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    Review: Hugh Jackman in a Twisty Tale of ‘Sexual Misconduct’

    A new play about a middle-age professor and his teenage student forces you to ask: Who’s grooming whom?We first see the willowy Ella Beatty, half of the cast of “Sexual Misconduct of the Middle Classes,” lugging furniture onto the stage of the Minetta Lane Theater. If you’ve heard that the play, by Hannah Moscovitch, is part of an Off Broadway experiment called Audible x Together — featuring big names, spare décor, short runs and rock-bottom prices — you may find yourself wondering whether the backers had penny-pinched on a crew. If so, they might have let the other half of the cast do the lugging: Hugh Jackman has the guns.But the backers — Audible is a division of Amazon and Together is Jackman’s venture with the hugely successful producer Sonia Friedman — are not exactly impoverished. Art, not parsimony, is the source of Beatty’s labors. Setting the stage for the terrific, tightly plaited knot of a play, the curious opening will pay off later. So will every seemingly casual moment of Ian Rickson’s long-game staging, from lighting (by Isabella Byrd) that often, weirdly, illuminates the audience, to Jackman’s manhandling of an actual lawn mower.Jackman plays Jon Macklem, a critically acclaimed yet best-selling author who teaches literature at a “world class college.” He has not had as much success in his domestic career, being the kind of Kerouac cliché who spends years, as he puts it, “racking up ex-wives like a maniac.” Currently he is separated from his third.Soon another cliché enters: the “grossly underwritten” sex-object character that lust-addled novelists (a description Macklem cops to) write about to “expose their mediocrity.” That’s Beatty’s Annie. Though she is a 19-year-old student in one of his classes, and he is starting to grizzle at the edges, their affair begins.“The erotics of pedagogy,” Macklem, only half-mortified by the phrase, explains.It is here you may say to yourself: I’ve seen this before. The questionable relationship between male mentors and female students is almost its own genre in plays (“Oleanna”) and novels (“Disgrace”) — perhaps because it is almost its own genre in life. (I immediately thought of Joyce Maynard and J.D. Salinger.) But Moscovitch clearly wants to complicate that narrative by shaping it almost entirely from the man’s point of view. Macklem speaks perhaps 80 percent of the words in the play, spinning long, disarming, verbally dexterous monologues. Annie’s lines are more like this: “I shouldn’t / I don’t know why I / Said that / Sorry I’m mm.”The thrill of this production, our critic writes, is that it doesn’t tell you what to think but, in its big payoff, gives you plenty to consider.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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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    ‘Reformed’ Is a Charming Show About a Young Rabbi

    Sitcom shenanigans nestle alongside philosophical musings in this French dramedy on Max.The French dramedy “Reformed,” on Max (in French, with subtitles, or dubbed), follows a young rabbi who moves back home to begin her career. Léa (Elsa Guedj) is smart, knowledgeable and capable, but she is also new at this and nervous. It doesn’t help that those around her, including members of her own family, scoff at the idea of a female rabbi — when they’re tired of scoffing at religion in general.“There was Galileo, there was Freud, there was Auschwitz,” says her father (Éric Elmosnino), a therapist. “I thought we’d figured it out. God doesn’t exist.”Doubt is a constant presence in “Reformed,” both grandly and in the sense that “Eh, aren’t we all just muddling through?” The show is based loosely on the book “Living With Our Dead,” by the French rabbi Delphine Horvilleur, and the episodes center on life cycle events: a bris, a bar mitzvah, a wedding, a funeral, shiva. Most of the people availing themselves of Léa’s services aren’t particularly observant, and they’re not sure if or how to engage with the rites.And Léa isn’t sure either, so she rehearses different voice memos. Yes, do it. No, don’t. Oh no, uh, there was a family emergency, I can’t help you. But invariably, she does help them, with real care and curiosity, not in trite or Pollyannaish ways. She is doctrinal but not doctrinaire, and all these rituals of change for her congregants are rituals of change for her, too. She becomes more confident and mature ushering a reluctant bar mitzvah boy through the process. She hones her discernment skills while officiating a wedding.The most intriguing relationship on the show is between Léa and Arié (Lionel Dray), the local orthodox rabbi and her former teacher. There’s a magnetic pull and constant fascination between them, a lot of trust but also a sense of betrayal. He’s her mentor, and they have an intense erotic energy, but each also sees the other as practicing religion incorrectly — a tension that can be playful right up until it is profoundly hurtful. The goings on at their respective shuls highlight their own misgivings about their denominational choices: Maybe her practice is shallow; maybe his practice is misogynistic. Let’s resolve to smolder at each other about it.In addition to being charming, “Reformed” is interesting. Sitcom shenanigans nestle alongside philosophical musings. A farce unfolds at a seder, and goofy sibling banter segues into deeper conversation and back. Seven episodes are available now, and the season finale arrives on Friday. More

