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Season 5 of ‘The Crown’ Depicts a Low Point for the Monarchy
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Late Night Rates Trump’s New Nickname for Ron DeSantis
“Trump doesn’t even know what that means,” Jimmy Fallon said after Donald Trump referred to the Florida governor as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.The Best He Could Come Up WithFormer President Donald Trump debuted a new nickname for Gov. Ron DeSantis at a Pennsylvania rally over the weekend, referring to him as “Ron DeSanctimonious.”“Trump doesn’t even know what that means. He thought he was casting a Harry Potter spell on him,” Jimmy Fallon joked.“That’s right, former President Trump referred to Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis as ‘Ron DeSanctimonious,’ which is a risky move for Trump, because that’s six syllables.” — SETH MEYERS“Has anyone ever been worse at coming up with nicknames? Imagine Trump in ‘Top Gun’: [imitating Trump] ‘People! People! I know we all love Maverick, but I think I got one that beats it. Are you ready? Everybody ready? Airplane Guy.’” — SETH MEYERS“You saw that, breaking out a classic Trump nickname. I mean, at least we think it was a nickname. It could’ve just been Trump trying to say ‘DeSantis.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Yeah, there’s nothing voters like more than insults from a word-a-day calendar: ‘Let’s get bellicose! DeSantis is a pusillanimous sycophant! Incarcerate him aloft!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, he’s lost some speed on his nickname fastball, you know? In the old days, it would have been something like ‘Smelly Ron,’ and we would’ve all went with it.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Dr. Oz Edition)“Even Oprah, who made Dr. Oz, endorsed his opponent, John Fetterman. Which is — I mean, look, that’s like, that would be like me not endorsing Guillermo. It just wouldn’t happen.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Poor Dr. Oz. If he wins, he’s gonna actually have to move to Pennsylvania. I don’t know if he knows this.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And that’s always how it goes, people. At some point in life, you have to kill the monster you create. Yeah, Dr. Frankenstein and his creature. Obi-wan and Anakin. Parents and their kids.” — TREVOR NOAH“Astronomers predict that a total lunar eclipse will occur tomorrow. So if you look outside and the moon turns red, don’t worry — it just means Dr. Oz won his Senate race.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingStephen Colbert announced the winner of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2022 on Monday’s “Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightJimmy Kimmel and Stephen Colbert will both go live on election night.Also, Check This OutSasha Diamond, left, and Shannon Tyo play ambitious twin sisters in Jiehae Park’s “Peerless.”James LeynseFemale playwrights are adapting and revamping Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” for the modern age. More
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On ‘S.N.L.’, President Biden Has Two Words on the Midterms: ‘Big Yikes’
Amy Schumer hosted a “Saturday Night Live” episode that contemplated the coming elections and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.On the weekend before the 2022 midterm elections, “Saturday Night Live” turned to James Austin Johnson, its resident impersonator of President Biden, to assess how Democratic candidates might fare at the polls. And, well, he wanted to make a lot of last-minute substitutions.This episode, hosted by Amy Schumer and featuring the musical guest Steve Lacy, began with Johnson as Biden speaking directly to the electorate. “My fellow Americans,” he said, “this Tuesday, our midterm elections will determine the fate of our democracy, and let’s just say: Big yikes.”He continued: “What’s going on? I guess the Democrats’ message just ain’t getting through. Plus, I’m over here, talking to people who don’t exist. I don’t know much. Who’s that? Oh, nobody’s there.”Even so, Johnson’s Biden said he was pushing himself as hard as he could: “I’m on the Peloton every morning, tempting fate,” he said. He reminded voters of past accomplishments, like an infrastructure bill that provided red states with broadband internet “so you can share your Paul Pelosi gay erotic fiction at light speed.”The problem with his party, Johnson said, is that “we don’t have any stars anymore — too many Raphael Warnocks and not enough Herschel Walkers.”