Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares179 Views

    in Theater

    The Best (and Worst) Theater in Europe in 2022

    The Times’s three European theater critics pick their favorite productions of the year — plus a turkey apiece for the festive season.Matt WolfFour favorites from The Times’s London theater criticFrom left, Samira Wiley, Ronke Adekoluejo, Sule Rimi and Giles Terera in “Blues for an Alabama Sky” at the National Theater.Marc Brenner“Blues for an Alabama Sky”National Theater, LondonWhen the American writer Pearl Cleage’s 1995 play crossed the Atlantic this fall, it was the high point of a variable year for the National Theater, England’s flagship playhouse. Set in adjacent apartments in 1930s Harlem, the play takes an unsparing look at a cross section of Prohibition-era Americans yearning for release from the racism and homophobia that mar their daily lives. An expert Anglo-American cast was led by Giles Terera (“Hamilton”) and the Juilliard-trained TV actress Samira Wiley as roommates who talk of packing up and moving to Paris; at the helm was Lynette Linton, making a terrific National Theater debut with a production that embraced freewheeling comedy as well as deep sorrow.Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein’s reimagining of “Oklahoma!” at the Young Vic.Marc Brenner“Oklahoma!”Young Vic Theater, LondonIt was an indifferent year for musicals in London, until the arrival from New York of a much-lauded revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1943 “Oklahoma!” The dilemma of the farm girl Laurey Williams (a dazzling Anoushka Lucas), forced to choose between the affections of two men, possessed an unusual urgency. And the directors Daniel Fish and Jordan Fein found a primal darkness in the material that made a buoyant-seeming American classic look very bleak. In February, the production is set to transfer to the West End for a limited run.From left, Emilia Clarke, Indira Varma, Daniel Monks and Tom Rhys Harries in Anya Reiss’s interpretation of Anton Chekhov’s “The Seagull,” directed by Jamie Lloyd at the Harold Pinter Theater.Marc Brenner“The Seagull”Harold Pinter Theater, LondonThe director Jamie Lloyd revived Chekhov’s 1896 play in a stripped-back, modern-dress production, with the cast seated on plastic chairs against a nondescript chipboard set. The absence of props and period detail helped focus attention on the anguish at the heart of this celebrated work. You felt, more acutely than ever, the thwarted passions that drive a play about artistic ambition and misplaced love. Indira Varma was in peak form as the charismatically self-regarding actress, Arkadina, and she was superbly matched by the Australian actor Daniel Monks as her suicidal son, Konstantin. The “Game of Thrones” alumna Emilia Clarke made a memorable West End debut as the hopeful young Nina.Lennie James, left, and Paapa Essiedu in Caryl Churchill’s “A Number,” directed by Lyndsey Turner at the Old Vic.Manuel Harlan“A Number”Old Vic Theater, LondonCaryl Churchill’s 2002 play has been revived many times, but rarely with the scorching intensity that the director Lyndsey Turner and the designer Es Devlin brought to bear at the Old Vic in January. Nominally about genetic cloning, Churchill’s hourlong drama moves beyond scientific inquiry to address more human issues, like sibling hatred and the slippery nature of happiness. In the superlative cast, Paapa Essiedu excelled playing three cloned sons who confront a toxic parental inheritance, as did Lennie James as a father who wants to make a fresh start.And the turkey …From left, David Harbour, Bill Pullman and Akiya Henry in Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” directed by Moritz von Stuelpnagel at the Ambassadors Theater.Marc Brenner“Mad House”Ambassadors Theater, LondonDysfunctional family dramas are a staple of American drama. But they rarely come drearier and more overwritten than Theresa Rebeck’s “Mad House,” which had its world premiere in the West End this summer. Rebeck, a New York theater regular, gave the play’s choice role to a fellow American, David Harbour; he played one of three children gathered at the home of a cantankerous father (Bill Pullman) roaring his way to the grave like a dime-store King Lear. The writing felt borrowed and inauthentic, and the director Moritz von Stuelpnagel couldn’t lift an evening rife with tired confessions (“none of us had a childhood”) and clichéd plot devices (the belated emergence of an all-important letter). More than once, I groaned.Laura CappelleFour favorites from The Times’s Paris theater criticRomeu Costa, left, and Rui M. Silva in “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord.Filipe Ferreira“Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists”Bouffes du Nord, ParisTiago Rodrigues, the incoming director of the Avignon Festival, was on a roll in 2022. He brought several revelatory productions to Paris this fall, none more so than “Catarina and the Beauty of Killing Fascists” at the Bouffes du Nord. The unlikely subject of the play, which Rodrigues also wrote, is a fictional Portuguese family that hunts down and kills fascists, following a tradition passed down through generations. Is that an honorable contribution to society, as most of the family members believe, or is doing harm always unacceptable, even when fascists threaten democracy? Rodrigues and his cast walk a fine line to avoid caricature, yet the conversations that result onstage — starting with the youngest daughter, who experiences doubts about her right to kill — are consistently thoughtful and engage the audience critically, without feeling forced.The cast in “One Song,” developed by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop.Christophe Raynaud de Lage/Avignon Festival “One Song”Avignon FestivalSome of the best shows to debut in France in the past year brought unclassifiable feats of virtuosity onstage, like “One Song,” which played at the Avignon Festival. Created by the Belgian artist Miet Warlop, it was another idiosyncratic entry in the “History/ies of Theater” series that the Belgian playhouse NTGent has developed in collaboration with the festival. In “One Song,” a group of musicians/competitors perform a single song on a loop while doing an extreme workout. (A violinist plays while doing squats and leg lifts on a high beam.) Throughout, as the performers thoroughly exhaust themselves, a male cheerleader and a group of fans take turns encouraging and booing them, while a referee mumbles incomprehensibly in the background. The instant standing ovation in Avignon wasn’t merely a way to reward the performers for their efforts: “One Song” lingered in the mind as a wild, exhilarating study in absurdity.Pierre Guillois and Olivier Martin-Salvan in “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Caberet.”Gestuelle“Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret”Paris l’Été FestivalAnother oddball success, “Fat People Skate Well. A Cardboard Cabaret” won a number of awards in France this year, and they were thoroughly deserved. The show’s two actors and directors, Olivier Martin-Salvan and Pierre Guillois, tell their story almost entirely through dozens of cardboard objects. Words written on the signs and boxes, of various shapes and forms, explain what each represents — including a “fjord” and a “fly swatter” — and with the help of assistants, Guillois, a lithe, clownlike