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    In ‘Hamlet Hail to the Thief,’ Radiohead Riffs on Shakespeare

    The band’s frontman, Thom Yorke, created a show with the Royal Shakespeare Company that is both admirably ambitious and a little foolish.Radiohead meets the Bard: a mash-up for the ages — and kryptonite for purists, you might think. But a new, dance-infused take on “Hamlet,” set to the band’s 2003 LP, “Hail to the Thief,” which opened in Manchester, England, on Wednesday, is no mere gimmick.There is plenty in the album, both aesthetically and thematically, that resonates with Shakespeare’s tale of usurpation, revenge and self-doubt: the title’s allusion to political infamy, the music’s gloomy timbre, the anxiously introspective lyrics. Immediately, the album’s opening line — “Are you such a dreamer / To put the world to rights?” — has echoes of Hamlet’s famous speech, “The time is out of joint, O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right!”“Hamlet Hail to the Thief” — co-directed by Christine Jones and Steve Hoggett for the Royal Shakespeare Company, and co-created by the Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke — runs at Aviva Studios through May 18 before transferring to the company’s home in Stratford-upon-Avon in June. Jones is best known as a set designer, and Hoggett as a choreographer. (They worked together on “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” for which Jones won a Tony in 2018.) In this interpretation, the story is drastically abridged — clocking in at comfortably under two hours — and there is a strong emphasis on music and visuals.The onstage action is interspersed with subtly reworked snippets and deconstructed riffs from the Radiohead songs. A group of musicians, supervised by Tom Brady, plays behind glass at the rear of the stage, while two singers belt out vocals from a balcony. The actors periodically slip into trance-like dance moves, combining strange, synchronized gesticulations with an assortment of tumbling, swirling and rolling motions. They dance a creepy waltz to the funky bass line of “Go to Sleep,” and the song’s chorus — “Something big is gonna happen / Over my dead body” — portentously signposts the carnage that is to come.The actors periodically slip into trance-like choreographed dance moves with strange, synchronized gesticulations.Manuel HarlanThe music and movement combine to evoke a suitably eerie sense of menace, although it’s a shame that the production’s smartly rendered monochrome aesthetic has become so commonplace — thanks in large part to to its deployment in successive high-profile Jamie Lloyd productions — that it scarcely registers. Black-clad actors, a little obscured by smoke; a dark stage illuminated by stark spotlights or neon rectangles: It’s a gloaming-by-numbers, almost too crisp to be spooky. (The set design is by the collective AMP Scenography, in collaboration with Sadra Tehrani.)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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    ‘Forever’ Explores the Timelessness of Teen Romance (and Sex)

    A new Netflix series adapts Judy Blume’s 1970s novel with a contemporary Black cast, flipping the gender roles but preserving its emotional innocence.In Judy Blume’s taboo-busting 1975 novel “Forever …,” a teenage girl has sex for the first time. It does not destroy her life. (That’s the plot twist.) But she is still surrounded by cautionary tales: unwanted pregnancies, untimely marriages and dreams deferred. The stakes of any tryst are higher for her than they are for her more experienced high school boyfriend.When the showrunner Mara Brock Akil considered adapting the novel, a young adult classic, she saw the relationship through different eyes: her own, as a mother to Black sons. In her first meeting with Blume — whose seminal coming-of-age best-sellers helped generations understand their bodies and themselves — she made the case that a TV version should also be told from the perspective of the boyfriend, in a contemporary series focused on Black families.If Katherine, the book’s heroine, seemed socially powerless in her era, “I would posit that Black boys are the most vulnerable at this time,” said Brock Akil, the creator of the beloved 2000s sitcom “Girlfriends,” and several other comedies. “A modern Black family, I feel like we know how dangerous the world is.”Blume wrote “Forever …” in the aftermath of the Pill, in response to her daughter’s request for a story in which a teen girl doesn’t get punished for having, and enjoying, a sex life — the dominant narrative at the time. Blume’s antidote captures the dramatic rush of first love and the fumbling urgency of adolescent exploration in frank language that made it both irresistible for young readers (with dog-eared copies passed around in schools) and one of the most frequently banned books in America well into the 2000s.Brock Akil with Michael Cooper Jr. on the set of “Forever.” In her first meeting with Judy Blume, she pitched the idea of centering the story on a Black family.Elizabeth Morris/NetflixBrock Akil’s interpretation, which debuts on Netflix on Thursday, stars Lovie Simone (“Greenleaf”) and the newcomer Michael Cooper Jr., flipping the original story’s gender roles: Simone, as Keisha Clark, is more experienced and self-assured; Cooper Jr., as Justin Edwards, is the awkward one who falls hard and needs guidance. Winningly, it preserves the source’s emotional innocence — breathe easy, parents; this is not the hard living of teen fare like “Euphoria.” But it builds tension exploring issues of race and class.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: Will ‘The Death of Rasputin’ Have a Cult Following?