“Which is why we’re going to make some last-minute changes before Tuesday with the Democrats who are exciting,” he continued.Among them, Johnson introduced the free-spirited 2020 presidential candidate Marianne Williamson (Chloe Fineman). Describing herself as “a prominent author and Level 4 enchantress,” Fineman said, “I am ready to fight for the American dream — which I caught in this Tibetan singing bowl.”Other replacement candidates included the goateed restaurateur Guy Fieri (Molly Kearney), who bellowed, “Do y’all want Dr. Oz’s crudité or a full plate of paid family leave, dripping in donkey sauce?”Johnson brought out the adult film star Stormy Daniels (Cecily Strong) and the rappers Tekashi 6ix9ine (Marcello Hernandez) and Azealia Banks (Ego Nwodim). He also introduced the “S.N.L.” alum Tracy Morgan (played in the sketch by Kenan Thompson), who Johnson said would be in charge of student-loan forgiveness.“Y’all want that money?” Thompson asked. “Why don’t you come on over here, rub my belly?”Host monologue of the weekSchumer, the stand-up comic and star of the sketch series “Inside Amy Schumer,” returned to host “S.N.L.” for the first time since 2018. Since last hosting, she has become a mother, but parenthood and the passage of the years have hardly softened Schumer’s occasionally racy sensibilities (and vocabulary).Among the portions of her routine we can safely recount here, Schumer joked about people who gave her advice during her pregnancy: “I had this one friend, she kept telling me: ‘You gotta do prenatal yoga. It really helps with the birth,’” Schumer said. “So I immediately signed up. For a C-section.”She also talked about life with her husband after he was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. On a rainy night, she said, she told him that being with him and their son had been the best years of her life.“He just looked at me and he said, ‘I’m going to go put the windows up in the car,’” Schumer recounted, adding affectionately: “That’s my guy. It’s one of the times we play the game Autism, or Just a Man?”Fake commercial of the weekIn what begins as a seemingly standard pharmaceutical ad, a voice-over asks: “Are you feeling tired and worn down? Sick of the endless grind at work? Exhausted by your family, desperate for some peace and quiet?”Don’t feel ashamed if you caught yourself agreeing with one or more of those propositions before you learned it was, in fact, a advertisement for Covid — you know, the highly communicable disease responsible for the pandemic — which here is touted for having fringe benefits, like getting you out of work and child-care duties.Probably not a sketch that “S.N.L.” would have attempted a year or two ago, but as the voice-over reminds you: “Side effects of Covid include having Covid, which is still kind of bad, but doesn’t it seem different now?”Obligatory Twitter sketch of the weekEven in an episode that was largely focused on the midterms, you knew “S.N.L.” would find a way to revisit the chaotic energy unleashed by Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. This weekend’s sketch was inspired by Musk’s announcement that the company would establish a content moderation council — in this case, a two-person team (Thompson and Fineman) who say they are the only two Twitter employees who haven’t been fired yet — to consider the reinstatement of suspended users.The council heard the pleas of various characters played by Schumer, Strong, Bowen Yang and Punkie Johnson, and then finally from former President Donald Trump (James Austin Johnson), who wanted his account back, too. “I won’t do anything bad except maybe coup,” he vowed.Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on President Biden’s recent speech about American democracy and on the New Jersey Nets’ suspension of Kyrie Irving for promoting an antisemitic documentary.Jost began:President Biden, seen here begging for one more year before the midterms, warned about Republican candidates who say they will refuse to accept election results, warning they could set the nation on a path to chaos. So wait, this is just the path to chaos? I thought we’d been living in chaos for at least six years. I mean, Nancy Pelosi’s husband was attacked in their home by a guy with a hammer, and instead of even basic sympathy, Republicans were like, “We heard he gay.”He continued:Donald Trump Jr. mocked the attack on Pelosi’s husband by posting an image of a hammer and a pair of underpants, with the message, “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.” And I would agree that Don Jr. is probably the expert on getting hammered in your underwear. Also, Don Jr., is that your underwear, man? Why is it so dirty and stretched out? You were trying to burn Paul Pelosi, but now I’m just wondering if you wear your dad’s old underwear.Che then pivoted to the news about Irving:After meeting with the Anti-Defamation League, Kyrie Irving announced that from now on, he will pretend to not be antisemitic. Brooklyn Nets star Kyrie Irving was suspended after he tweeted a link to the antisemitic film “Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America.” You know, Hebrews