figure, in boxer shorts throughout, manipulates them at lightning speed. In the tale he spins, Martin-Salvan’s character goes on an adventure around Europe to reconnect with a siren, all the while mumbling in a mix of gibberish and English. How does this all add up, you ask? The duo’s fantasy world coheres thanks to extraordinary stagecraft in this “cardboard cabaret,” and the result is serious theater magic.Juliette Speck as Caster Semenya, the South African runner and Olympic gold medalist, in “Free Will,” directed by Julie Bertin at the Théâtre Dunois. Simon Gosselin“Free Will”Théâtre Dunois, ParisTheaters that cater to young people often fly under the critical radar. With Léa Girardet and Julie Bertin’s “Free Will,” however, the Théâtre Dunois in Paris landed a hit for all ages. This new play explored the life of the South African runner Caster Semenya, an Olympic gold medalist caught in a long-running fight with her sport’s governing body — and repeatedly banned from competition — because of elevated testosterone levels. Girardet and Bertin, two gifted young writers and directors, depict the frequently inhuman treatment of Semenya (the excellent Juliette Speck) with instructive clarity, weaving together verbatim excerpts from court proceedings and witty spoofs of femininity standards that even top athletes are forced to abide by.And the turkey …From left, Julien Frison, Denis Podalydès and Christophe Montenez at the Comédie-Française in “Tartuffe,” directed by Ivo van Hove.Jan Versweyveld“Tartuffe”Comédie-Française, ParisThis “Tartuffe” was supposed to launch France’s yearlong celebration of Molière’s quadricentennial in style. Staged by Ivo van Hove for the Comédie-Française, a descendant of Molière’s own theater ensemble, it offered an intriguing experiment: a reconstruction of the play’s 1664 original version, censored by the French religious establishment and subsequently lost. Yet van Hove undermined it with a stultifying black-and-white production that had less to do with Molière than with his own directorial tics. The suited cast was left to wrestle with bewildering character arcs: When Tartuffe, who fakes piety to secure a position within a bourgeois family’s home, attempts to seduce the wife, Elmire, van Hove manufactured a love story between the two — leaving Marina Hands, as Elmire, to take Tartuffe’s abuse with puppy-eyed adoration. Thankfully, stronger Molière productions followed at the Comédie-Française later in the year.A.J. GoldmannFour favorites from The Times’s Berlin theater criticA scene in Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” an exploration of texts by the experimental Austrian writer Ernst Jandl.Nikolaus Ostermann/Volkstheater “humanistää!”Volkstheater, ViennaThe director Claudia Bauer’s “humanistää!,” which premiered at the Volkstheater in Vienna in January and traveled to Berlin for Theatertreffen, the prestigious German theater festival, in May, is rightly one of the most acclaimed German-language productions of the year. This theatrical homage to the Viennese experimental poet and writer Ernst Jandl (1925-2000) is a musically supercharged and visually arresting work from one of Germany’s very best theater directors. Exuberant performances from the Volkstheater’s excellent actors are perfectly calibrated to this gleefully surreal production, in which 10 of Jandl’s key works come to eye-popping life in a Gesamtkunstwerk that combines spoken word, music, dance and pantomime. While delighting in Jandl’s linguistic games, the production, which remains in the Volkstheater’s repertoire, crackles with fresh and euphoric inventiveness. This is the one show I can’t wait to see again.The ensemble in “Oasis de la Impunidad” (“Oasis of Impunity”), directed by Marco Layera, at the Schaubühne’s Festival International for New Drama, or FIND.Gianmarco Bresadola“Oasis de la Impunidad”Schaubühne, BerlinThis show, from the Chilean director Marco Layera and his company, La Re-sentida, is brilliant but harrowing: I don’t ever want to revisit it. A coproduction between Berlin’s Schaubühne, where it premiered in April, and the Münchner Kammerspiele, the rigorously choreographed exploration of state violence is one of those extreme works of art that is all the more disturbing for the delicate artistry of its execution. Darkly comic in some places, poetic or balletic in others, this “investigation into the origins and mechanisms of violence,” to quote the program, feels like being trapped in a carnival of torture and brutality that is profoundly unsettling for the performers and spectators alike.“Crazy for Consolation,” directed by Thorsten Lensing.Armin Smailovic/Salzburg Festival“Verrückt nach Trost”Salzburg FestivalThorsten Lensing’s long-awaited follow-up to his 2018 adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest” is possibly even more astonishing. In “Verrückt nach Trost” (“Crazy for Consolation”), which premiered at the Salzburg Festival, in Austria, in August, Lensing and his group of four brilliant actors achieve something close to a theatrical miracle. The lengthy and often surreal play, which revolves around an orphaned brother and sister who go through life craving love and human connection, is one of the most profoundly moving new plays I have seen in a long time. The work’s emotional impact has much to do with the finely chiseled performances of Ursina Lardi, Devid Striesow, André Jung and Sebastian Blomberg, who guide us through a long evening of unpredictable and incandescent episodes, including what is quite possibly the most moving monologue ever written for an octopus.The “Hamilton” cast in Hamburg.Johan Persson“Hamilton”Stage Operettenhaus, HamburgIn October, the German premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Pulitzer- and Tony-winning musical, “Hamilton,” landed with volcanic force in Hamburg. The first production of the show in a language other than English, it was a herculean undertaking. The ingenious translation of Miranda’s abundant and inventive lyrics took four years, and the cast hails from 13 countries. Hard to believe, but the original Broadway production, directed by Thomas Kail, is already seven years old; if anything, this one seems galvanized by its new language and cultural context. There has never been a show like this before in Germany. From the dazzling linguistic feats of the translators to the convincing and handsome staging and gripping, Broadway-caliber performances, everything about “Hamilton” in Hamburg feels revolutionary.And the turkey …Christian Weise’s “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater.Ute Langkafel“Queen Lear”Maxim Gorki Theater, BerlinGermans love their Shakespeare, and Berlin has seen many fine stagings of the Bard’s work, both traditional and deconstructed. Christian Weise’s goofy sci-fi production of “Queen Lear” at the Maxim Gorki Theater is possibly the most bewildering Shakespeare reimagining ever conceived. The modern-language adaptation is by Soeren Voima, an authors’ collective, and it recasts Shakespeare’s darkest play as an outer-space soap opera with echoes of “Star Wars” and “Doctor Who.” The chintzy, low-budget aesthetic, the hammy acting and the lightsabers are all good, if mildly tedious, fun for the first hour. But hark! There are two more hours to go! The only thing this intergalactic spacewreck of a production proves is Lear’s maxim that“nothing will come of nothing.” More

