his role as John Black.Mr. Hogestyn appeared in more than 4,200 episodes of the soap opera and became a fan favorite for his portrayal as the rugged, raspy-voiced and often heroic character who had the skills of an intelligence agent, a police officer and a private investigator.The character was also known for being married to Dr. Marlena Evans, a psychiatrist and the town’s de facto matriarch, played by Deidre Hall. In 2005, the actors won a Soap Opera Digest Award for Favorite Couple.“It’s, like, I’ll always love her,” Mr. Hogestyn said, at a gathering for the show’s fans in 2004, of the characters’ enduring romance.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 Perfect Couple’ Offers Signe Sejlund’s Take on Nantucket Style

    Scrutinizing the costumes in Netflix’s “The Perfect Couple.”“It’s not a documentary,” said Signe Sejlund, the costume designer for the Netflix limited series “The Perfect Couple.” “It’s a murder mystery.”Yet the compulsively watchable show is not merely a murder mystery. Set on Nantucket, a glorified sand dune 30 miles off the coast of Massachusetts — where superyachts bottleneck in the harbor every summer; the median home price has surpassed $3 million; and the guy in line at Something Natural, a favorite local sandwich stand, could well be a billionaire — the show is in some sense a travelogue offering a worm’s-eye view of rich people behaving appallingly. It is also a statement on our cultural fascination with the folkways of people with too much money to count.The series, adapted from a novel by Elin Hilderbrand, is a tale of “them” and “us.”Embodying “them” in this case is the fractious Winbury family: patriarch Tag (Liev Schreiber), matriarch Greer (Nicole Kidman) and their three sons. Everyone else is “us.”The Winburys have for generations vacationed at an oceanside mansion — putatively located in Monomoy, an enclave with some of Nantucket’s costliest real estate — among peers who attended the same private schools, belonged to the same country clubs and adopted the same form of garb that was once a tell for quiet wealth. Think modest A-line dresses; knotted-rope sailors’ bracelets; boat shoes so weathered they are patched together with duct tape; polos and T-shirts worn almost to transparency; and stiff Nantucket basket purses whose lids are topped with bone medallions incised like sailor’s scrimshaw.Signe Sejlund, the show’s costume designer, treated characters like Thomas Winbury (Jack Reynor) as “peacocks.”NetflixTag Winbury (Liev Schreiber) is from an old-money family that has for generations vacationed at an oceanside mansion on Nantucket.NetflixWe 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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    ‘S.N.L.’ Recap: Maya Rudolph Returns to Play Kamala Harris

    The 50th season began with several surprise guests and alumni — including Dana Carvey, Jim Gaffigan and Andy Samberg — playing figures in the 2024 election.“Saturday Night Live” dug deep into its contact list of celebrity alumni and friends in the comedy world as it kicked off its 50th season with an opening sketch that featured Maya Rudolph’s anticipated return as Vice President Kamala Harris.The sketch, for which the cast member James Austin Johnson returned in his recurring role as former President Donald Trump, also saw the debuts of the comedian Jim Gaffigan as Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Bowen Yang, another “S.N.L.” performer, as Senator JD Vance of Ohio.And for good measure, the segment included appearances from “S.N.L.” alums Andy Samberg as Douglas Emhoff, the Second Gentleman, and Dana Carvey as President Joe Biden.Speculation had swirled all summer about who would play these roles on “S.N.L.,” which tends to receive increased attention during presidential election seasons. That curiosity was intensified by the reshuffling of the Democratic ticket in July, when President Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.In early August, when Harris chose Walz as her running mate, many fans wondered if Steve Martin, a frequent “S.N.L.” host and friend of the show, would be cast as the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential hopeful.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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    ‘S.N.L.’ Picks Maya Rudolph and Jim Gaffigan to Play Kamala Harris and Tim Walz

    The casting ended months of speculation after President Biden, played on Saturday by Dana Carvey, withdrew from the race. James Austin Johnson continued as Donald Trump.“Saturday Night Live” dug deep into its contact list of celebrity alumni and friends in the comedy world as it kicked off its 50th season with an opening sketch that featured Maya Rudolph’s anticipated return as Vice President Kamala Harris.The sketch, for which the cast member James Austin Johnson returned in his recurring role as former President Donald Trump, also saw the debuts of the comedian Jim Gaffigan as Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota and Bowen Yang, another “S.N.L.” performer, as Senator JD Vance of Ohio.And for good measure, the segment included appearances from “S.N.L.” alums Andy Samberg as Douglas Emhoff, the Second Gentleman, and Dana Carvey as President Joe Biden.Speculation had swirled all summer about who would play these roles on “S.N.L.,” which tends to receive increased attention during presidential election seasons. That curiosity was intensified by the reshuffling of the Democratic ticket in July, when President Biden announced that he was withdrawing from the 2024 race.In early August, when Harris chose Walz as her running mate, many fans wondered if Steve Martin, a frequent “S.N.L.” host and friend of the show, would be cast as the Minnesota governor and vice-presidential hopeful.But Martin himself quickly nixed that, telling the Los Angeles Times that he did not consider himself an impressionist. “They’re going to find somebody really, really good,” Martin said at the time. “I’d be struggling.”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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    in Television