II Negroes was also the name of my favorite R&B group in the ’90s.Deskside segment of the weekStrong missed the first three “S.N.L.” episodes of this season while she performed a revival of the one-woman show “The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe” in Los Angeles. But she has been rapidly making up for lost time with appearances like this one, a companion piece of sorts to her Goober the Clown segment from last season.The name of this latest character, “Tammy the Trucker, Who Promises She’s Here to Talk About Gas Prices and Definitely Not Abortion,” pretty much says it all, and Strong could just barely pretend to turn a steering wheel or care about trucker lingo as she declared, “You shouldn’t have to pull the convoy across state lines to find a doctor who can provide health care for your anatomy without having to call their lawyer first.”In closing, she reminded viewers to vote because, as she put it, “We all love someone who’s had an abortion — I mean, drives a truck.” More
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‘My Broken Language’ Review: Piecing Together a Life of Many Dialects
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What’s on TV This Week: ‘Atlanta’ and ‘Black Panther’
The series staring Donald Glover concludes its fourth and final season. And the Marvel blockbuster airs on FX as the sequel premieres in theaters.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Nov. 7-13. Details and times are subject to change.MondayPUSS IN BOOTS (2011) 6 p.m. on TOON. In this prequel spinoff of the “Shrek” franchise, Puss, the talking cat voiced by Antonio Banderas, is framed for a bank robbery and becomes an outlaw in his own town. He seeks to restore his honor and pay the debt he owes to his hometown by joining forces with Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) and Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) to find the magic beans that lead to valuable golden goose eggs. The film is a “cheerfully chaotic jumble of fairy tale and nursery rhyme characters,” Stephen Holden wrote in his review for The New York Times. A sequel is set to be released on in late December.TuesdayELECTION NIGHT SPECIALS 8 p.m. on ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS. As the polls close on Tuesday, several networks are airing the latest election and voting news in the U.S. midterm elections. Find out what’s at stake in our guide to the midterms, including how state races could have a huge effect on issues like abortion rights and voting.SAY HEY, WILLIE MAYS! (2022) 9 p.m. on HBO. This documentary explores the life of the Major League Baseball legend Willie Mays as he navigated the sport during a time of segregation and racism. The director Nelson George tracks Mays’s experience growing up in Alabama and getting his start playing for the Birmingham Black Barons in the Negro Leagues, as well as his career in the big leagues. The film features interviews with Mays, the baseball greats Barry Bonds and Reggie Jackson and the sports commentator Bob Costas.WednesdayLainey Wilson in October. The performer is up for six nominations at this year’s CMA Awards ceremony, which will take place on Wednesday.Jason Kempin/Getty Images For CmtTHE CMA AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. Luke Bryan and Peyton Manning will take the stage live in Nashville to host the 56th annual Country Music Association Awards. This year, first-time nominee Lainey Wilson is up for six awards, including new artist of the year, and Ashley McBryde, Carly Pearce, Chris Stapleton and Shane McAnally are each nominated for five. The evening will feature performances from Carrie Underwood and Katy Perry, among others.HARD KNOCKS IN SEASON: THE ARIZONA CARDINALS 10 p.m. on HBO. This reality sports series is based on the HBO franchise “Hard Knocks,” which documents a different N.F.L. team’s training camp each year. This series instead focuses on a team through its pro season. The second season follows the Arizona Cardinals, led by the quarterback Kyler Murray. The Cardinals have gotten off to a rocky start this season, currently in last place in the N.F.C. West.ICONS UNEARTHED 10 p.m. on VICE. Season 2 of this documentary series focuses on the long-running animated series “The Simpsons.” In the final episode, writers, directors, actors and network executives share stories about how the television show came together and established its place in pop culture.ThursdayBIGGER THAN LIFE (1956) 8 p.m. on TCM. Based on a 1955 article in The New Yorker, the film follows Ed Avery (James Mason), a teacher who is diagnosed with a fatal illness. After his doctor prescribes him cortisone, he is at first believed to have made a recovery. But he then develops an addiction to the drug that leads to his downward spiral.ATLANTA 10 p.m. on FX. This series wraps up with the show’s characters