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Jimmy Kimmel Jokes About Elon Musk’s Business Acumen

    Maybe Musk “finally read ‘The Art of the Deal,’” Kimmel said, after reports emerged that Twitter had stopped paying its bills. 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.Bad for BusinessElon Musk is no longer the world’s richest person, following a drop in Tesla shares. And one of his other companies, Twitter, has stopped paying rent on its offices and has stiffed some of its vendors, according to reports.“Of all the problems I would have guessed the second-richest man in the world would have, paying rent wasn’t one of them,” Jimmy Kimmel said. “Maybe he should change the name from Twitter to ‘Squatter,’ you know?”“Don’t worry, Elon. You still have your sparkling wit and personality.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Here’s what happened: Most of Musk’s fortune comes from Tesla, but in the last year, Tesla stock has lost about 50 percent of its value, in part because Musk’s Twitter politics are adding pressure on Tesla’s brand image. And it doesn’t help that the new Model X comes pre-loaded with Kanye’s tweets.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He’s also apparently stopped paying his vendors. I guess, I don’t know, maybe he finally read ‘The Art of the Deal’ and now he’s doing it Trump-style.”— JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Holding Out for a Hero Edition)“Is he announcing Dean Cain as his running mate?” — JIMMY FALLON, on a post from Donald Trump promising a “major announcement,” with a video featuring Trump as a superhero“I think the major announcement is that Trump has a lot of time on his hands.” — JIMMY FALLON“Right after that was released, Ron DeSantis’s poll numbers shot up another 20 points.” — JIMMY FALLON“Maybe Eric learned to tie his shoes? Who knows?” — JIMMY KIMMEL, speculating about the nature of the announcement“I don’t know about you, but I won’t be able to sleep tonight, waiting to find out.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden was incredulous to learn that the “Late Late Show” band doesn’t like Mariah Carey’s iconic Christmas anthem.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightBesties Andy Cohen and Anderson Cooper will pop by Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutThe director Alexandra Pelosi, right, recording her mother, Nancy Pelosi, for the documentary “Pelosi in the House.”HBOAlexandra Pelosi directed the new HBO documentary about her mother, Nancy, “Pelosi in the House.” More

  • 138 Shares169 Views

    in Theater

    Eddie Izzard Plays Which Part in ‘Great Expectations’? All of Them.