    The immersive production on Governors Island is an attempt to fill the void left by “Sleep No More” and “Life and Trust.”There was an orgy in the next room. Or possibly a riot. Upstairs the aristocracy colluded. Downstairs the workers plotted. Norms were flouted, alternative medicine practiced. The world tumbled toward anarchy and decadence. Honestly, there are worse ways to spend an evening.This was “The Death of Rasputin,” an immersive event created by the collective Artemis Is Burning and staged in an arts building on Governors Island. The much delayed closing of “Sleep No More” in January and the more abrupt shuttering of “Life and Trust” last month have left a vacuum in the immersive scene. “The Death of Rasputin,” which runs through the end of May, is one attempt to fill it. (The bar offerings — pierogi, spicy pickles, an elevated White Russian — are another.) With 10 performers, this show is smaller in scale than those others, but even on a limited budget, it glimmers like a Fabergé egg. Especially if you don’t look too closely at the jewels.Jake Ryan Lozano, center, as Grigory Rasputin, the Russian mystic.Maria BaranovaConceived and directed by Ashley Brett Chipman and written by Chipman and three others, the show is set, loosely, in St. Petersburg (a.k.a. Petrograd) in 1916. Most of the scenes, even the more outré ones, have some basis in fact, though Artemis takes a relaxed approach to language and chronology. Broadly, the shows is in thrall to Grigory Rasputin, the mystic who exerted an unhealthy influence on the Romanov royal family in the years just before the Russian Revolution. His sway unsettled several aristocrats, who conspired in his murder. Legend has it that he was poisoned, shot, bludgeoned, then finally drowned in the Neva River. (The real story is probably duller.)The performance begins with a ride to the island. Ticket holders are instructed to wear black and embrace Romanov chic, albeit in comfortable shoes, which looks a little funny in the electric light of the ferry, a cult afloat. After coat check and perhaps a drink at the bar, there is an introductory scene, then participants can roam at will across two floors and a dozen or so environments in a single building.In structure and style, “The Death of Rasputin” doesn’t diverge too much from recent immersive offerings. There are drawers to poke through, letters to read, eldritch items to caress, a secret passage or two, performers to chase. (Unless you are very, very fast, sightlines remain a problem.) There is also lots of dance fighting and hanky-panky, though in a welcome departure, the characters speak and pains have been taken to offer audiences a coherent experience.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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    ‘Poker Face’ Returns With New Mysteries and Old Friends