back in Atlanta after spending time in Europe in Season 3. Acclaimed for its acting, storytelling and depictions of modern day Black life, the series follows the rapper Paper Boi (Brian Tyree Henry), his manager and cousin, Earn (Donald Glover), and their friends Darius (LaKeith Stanfield) and Van (Zazie Beetz).FridayChadwick Boseman in “Black Panther.”Marvel Studios/Disney, via Associated PressBLACK PANTHER (2018) 5 p.m. on FX. Need a refresher before watching the sequel? Catch this blockbuster film on the day of the premiere of “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.” In this movie, T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman) becomes the king of Wakanda, the isolated, technologically advanced African nation. As Black Panther, he rallies his allies and fights to keep his people, and their culture, safe. “In its emphasis on Black imagination, creation and liberation, the movie becomes an emblem of a past that was denied and a future that feels very present,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “And in doing so opens up its world, and yours, beautifully.”SaturdayTHE SNAKE PIT (1948) 8:30 p.m. on TCM. Virginia Cunningham (Olivia de Havilland) wakes up in a mental hospital, with no recollection of how she ended up there and an inability to recognize her husband, Robert (Mark Stevens). The film follows Victoria as she attempts to regain her memory with the help of Dr. Mark Kik (Leo Genn).SundayFrom left: Melissa McCarthy, Kate McKinnon, Kristen Wiig and Leslie Jones in “Ghostbusters.”Sony Pictures Entertainment, via Associated PressGHOSTBUSTERS (2016) 8:30 p.m. on Syfy. In this reboot of the science fiction comedy franchise, a transit worker (Leslie Jones) contacts three paranormal physicists (Melissa McCarthy, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon) after she encountered a ghost in a subway terminal. The four women band together to fight off the ghosts that have invaded New York City. It is “a movie that is a lot of enjoyable, disposable fun,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The Times. “It’s a lot like the old ‘Ghostbusters,’ except that it stars four funny women instead of, you know, four funny men.” More
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Review: ‘You Will Get Sick’ Tells the Untellable, for a Price
In a new Off Broadway play, Linda Lavin shines as a woman paid to say what an ailing young man cannot.Disease, dying and death are usually depicted as wretched or bloody onstage. We’re meant to cry or recoil.As you might guess from its title, though, “You Will Get Sick,” which opened on Sunday at the Laura Pels Theater, is more matter-of-fact. It seems to promise a bald memento mori in the form of a fortune cookie.Yet the play, written by Noah Diaz, directed by Sam Pinkleton and starring the evergreen Linda Lavin, is far more than that. Neither prosaic nor clinical, it defies all expectations for a story in which the main character receives a fatal diagnosis, telling the tale in the most lively, surreal and surprising ways imaginable.For one thing, Lavin, who is 85, does not play the character who’s ill. Turning the template upside down, she instead plays the caregiver, Callan — if you can call someone a caregiver whose every act of care is minutely monetized. Never lifting a finger without naming a price, she’s more like an end-of-life TaskRabbit, having answered an ad from a man seeking someone to listen to him admit that he’s sick.That he can’t actually say the word reflects on the way his life as a millennial — he’s in his 30s — has failed to prepare him to envision such a fate. But for his initial payment of $20, he purchases the opportunity to practice his confession by telling Callan that his limbs are growing numb as his illness progresses. Soon he will be paying her more to break the news to his narcissistic sister (Marinda Anderson) and others in his orbit. Even his co-workers don’t know why he hasn’t been at work.The playwright, making his New York debut, is withholding too. He elects not to name the character (he’s simply called #1 in the script) or even the disease, which resembles multiple sclerosis. But in Daniel K. Isaac’s typically and appealingly restrained performance, we understand much more. This is a man who protects himself against too much feeling by keeping the flow of information to a minimum. The flow of money replaces it.From left, Marinda Anderson, Isaac and Lavin. All the actors except Isaac play multiple roles.