    The British comedian and actor is now performing her solo take on Dickens’s coming-of-age drama Off Broadway. It’s “pure storytelling,” she said.On a December evening in a rehearsal studio on the western edge of Manhattan’s garment district, Eddie Izzard was chatting about audience assumptions — that her solo performance of “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations” would be a comic take on the classic Victorian coming-of-age tale.“There’s about four jokes in it,” she said.Still, even the way Izzard uttered that sentence was funny: dryly dismissive, with the briefest pause as she calculated the paltry figure. Izzard has, after all, made her name in comedy. And however firmly she might draw a line between Eddie Izzard the stand-up and Eddie Izzard the actor — the British Broadway veteran who was a Tony Award nominee in 2003, for “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” — they are of course one and the same, operating in different yet overlapping modes.In “Great Expectations,” now in previews for a Dec. 15 opening at the Greenwich House Theater in Greenwich Village, Izzard pulls moments of levity from the very air. Playing the orphaned Pip, the forsaken Miss Havisham, the alluring Estella, the desperate Magwitch and 15 or so others, she brings her own arch humor to a multiple-character technique that she ascribes not to some drama theorist but to the comedian Richard Pryor, a virtuoso of the crowded solo stage.When, in rehearsal that evening, Izzard worried aloud about her Pip blocking the audience’s view of Miss Havisham — who at that moment in the scene was quite invisible, as was Estella beside her — it was all about leaving room for the spectators’ imaginations to fill in the blanks.Over the phone later, the show’s director, Selina Cadell, laughed warmly as she said: “I think Eddie looks after the invisible characters better than I do.”“Great Expectations” begins on Christmas Eve, and Dickens did love a Christmas story. But its saga stretches over years, and Izzard says the holiday timing of the play’s run in New York — scheduled to continue through Feb. 11 — is accidental.Unlike Jefferson Mays’s solo performance of “A Christmas Carol,” currently on Broadway, Izzard’s “Great Expectations” has almost nothing in the way of scenery, aside from the velvet curtains of its wooden-floored set, and certainly no whiz-bang, high-tech projections.“This is pure storytelling,” Izzard said after rehearsal. “I’ve always said that drama is like a main meal, and comedy is like a dessert. We love desserts. But the main meal has all different tastes, the savory and the sweets and everything.”Izzard in “Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations,” at the Greenwich House Theater in Manhattan through Feb. 11.Carol RoseggAt 60, she is ready to dig in — and to demonstrate what she’s capable of.“Drama is something I’ve always wanted to do from the beginning, and just went a long way round to get to it,” said Izzard, who lately has been preparing a one-woman “Hamlet” with Cadell. In such multicharacter solo shows, Izzard finds her own gender fluidity helpful.“I love the fact that I’m playing male characters and female characters in this,” she said. “And I hope that Dickens might think it was OK.”Izzard is fond of noting that the novelist, in his lifetime, used to travel to New York to give public readings. This “Great Expectations” began with readings, too, as Izzard did what she calls work-in-progress performances, initially in 2019 at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The streamlined adaptation is by her older brother, Mark Izzard, though when Eddie suggested the project to him, she meant for them to work on the script together.“I went back and read the book and got started,” Mark said by phone, all practicality, “and found out later that Eddie was too busy to do anything. So I just pushed on.”Back in the rehearsal room, Eddie pulled out her phone and scrolled, seeking a photo from the summer of 2020: a time-capsule image of an early pandemic performance. It shows her in a red dress, doing “Great Expectations” for a socially distanced audience on a wind-whipped rooftop in the south of England, using a hand-held microphone.“I said, ‘This is exactly how Dickens planned it,’” she deadpanned.THEATER REHEARSAL ROOMS are workaday spaces, and people tend to dress accordingly. Almost no one looks glamorous, let alone devastatingly so. But that evening in early December, Izzard did, in a tailored black jacket over onyx tights, with a splash of color in the few fluttery inches of floral-print skirt — a very British touch — peeking out beneath the jacket hem. On her feet were a stunning pair of tall, lace-up, high-heeled black boots: a part of her costume that she wanted to get used to wearing.“If you are trans, it’s probably better to be fairly well put together,” she said, and sighed at the difference between taking meticulous care with her appearance and throwing on any old thing, as she said a person can do “if you look devastatingly feminine. Female. I mean, Marilyn Monroe wore a potato sack at one point in a photo shoot.”Let the record show, though, that Izzard was not just fairly well, but magnificently, tastefully put together. If you’ve seen the 2009 documentary “Believe: The Eddie Izzard Story,” which includes a short section ridiculing her historical lack of fashion sense when it came to standard-issue guy clothes, you will recognize this as a sartorial leap forward.About her pronouns, when I asked, she said: “Prefer she/her, don’t mind he/him, so no one can get it wrong.”It was such a breezy, practiced statement that I thought she was done until she added: “And I didn’t change them. The world changed them.”What’s this?“I was on a program. They said, ‘Do you want she/her or he/him?’ I went, ‘Ahh, oh, she.’ I’d been thinking of changing them. And then the program went out, and the whole world changed them. Two days.” She made a sound effect like a series of detonations.“All news outlets, particularly in America and Britain, where I’m known probably the strongest” — another sound effect, this one a whoosh — “and Australia and Canada and New Zealand, where I’m also known” — a sound effect like a rapid whir — “‘She/her now.’ And I went, ‘Oh, OK.’”It wasn’t that she merely went along with it, but she was surprised at the sweeping abruptness with which her pronouns were adopted.“I thought it was a great honor,” she said. “I’ve been promoted — promoted to she. That’s how it was. But I didn’t actively have a campaign about it. It just happened. You know, I came out 37 years ago. Some people grumble. I say, well, how much notice do you need? Thirty-eight years? Thirty-nine years?”Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations” was released in 2018, and she always thought there would be a companion stage version.Josefina Santos for The New York TimesComing out is an inherently political act, and Izzard is a political creature. In American terms, she described herself as a Democrat, but at home she is a longtime member of the Labour Party and this fall had hoped to become its candidate for an open seat in Parliament. That bid failed this month, though not before drawing what The Guardian newspaper called “a barrage of abuse,” with both Conservative and Labour politicians publicly making transphobic remarks.But Izzard said that increased mainstream awareness of transgender people and transgender issues has made life easier since she came out in 1985, when she described herself as transvestite — language that, she noted, has since evolved.“We were considered non-people, or toxic people,” she said. “And I realized that my job is to try and knit being trans into society. We had a hard time just trying to exist.”She went on: “A lot of people have been wonderfully accepting, and young people are very open and great. Some people are still transphobic, but” — she took a deep breath, then finished the sentence more quietly — “I just ignore them.”CADELL FIRST met Izzard about two decades ago, when the agent Nicki van Gelder asked Cadell, who is also an actor, to coach Izzard for a film role.Izzard loves acting for the big screen — loves that movies can capture forever what she called “that lightning in a bottle” that is a beautiful performance, loves having played Edward VII to Judi Dench’s Queen Victoria in “Victoria & Abdul,” loves having been in both “Ocean’s Twelve” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” even in small roles.But when I asked Cadell what makes Izzard tick as an actor, she mentioned the live-performance dynamic between Izzard and a crowd.“I think she is someone who loves that present moment with an audience. It electrifies her imagination,” Cadell said. “Laughter is very important to Eddie. I also think that Eddie is driven to try everything she feels is, in some way, challenging. But I think she keenly understands the relationship of a performer with an audience, which I adore.”Izzard was only 6 when her mother died in 1968. After that, her widowed father sent her and her brother to boarding school. In “Believe,” the documentary, there is a sweet moment when a former headmaster recalls a teddy bear show that young Eddie put on at the foot of her bed, using a bathrobe as the stage curtain.A couple of years later, when the school did a production of “Oliver!,” the “Oliver Twist” musical that Izzard remembers as her first Dickens, she begged to be cast but was assigned to play the clarinet in the orchestra. (Recalling this, she burst into snatches of songs she’d yearned to sing: “Oliver! Oliver!” and “Got to pick a pocket or two, boys, you’ve got to pick a pocket or two.”)The same thing happened with “The Pirates of Penzance,” for which she would have been happy to play either a pirate or a girl. She was 17 when she got her first dramatic role — as Ernst Ludwig, the Nazi, in “Cabaret” — and dyed her hair jet black to play it.So acting, in her growing-up years, was mostly just dreamed of, and a passion for Dickens didn’t take root in a child who was dyslexic and not a big reader, but also enthralled with astronauts and all things 20th-century American.“Great Expectations” came into Izzard’s life when she asked her agents to find someone to hire her to make an audiobook of a Dickens novel — because she had noticed that audiobooks were taking off, she wanted to read a great work of literature, and she and Dickens share a birthday, 150 years apart.Izzard’s audiobook of “Great Expectations,” which is more than 20 hours long, was released in 2018. In Izzard’s mind, there was always going to be a stage version as a companion piece — though she had envisioned the audiobook as the primary element. She says it didn’t occur to her initially that once she got the live performance down, it could remain permanently in her repertoire. Its running time, rather more accessible than the book’s: about two hours, intermission included.LISTEN CLOSELY to people’s memories, and sometimes you hear their ambitions underneath. Here is Izzard remembering the night she lost the Tony to Brian Dennehy, and found herself in the company of some other acting nominees.“I was standing next to Stanley Tucci and Philip Seymour Hoffman,” she said. “I thought, I’m in this group? This is the group that didn’t get the Tony?” She whispered the next bit, savoringly: “This is a good group to be in.”Nearly 20 years later, she knows that some people continue to write her off as solely a comedian, not also an actor. She knows that acting gets a different kind of respect than comedy.“I think my dramatic work now has got really to an interesting place, a place where I don’t quite know where it’s going to go,” Izzard said.She intends to “keep pushing” with it as she finds out.For now, that means donning those glorious boots downtown at Greenwich House, channeling Pip and company. Digging into the main meal that is her acting, she’ll be sharing it only with the audience. More