    On ‘Downton Abbey,’ Maggie Smith Made an Icy Aristocrat Irresistible

    The hit melodrama brought Smith the kind of fame she never wanted, but it is easy to understand why it happened.In retrospect, Maggie Smith’s brilliant, high-wire career can be seen as a protest against celebrity.As an actor, Smith, who died on Friday at 89, favored characters into which she could disappear, and the rare interviews she agreed to were awkward, unrevealing, sometimes deliberately uningratiating. In a 2013 “60 Minutes” profile, she seems almost physically racked by the journalist’s curiosity. There was one personal detail, though, that she had no problem sharing in her final years: how much she despised the fame that her most recognized part had brought down on her.“It’s ridiculous,” she told one reporter. “I was able to live a somewhat normal life until I started doing ‘Downton Abbey.’ I know that sounds funny, but I am serious. Before that I could go to all the places I wanted and see all of the things that I like, but now I can’t, which I find incredibly awful.”“Flattering,” she added, “but awful.”Did she protest too much? Or was it the peculiar nature of the attention that afflicted her? As someone who began following her from my first viewing of “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” (1969), her Oscar-winning drama, I can say I would have recognized Maggie Smith on any street anywhere. (Among other mass-cultural acts, she guest-starred on “The Carol Burnett Show.”) But would I have hailed her? What was it about “Downton Abbey” that inspired perfect strangers to lay claim to her?We can start with the show itself. From the beginning, “Downton Abbey” was conceived as a Tory fantasy — a make-believe past in which aristocrats take a searching interest in their servants’ personal lives and subsidize their eye surgery — but it came to us through the democratic medium of broadcast television. To watch it in the United States, you had only to fire up your local PBS station, where it played every Sunday night at the same time, leaving you instantly positioned to spill tea the second it was over. (As The New York Times’s “Downton” recapper, I can attest to this.)Few TV shows achieve that kind of instant saturation, so we might all be excused for thinking that these characters were ours. But how exactly did we warm to Violet Crawley, the wary and imperious dowager who despises any intrusion of democracy (America, Ireland) or modernity (telephones, swivel chairs) and who sincerely wants to know what a weekend is?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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    Laura Donnelly, ‘Hills of California’ Star, Is Not Some Delicate Flower

    But she did “burst into tears” reading Jez Butterworth’s rewrite of his new Broadway play, which left her with 10 days “to create an entirely new character.”Most plays that transfer to New York from London arrive in close to their original form. There might be small changes to the text, to make particular lines comprehensible to American ears, but usually not much more than that.Laura Donnelly, the star of Jez Butterworth’s new play, “The Hills of California,” knew that the playwright had been planning rewrites since early in the London run, which stretched from January to June this year. The current Broadway engagement at the Broadhurst Theater would give Butterworth the chance.“He was really excited about that,” Donnelly, 42, said over coffee on a recent morning in Manhattan, her dark hair lightened, permed and cut in a ’70s style for the play. “He kept referring to it as like, ‘little bits here and there,’ and I was like, ‘OK, cool. Yep, no problem.’ I think this is also what he told Sam [Mendes], our director, and told our producers. So they scheduled in two weeks of rehearsals.”From left, Leanne Best, Helena Wilson, Donnelly and Ophelia Lovibond as singing sisters in the Broadway production of “The Hills of California.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat Butterworth, Donnelly’s partner of nearly a dozen years, had actually ended up doing was a major rewrite of the third act — an overhaul that alters the substance, plot and even meaning of the play.From the start, Donnelly has portrayed two characters in “The Hills of California”: Veronica Webb, a guesthouse owner in Blackpool, England, in 1955, who is rigorously training her four adolescent daughters to become an American-style girl group; and Joan, her estranged and longed-for favorite child, who returns home at last in 1976, in Act III. But the Joan of the West End script was significantly different from the Joan of the Broadway script.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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    ‘Saturday Night Live’: Here’s What Critics Thought of the First Episode

    The late-night institution begins its 50th season on Saturday. Here’s how The New York Times and others covered its debut in 1975.It is strange to read the early press coverage of “Saturday Night Live.” No matter how much the show has changed over the years, the focus of the criticism is still much the same.“Saturday Night,” as it was known when it premiered on Oct. 11, 1975, was considered to be … rather uneven. Some saw this as a flaw, others as an endearing element. Many saw the ragtag show’s potential to change TV forever.With “Saturday Night,” which recreates the run-up to the first episode, currently in theaters and the show’s 50th season beginning — when else? — Saturday night, here is a look back at how the world greeted the arrival of “S.N.L.”‘Simon and Garfunkel Reunion on NBC’s “Saturday Night”’The New York Times, Oct. 20, 1975The Times did not review the first episode. But the critic John J. O’Connor did write about the second, and he included his thoughts about the premiere. He disliked the inaugural host George Carlin’s “pretentious comedy lectures” and the juxtaposition of fake and genuine commercials. “Even an offbeat showcase needs quality, an ingredient conspicuously absent from the dreadfully uneven comedy efforts of the new series,” he wrote. O’Connor admitted that he missed the first hour of the second episode because of “an unusually good dinner on Long Island” and travel challenges. So he highlighted a Simon and Garfunkel reunion on the show, which he did see. Lorne Michaels complained about this in “Live from New York,” a 2002 oral history of the show.‘Sprightly Mix Brightens NBC’s “Saturday Night”’The New York Times, Nov. 30, 1975By the fifth episode, with Lily Tomlin hosting, O’Connor changed his tune. The format now worked, more of the humor was now “on target,” and the Not Ready for Prime Time Players were “incredibly adept” at going live. The show had become “the most creative and encouraging thing to happen in American TV comedy since ‘Your Show of Shows,’” he wrote. Could Tomlin’s hosting have anything to do with that assessment? Perhaps. In the spirit of full disclosure, O’Connor confessed to being “helplessly in love” with the comedian. (“It’s best to get that kind of thing out in the open.”)Lily Tomlin, center, with Gilda Radner on “Saturday Night” in 1976. Tomlin was a popular early host of the show.NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal, via Getty ImagesWe 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