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSuch omissions and substitutions are part of the play’s overall approach. We never do hear #1 say the things he wants said; that service is provided instead by a disembodied narrator (Dario Ladani Sanchez) and of course by Callan, who, aside from the paid-for retellings, turns the story into a monologue for her night-school acting class.If this Cubist approach sounds too clever, it is in fact functional. The second-person narration (“Your hand goes numb,” says the voice) reproduces in the audience the sensation of dissociation #1 feels as his body starts to operate independently of his will. And the third-person monologue (“His balance isn’t right,” Callan declaims) demonstrates how our stories, even when buried, may yet leach into the world.For Diaz, theater is clearly part of that process; the slightly indulgent acting class sequences engage in some affectionate if too easy satire. (“There is no can’t,” says the teacher. “There is sometimes cannot … There is mostly maybe … We call that do.”) Yet when #1 accompanies Callan to a session one evening, the trite instruction to “live inside our bodies” becomes, in a quietly joyful moment between them, profound, experienced from opposing side of wellness.Lavin’s wit is in full bloom playing a woman who, unlike herself, is a terrible actor and a worse singer. (When prompted to walk like a lion, she’s suddenly Gwen Verdon doing Fosse.) Callan is as rich as any role she’s had in years — and even richer in some ways, because it doesn’t trade, as her characters in “Our Mother’s Brief Affair” and “The Lyons” did, on her innate glamour. Far from it: Her Callan is that woman you see on the subway, pawing through a dirty tote bag, her auburn perm three inches grown out.And yet, as a foul-mouthed, don’t-mess-with-me urban lady with sincere if hopeless dreams in her head, Lavin has never seemed more vital, sly and fearless. When she admits that she wants to play Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” — to which #1 incredulously responds, “Did this Dorothy see the trials of war and age 60 years?” — you somehow feel the deep sense of the ludicrous self-casting.Such underground connections are at the heart of “You Will Get Sick”; Diaz is working a surrealist vein that doesn’t mean to make an argument so much as to plant the seeds of one you can have with yourself later. That all the actors except Isaac play multiple roles — Nate Miller plays seven, marvelously — suggests layers of correspondence among them. Most of Miller’s are fearful, for instance, and Anderson’s are all hilariously tin-eared. When #1’s body starts turning into hay, you may begin to see that they are familiar archetypes as well.Anderson, above center, leads Isaac, Lavin and Nate Miller in animal exercises during an acting class.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe hay — not to mention the marauding birds, “The Wizard of Oz” and the narrative legerdemain — could easily have made “You Will Get Sick” too self-consciously poetic, its spray of images dissipating too quickly. But Diaz, who is 29, has had time to refine and tighten the script since he wrote it in drama school in 2018. In any case, it flies by, feeling even shorter yet fuller than its 85 minutes, especially as the imagery coalesces in a neat pull of strings at the end.That a play in which sadness is always biting at your fingers comes off this light and funny in performance requires a great deal of discipline. Some of that clearly comes from Pinkleton, whose direction trusts the material deeply enough to ask the audience to come toward it instead of the other way around. No surprise that he is also a choreographer, nominated for a Tony Award for his work on “Natasha, Pierre & the Great Comet of 1812”; he’s alert to the play’s internal rhythms.The Roundabout Theater Company production is also alert technically, with a trick box of a set by the design collective dots, lighting by Cha See, costumes by Michael Krass and Alicia Austin, and — especially — a powerful sound design, both apocalyptic and psychological, by Lee Kinney. He helps you believe in the existence of the soul, and also the forces that threaten it.If this all makes “You Will Get Sick” sound avant-garde and difficult, that’s part of the problem Diaz is addressing. Disease, dying and death are the opposite of avant-garde; they’re old news. And they’re difficult only in the way old news is: They happen to other people, always in the past. When it comes to our own demise, we don’t want to talk about it. Perhaps that’s why, in “You Will Get Sick,” we gladly pay Diaz to do it for us.You Will Get SickThrough Dec. 11 at the Laura Pels Theater; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 25 minutes. More
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Review: In ‘Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,’ Missed Connections