  • 163 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    Stephen Boss, Dancer and Reality TV Star Known as tWitch, Dies at 40

    Mr. Boss spent nine years with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer.Stephen Boss, a charismatic hip-hop dancer and television personality known as tWitch who rose to fame on the reality show “So You Think You Can Dance” before becoming a regular on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show,” died on Tuesday in a motel room in Los Angeles. He was 40.The death was ruled a suicide by the Los Angeles County medical examiner’s office.Mr. Boss joined “So You Think You Can Dance” in 2008 as a 25-year-old with a talent for popping — a dance form associated with hip-hop that involves isolating parts of the body with a staccato rhythm — and an ability to make the judges burst into laughter with his facial expressions and theatrics.He soon found himself dancing unfamiliar styles like the waltz and the tango on national television, and he finished the show’s fourth season as runner-up. Later on in the series, Mr. Boss performed a hip-hop duet with Ellen DeGeneres — featuring him as a therapist in a sweater vest and her as his client — that would end up shaping the rest of his career.As a bubbly presence on TV who liked to wear a fedora and often broke into dance, Mr. Boss spent nearly a decade with “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” as D.J., guest host and, eventually, an executive producer. “I count on him to look over at and make silly jokes,” Ms. DeGeneres said in an episode this year, the show’s last. “He’s my pal, he’s my sidekick.”In a statement on Wednesday, Ms. DeGeneres said she was “heartbroken” over the death, calling Mr. Boss “pure love and light.”Stephen Laurel Boss was born on Sept. 29, 1982, in Montgomery, Ala., to Connie Boss Alexander and Sandford Rose. He started dancing as a teenager and earned the nickname tWitch because he could not stop moving in school or in church.“Dance constitutes a lot of the conversation that I have,” Mr. Boss told the website Collider in 2014. “While I’m not a ridiculous wordsmith and I can’t clearly verbalize the things that I’m feeling sometimes, I’d say that I can emote how I feel by dancing, 100 percent of the time, and fearlessly at that.”By the time Mr. Boss made it onto “So You Think You Can Dance,” he had already competed on “Star Search” and the MTV show “The Wade Robson Project,” in addition to more traditional dance training at Chapman University in Orange, Calif.If he had not been chosen for “So You Think You Can Dance,” he said in interviews, he planned to join the Navy. But the show embraced him, and for years he would return to dance with new contestants and serve as a judge.Mr. Boss’s marriage also had its origins on the reality show. After dancing with Allison Holker — a contemporary dancer who had performed on Season 2 — at a party at the end of a later season, they became inseparable.“We danced and we were together, like holding hands the very next day, and never looked back,” Ms. Holker Boss told People magazine this year.Dance was often at the center of their relationship: Mr. Boss proposed while the couple were filming choreography for a Microsoft commercial, and the dance — later posted online — turned into a romantic duet. They married in 2013 and built a significant social media following, hosting a reality TV show and posting both dance videos and peeks into their life raising a family.“Stephen lit up every room he stepped into,” Ms. Holker Boss said in a statement. “He valued family, friends and community above all else, and leading with love and light was everything to him.”In addition to his wife and his parents, Mr. Boss is survived by a son, Maddox; a daughter, Zaia; a stepdaughter, Weslie; a brother, Deondre Rose; a grandfather, Eddy Boss; and two grandmothers, Elnora Rose and Marie Boss.After finding fame as a dancer, Mr. Boss explored an acting career. He appeared in films in the “Step Up” franchise and in the second “Magic Mike” movie. (In his role as Ms. DeGeneres’s sidekick, he had his body hair waxed on her show in preparation for “Magic Mike XXL.”)With Ms. DeGeneres’s show ending this year after 19 seasons, Mr. Boss called his return to “So You Think You Can Dance” as a judge a “full-circle moment” in an interview on the “Today” show. He then put his talk-show charm on display as he gave the hosts dance lessons in salsa, popping and locking, and the robot.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 to reach the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

  • 150 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Ye Bear & Ye Cubb,’ Colonial America Takes the Stage