    For the second season of the comic crime show, Natasha Lyonne called on her closest pals to guest star as victims or suspects.Natasha Lyonne has been acting since childhood, but she is not a “nepo baby.” (She wanted to be one, she joked, but “they’re telling me it’s too late, and that’s unfortunate.”) What she does have in lieu of famous parents, however, is a universe of famous friends ready to heed her call.“I don’t have parents or kids,” she said. “I’m just always trying to create some sort of an old-fashioned caravan on-the-road family band that is a real town-to-town pickup sport where we get to reunite.”That much is evident in the second season of the Peacock mystery series “Poker Face,” debuting on Thursday. The show stars Lyonne as Charlie Cale, a reluctant crime solver who can tell when someone is lying. The mystery-of-the-week structure allows Lyonne, who is also an executive producer, to call on her closest pals to guest star as victims or suspects. The upshot is that viewers are treated to mini reunions from the stars of cult classics like “Slums of Beverly Hills” (1998) and “But I’m a Cheerleader” (2000).One episode features Lyonne’s “Slums” love interest, Kevin Corrigan, as a Teamster on a film set that turns into a crime scene. Another has her character’s brother from “Slums,” David Krumholtz, as a kind father to a boy accused of killing a pet gerbil.Melanie Lynskey (with John Cho), a friend of Lyonne’s since the 1990s, appears in the new season. Ralph Bavaro/PeacockLater, her “Cheerleader” co-star Melanie Lynskey plays an unsuspecting do-gooder roped into a scheme at a hotel bar. Clea DuVall, Lyonne’s girlfriend from that same comedy, directs an episode that also stars Lynskey’s husband, Jason Ritter; DuVall also played Charlie’s sister in the first season. In real life, Lyonne and Lynskey planned DuVall’s wedding reception.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 Anxiously Awaits the Unveiling of Trump’s Big News

    “The Daily Show” host Desi Lydic said it “could be anything from ‘I’ve achieved peace in the Middle East’ to ‘I just tried bucatini, and I’m never going back to regular spaghetti.’”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.Trump, the TeasePresident Donald Trump said Tuesday that he would make a big announcement in the next few days, keeping the details elusive.On Wednesday’s “Daily Show,” Desi Lydic said, “it’s great to have a president who does teaser trailers for world events.”“It’s like when F.D.R. said, ‘We only have one thing to fear, and I’ll tell you what it is after the break!’” — DESI LYDIC“This is Donald Trump, so his big announcement could be anything from ‘I’ve achieved peace in the Middle East’ to ‘I just tried bucatini, and I’m never going back to regular spaghetti.’” — DESI LYDIC“This could literally be about anything. He could be getting rid of the tariffs or installing a Big Mac button on the White House desk.” — JIMMY FALLON“Maybe Melania’s pregnant again. Wouldn’t that be sweet, to have a baby — another baby in the White House?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“This had better not be another set of his Trump NFTs or a golf tournament that he won. This feels like a dad who’s a gambling addict telling his family, ‘I have big news, we’re moving into an RV!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But this is what happens when you put a loose cannon into the White House. This — it could be about anything from new tariffs to announcing our next attorney general is Gary Busey. Best-case scenario, Don Jr.’s rabies test comes back negative.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Pope O’Clock Edition)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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    Michael Pitt, ‘Boardwalk Empire’ Actor, Is Arrested on Sex Abuse Charges

    Mr. Pitt faces numerous charges, including assault and strangulation, based on encounters in 2020 and 2021. He has pleaded not guilty.Michael Pitt, the actor known for his role on “Boardwalk Empire,” was arrested on sexual abuse charges this month, according to the Brooklyn district attorney’s office.Mr. Pitt was arraigned on Friday in Kings County Supreme Criminal Court on charges based on encounters from April 2020 through August 2021. He was charged with nine counts, including first-degree sexual abuse, second-degree assault and second-degree strangulation.Mr. Pitt pleaded not guilty to all charges; his next court appearance is set for June 17.An indictment outlining the accusations against Mr. Pitt said he forcibly touched an unnamed woman and later engaged in oral sex without her consent. The indictment also said Mr. Pitt had injured her with a four-by-four and a cinder block on separate occasions.Jason Goldman, Mr. Pitt’s lawyer, said on Wednesday that his client had secured bail and was released from custody. Mr. Pitt does not have contact with his accuser, he said.“Unfortunately, we live in a world where somebody like Mr. Pitt — an accomplished professional who would never so much as contemplate these crimes — can be arrested on the uncorroborated word of an unreliable individual,” Mr. Goldman said in a statement.He said the claims had been raised several years after the encounters were said to have taken place, when Mr. Pitt and his accuser were in a consensual relationship. “We have already uncovered exonerating evidence and this case will be dismissed,” he said.A representative for the district attorney’s office declined to comment.Mr. Pitt, whose acting credits include several episodes of “Dawson’s Creek” and the movies “Funny Games” and “Reptile,” played James Darmody, known as Jimmy, on the first two seasons of the HBO drama “Boardwalk Empire.” His character was killed off in a shooting. More