    A play first performed in a tavern in 1665 survives with its title, and the court case it precipitated, intact — but nothing else.The first scripted performance in colonial America took place in a Virginia tavern on Aug. 27, 1665. Not a line of it remains, not a character name, not a whisper of plot. Even its genre — comedy, satire, arboreal drama? — is lost to time. But its title, “Ye Bare and Ye Cubb,” has survived. So has the court case it precipitated. Because as long as there has been theater in America, there has been someone around to hate on it. The actors were promptly arrested, and what we know about the play we know from court records.These dregs of history are the fermenting agent for “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” at 59E59 Theaters. Those responsible for the original were charged with public wickedness. The devisers of this new version, which includes a cream pie and several fart jokes, don’t really know how to behave, either. Created by No. 11 Productions and directed by Ryan Emmons, “Ye Bear” is a fantasia on colonial themes — messy, overstated, indifferently competent. It is also tenacious and generous, with a sweet-tempered approach to its audience interactions.After an unnecessary dream sequence (so much in the script, credited to six company members, is unnecessary), the action begins in Fowkes’ Tavern. William Darby (Steven Conroy, who also plays a version of himself) has written a play, and he recruits two friends, Cornelius Watkinson (Anthony Michael Martinez) and Philip Howard (Erin Lamar), and an unknown person in a bear costume (or possibly an actual bear, it’s unclear) to perform it there. After the players are arrested, they are asked to perform it again, in full costume, before the court.So far, this matches the historical record. But while the court reports are silent on the contents of the play, No. 11 voices an imagined version, with lines like: “The goose is loose/by the beard of Zeus/the fawn is gone/are we amidst a con?” (The play’s name references Ben Jonson’s masques, a dubious inspiration.) These sequences are, at best, embarrassing, as is the alliteration-heavy courtroom drama that ensues. Clearly, this verbiage is bad on purpose — which doesn’t make it any easier to endure. Every character stops the show for a monologue. Few of them should. If the script reveals a decent knowledge of theater history, it never offers immersion in what life might have been like in early America, what excitement these players might have felt or the risks they took — knowingly or otherwise — in giving this performance.The script’s insufficiencies are softened by the company’s attitude — warm and inclusive — toward the audience. From the first, the spectators are invited in (considering the cramped layout of the upstairs theater, there are few alternatives) and encouraged to buy drinks at the onstage bar. Later, they are recruited as seamstresses, as witnesses, as a bailiff and a miscreant. Theater, the play suggests, is a communal effort. No. 11 puts that into action, with free beers for the spectators charged with sewing a doublet.We know so little about theater in America’s first century. The earliest report of professional actors here is of a troupe that had been kicked out of England for violating a licensing act in the 1750s, nearly 150 years after the first colonists settled. If theater happened previously — and it did, in some form, in schools and churches and the occasional tavern or purpose-built playhouse — it meant that small groups of people, all of whom had other jobs and priorities, met in small rooms and made something together.This is what “Ye Bear & Ye Cubb” seeks, in its shambling way, to honor. “Let’s raise a glass,” Conroy, as himself, says late in the play, “to the artists and the work that we don’t know and the names that never got written down.” Would those 17th-century artists enjoy what No. 11 has wrought? That, too, is unknown. But let’s hope they wouldn’t sue.Ye Bear & Ye CubbThrough Dec. 23 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 5 minutes. More

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    Stephen Colbert Doesn’t Want to Editorialize, but He Will

    Colbert was shocked by a report that 34 lawmakers texted Mark Meadows about subverting the 2020 election. “That is unbelievable — 34 people wanted to talk to Mark Meadows!” he 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.He Gets AroundStephen Colbert was amazed by a report that 34 Republican lawmakers had exchanged text messages with Mark Meadows, the former Trump chief of staff, about overturning the 2020 election results.“That is unbelievable — 34 people wanted to talk to Mark Meadows!” Colbert said on Tuesday night.“These members of Congress communicating with Meadows were — and it’s not my place to editorialize — stupid, evil traitors who were trying to do crimes against democracy, for which they should be punished with decades of jail time.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Turns out the calls were coming from inside the House — and the Senate.” — JIMMY KIMMELJimmy Kimmel said “all the usual suspects” were among the 34, including Ted Cruz, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan. “It’s like a gang of Batman’s dumbest enemies,” he said. Another was Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina, who was said to have written that “we are at a point of no return in saving our Republic!! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!!”“But instead of ‘martial’ he spelled it ‘Marshall,’ like the chain of off-price department stores. And if Marshall Law doesn’t work, we’ll mobilize the TJ Maxxinistas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Thank God this coup wasn’t planned by people who could solve the Wordle. We’d all be in a lot of trouble right now.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Respecting Marriage Edition)“Today, President Biden hosted a ceremony on the South Lawn to sign a bill that mandates federal recognition for same-sex marriages. When he heard, Mike Pence was like, ‘Barkeep, give me a shot of whole milk. Just leave the whole carton.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Respecting marriage? Wow, he really is undoing all of Trump’s orders.” — SETH MEYERS“That bill passed with strong bipartisan support in the House and Senate. Wow, even the partisanship was bi. That’s really great.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yeah, the bill protects all marriages, unless you’re one of those couples who feed each other in public. Then you’re on your own.” — JIMMY FALLON“That is great news. And I hope you were listening, Alan and Brad. No more excuses. Grandma’s not going to live forever. I booked the Doubletree by the lake for June 9. Get a linen suit.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingSeth Meyers took Lizzo day drinking on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightTegan and Sara will perform a song from their new album “Crybaby” on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSZA revels in mixed emotions on her second studio album. Jemal Countess/Getty ImagesSZA puts complex craftsmanship into songs that sound like spontaneous confessions on her new album, “SOS.” More

  • 138 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Stuart Margolin, Emmy Winner for ‘The Rockford Files,’ Dies at 82

    A sought-after character actor for decades, he worked frequently with James Garner. He also wrote and directed.Stuart Margolin, a character actor best known for playing the sidekick to James Garner’s private detective on the hit series “The Rockford Files,” a role that won Mr. Margolin back-to-back Emmy Awards as best supporting actor in 1979 and 1980, died on Monday in Staunton, Va. He was 82.His family said the cause was complications of pancreatic cancer.Mr. Margolin was all over television from the early 1960s into this century, turning up in episodes of dozens of shows as well as in assorted TV movies. He also had a substantial behind-the-scenes career: He wrote several TV movies and directed episodes of “The Rockford Files,” “The Love Boat,” “Touched by an Angel” and numerous other series. In 1987 he and Ted Bessell shared an Emmy nomination for directing for “The Tracey Ullman Show.”Mr. Margolin’s career was tied to that of Mr. Garner, one of Hollywood’s top stars, at several points. Before “The Rockford Files,” which was seen on NBC from 1974 to 1980, he and Mr. Garner were in “Nichols” (1971-72), a short-lived western; Mr. Garner played the title character, a sheriff, and Mr. Margolin played his deputy.After “Rockford,” the two men were in another western, “Bret Maverick” (1981-82), a sequel to “Maverick,” the show that helped make Mr. Garner a star in the 1950s and early ’60s. Mr. Margolin also directed Mr. Garner in several “Rockford Files” TV movies.“Jim has been better to me than anyone else in my life except my father,” Mr. Margolin was quoted as saying in “The Garner Files,” a 2011 memoir by Mr. Garner, who died in 2014.Mr. Margolin in 1978. His ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. Associated PressMr. Garner may have helped his career along, but it was Mr. Margolin’s ability to create memorable impressions, often with very little screen time, that made him a fixture of casting directors’ call lists. That was true even of his Emmy-winning role as Angel Martin, who once served prison time with Rockford and was both his friend and a thorn in his side.“Stuart Margolin, as Angel, is not on the show every week,” the syndicated columnist Dick Kleiner wrote in 1979. “And even when he is on, mostly he is in for little bits and pieces.”“But,” he added, “Margolin has created a vivid character in Angel, no matter how little he is seen. He is notably sleazy — in mind and body — and that’s what makes him fun.”In his memoir, Mr. Garner gave Mr. Margolin full credit for making the most out of the character.“I confess that I’ve never understood why Rockford likes Angel so much, because he’s rotten to the core,” he wrote. “But there’s something lovable about him. I don’t know what it is, but it’s all Stuart’s doing.”NBC had not wanted Mr. Margolin, Mr. Garner wrote. But he was cast in the pilot, and Angel made several more appearances.“NBC still didn’t want him and they told us point-blank not to use him again,” he wrote. “Then he got an Emmy nomination.”Stuart Margolin was born on Jan. 31, 1940, in Davenport, Iowa, to Morris and Gertrude Margolin. He spent much of his childhood in Dallas, where he learned to golf. His first newspaper mentions were in write-ups of the results of golf tournaments.He became good enough at the sport that, he said, he had scholarship offers from several universities. But he was more interested in acting — he caught the bug when he played Puck in a local production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at age 8 — so, after graduating from a boarding school in Tennessee, he went west to study at the Pasadena Playhouse in California.He appeared in numerous stage productions, and he continued to work in the theater throughout his career. But in 1961 he landed his first TV role, on “The Gertrude Berg Show,” and soon television was dominating his résumé.He achieved a new level of visibility when he landed a role as a regular on “Love, American Style,” a buzz-generating series that debuted in 1969 and on which his brother Arnold was an executive producer.That series consisted of several vignettes per episode, with comic skits in between. He was among the cast members performing those skits. Sample bit: Mr. Margolin is behind the wheel in a car, complaining to someone in the back seat that “every time you fix me up with a chick, she turns out to be a dog.” The camera pans to the passenger seat, where, sitting next to Mr. Margolin, is an actual dog.In a 1981 interview with The Associated Press, Mr. Garner said Mr. Margolin’s work on that show caught his attention, especially a skit in which Mr. Margolin had a cell door slammed in his face.“I fell out of my chair,” Mr. Garner said. And he knew he had found his “Nichols” sidekick.“I love comedy and I study comedy and comedians,” Mr. Garner recalled. “I said, ‘That’s the guy.’”Mr. Margolin, who lived in Staunton, is survived by his wife, Patricia Dunne Margolin, whom he married in 1982; his brothers, Arnold and Richard; a sister, Anne Kalina; two stepsons, Max and Christopher Martini; a stepdaughter, Michelle Martini; and four step-grandchildren. His marriage to Joyce Eliason ended in divorce.In addition to acting and directing, Mr. Margolin dabbled in music. In 1980 he released a country-rock album, “And the Angel Sings,” for which he was a co-writer on some of the songs. Reviewing it in The Detroit Free Press, Mike Duffy called it “an album of style, wit and lowdown fun.”“It’s almost as if Soupy Sales and Willie Nelson got together,” he wrote. More

  • 125 Shares139 Views

    in Television

    Lloyd Newman, Teenage Chronicler of ‘Ghetto Life,’ Dies at 43

    He and LeAlan Jones recorded stories of life and death in a Chicago housing project for NPR, winning a Peabody Award and inspiring the birth of StoryCorps.Lloyd Newman, who teamed up with a fellow teenager in the 1990s to record two award-winning radio documentaries that bared the pernicious underside of growing up in a Chicago public housing project, died on Dec. 7 in Elmhurst, Ill. He was 43.His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of sickle cell anemia, his brother Michael said.Mr. Newman, the understated, harder-luck half of the duo, was 14 and in the eighth grade when he and his best friend, LeAlan Jones, 13, tape-recorded 100 hours of oral history and interviews to produce “Ghetto Life 101.” The producer David Isay transformed into a 28-minute segment on National Public Radio in 1993.In 1996, the youths won a Peabody Award, the youngest broadcasters at the time to do so, for “Remorse: The 14 Stories of Eric Morse,” a collage of recordings exploring the killing of a 5-year-old boy, tossed from the window of a vacant 14th-floor apartment in the Ida B. Wells Homes by a 10 and an 11 year old because he had refused to steal candy for them, according to the police.The two young journalists “squeezed magic from the streets of their struggling South Side neighborhood,” the reporter Don Terry wrote in The New York Times in 1997.The radio broadcasts were adapted into a book, “Our America: Life and Death on the South Side of Chicago” (1997), which they wrote with Mr. Isay.Mr. Isay had produced both documentaries, and they inspired him to establish the StoryCorps oral history project. It began with a recording booth in Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan in 2003 and since then has interviewed a half-million people, an effort to encourage mutual understanding by asking “to hear someone’s truth,” as the project puts it.Even when he was only 14, Lloyd Newman seemed unlikely to outlive his friend. “It’s easy to do wrong around here,” he told The Times in 1996. “It’s easy to get caught up by mistake.”Mr. Jones had been raised by middle-class grandparents in a private home a block away from the housing project. He graduated from high school on schedule, earned a bachelor’s degree in social science from Barat College in Lake Forest, Ill., ran for Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat as the Green Party candidate in 2010 (he polled 3.2 percent) and became a mentor and professional journalist. Yet he seemed more pessimistic of the two.“Unfortunately, Lloyd and I both knew we had accomplished very little with the challenges introduced in the documentaries,” Mr. Jones said in an email this week, citing, among other metrics, the rising toll of Black teenagers killed in Chicago.Mr. Newman’s trajectory was more problematic, but he seemed more spirited.He was “whip smart, street smart, with a huge heart and a shy smile,” Mr. Isay said on NPR last week, but “he lived through more in his first dozen years than most people live in a lifetime.”Lloyd Sentel Newman was born on March 3, 1979, to Michael Murry, an alcoholic who, by the time his son was a teenager, hadn’t lived with the family for a decade, though he kept in touch with them and lived nearby. His mother, Lynn Newman, also drank heavily and died of cirrhosis when she was 35 and Lloyd was 15.Lloyd was raised in a rowhouse, part of the Ida B. Wells Homes, by a sister who was six years older. She and another sister also died of complications of sickle cell anemia.In addition to his brother Michael, he is survived by another brother, Lyndell; and a sister, Ericka Newman.Mr. Newman in 2019. He struggled academically but completed high school and attended college.Michael NewmanLloyd, who sold laundry bags with his father and peddled newspapers, struggled at Wendell Phillips High School in Chicago. But he was able to transfer to Future Commons Technical Prep High School (now closed), where he received closer supervision in smaller classes.“It isn’t hopeless,” he told The Times in 1997. “I’ll go to summer school and regular school and night school — I’ll never drop out.”He didn’t. After six years, he finally received his diploma and enrolled at Langston University in Oklahoma, though he never graduated.He returned to Chicago, where in 2006 he was arrested outside his sister’s apartment and charged with the manufacture, delivery and possession of crack cocaine.He pleaded guilty on his lawyer’s advice and was sentenced to two years’ probation. In 2021, his conviction was vacated thanks to another lawyer, Joshua Tepler, after it was determined that the evidence used to convict Mr. Newman had been faked by corrupt police officers who were implicated in more than 100 other phony arrests.In interviews, Mr. Newman said he dreamed of going to college, opening a hardware store or becoming a journalist. After moving to DeKalb, Ill., west of Chicago, to be closer to his brother, he worked as a cabby and as an Uber driver.In 2018, he was hired as a part-time shelver by the DeKalb County Library System and was later promoted to a $16-an-hour position mostly handling book loans to and from other libraries.Before he lapsed into a coma seven months ago, he and a partner were planning to open a tobacco and CBD retail store.“Ghetto 101” originated when Mr. Isay was hired at WBEZ radio, NPR’s Chicago affiliate, to contribute to a series of broadcasts inspired by Alex Kotlowitz’s book “There Are No Children Here: The Story of Two Boys Growing Up in the Other America” (1991).Michael Newman said that Lloyd had responded to a leaflet distributed by Mr. Isay seeking boots-on-the-ground reporters. Lloyd, he said, “thought that it would be fun and something different to do.”Mr. Kotlowitz said in an email that the project had imbued Mr. Newman with a quiet confidence and gave him a job that fit his character, as an “understated yet fiercely powerful storyteller who so relished making individual connections often with people whose lives so differed from his own.”“He was such a generous spirit and such a thoughtful soul,” Mr. Kotlowitz added. “I don’t know if he fully grasped the impact his storytelling had on others, but it inspired so many and challenged them in ways that brought us all closer.”Both youths understood the challenges they faced in the other America, the one outside the ghetto.“If we go in the store, we’re looked at wrong, as if we was going to steal,” Mr. Newman told Charlie Rose on PBS in 1997. “We’re not trusted, and most people feel that way.”By his own reckoning, Lloyd Newman might not have expected to die of natural causes. In 1997, enumerating the most common causes of death in the projects, he told The Times: “People get thrown out of windows, drowned, stabbed, shot. But a lot of that killing would stop if the government would make it livable around here. We don’t have no parks. The swings are broken. There’s nothing for people to do. There’s no fun. Life isn’t worth living without some fun.”In the documentary “Remorse,” Mr. Newman and Mr. Jones stood on the roof of the public housing building from which 5-year-old Eric Morse had been dropped from a 14th-floor window by two other young kids, or “shorties,” in the parlance of the streets. Looking over the edge, Mr. Jones asked Mr. Newman what would have gone through his mind if it was he who had been plunging to the ground.“I’d be thinking about how I’m going to land and if I’m going to survive,” Mr. Newman said. “I’d be thinking about how it is in heaven.”They mulled how long the fall would take and whether there would be time enough to say a prayer. Regardless, they concluded, Eric was so young that he would surely have gone to heaven.“Dude, you think they got a playground in heaven for shorties?” Mr. Jones asked.“Nope,” Mr. Newman said. “They don’t got a playground in heaven for nobody.” More