A father and a son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness in Jeff Augustin’s play, performed with music by the Bengsons.Migration doesn’t necessarily have a set endpoint. Looking for belonging in an unfamiliar place, and lingering over memories of what’s been left behind, can result in a perpetually itinerant state of mind. For the Haitian schoolteacher who legally gains passage to the United States in “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea,” that means giving up a fulfilling vocation to handle strangers’ baggage at the Miami airport while hoping to find love and start a family.It’s evident that Jean (played with an almost childlike wonder by Billy Eugene Jones) gets his wish, because he’s joined onstage by his son, Jonah (Chris Myers), who has moved across the country to study linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles — another act of flight toward the unknown. Set apart in time and place, father and son each carry a microphone and address the audience in alternating confessional monologues. In Jonah’s present, Jean is already dead, his ashes waiting to be retrieved and spread. Jonah intends to retrace in reverse a road trip his parents took from Florida to California when his mother was pregnant, to experience America as they did and perhaps understand something about his roots.Myers, foreground, with the Bengsons, far left, and Jones, far right.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn a bit of cross-pollination, that heritage includes folk music from the American South, or what Jean calls “mountain music,” which offered him echoes of Haiti and became a conduit for both the melancholy and joy of his adventures in displacement. This part-concert-style staging of Jeff Augustin’s play, a Manhattan Theater Club production that opened on Wednesday at New York City Center, is performed with music by Abigail and Shaun Bengson, a husband-and-wife duo known as the Bengsons whose musical setup on the blond-wood, semicircular set (by Arnulfo Maldonado) includes acoustic banjo and guitar. Their mournful, evocative songs — about longing, loss and unresolved feelings — are interspersed throughout the men’s recollections, punching up the emotional tenor.Father and son recall parallel journeys that reflect shared experiences of otherness and their psychic separation. Jean remarks on moments of alienation he experienced as a Black immigrant, and Jonah points to those he encounters as a Black gay man. Both relay their histories by way of past lovers, an illustration of mutual appetites. But the depth of their characterizations are unevenly balanced, and the play is considerably more insightful about the psychology of its immigrant father than of his queer son. While Jean’s talk of lost loves tends to reveal more about who he is and what he wants, Jonah’s descriptions of conquests linger on surface details — a ginger daddy’s Haitian-blue eyes, a Nigerian’s lean muscular arms — that tend to deflect attention away from their observer. In performance, too, Jones lends Jean a warm and wistful soul-searching quality, while Myers’s more mannered take keeps Jonah at a distance.Under the direction of Joshua Kahan Brody, “Where the Mountain Meets the Sea” feels like a kind of formal experiment, combining spoken text, live music and, occasionally, freestyle movement to capture the nomadic experience of building a life without a homeland. The 80-minute show is most poignant when these elements work in concert rather than run alongside each other, as when Myers and Shaun Bengson (stepping in as a guy Jonah meets on the road) engage in a loose-limbed dance-off, or when Jones’s Jean sings a forlorn refrain. But at other times, the connective thread between the show’s different modes of performance feel tenuous and less than fully realized.That formal fragmentation, and the fact that Jean and Jonah don’t directly interact, highlights the ache and frustration of their estrangement. But at least some of that frustration may be passed along to the audience, particularly since Jonah’s interior life remains elusive even as he assumes a kind of dishy posture. The plainest glimpse we get into what he wants comes from sentiments that his father regrets leaving unspoken — that his son is smart, beautiful and enough — the kind of obvious wish fulfillment it would be tough to begrudge anyone, even a relative stranger.Where the Mountain Meets the SeaThrough Nov. 27 at New York City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes. More
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Douglas McGrath, Playwright, Filmmaker and Actor, Is Dead at 64
His one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” directed by John Lithgow, had opened just weeks ago.Douglas McGrath, a playwright, screenwriter, director and actor who was nominated for an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony Award, and whose one-man Off Broadway show, “Everything’s Fine,” opened just weeks ago, died on Thursday at his office in Manhattan. He was 64.His death was announced by the show’s producers, Daryl Roth, Tom Werner and John Lithgow. Their representative said the cause was a heart attack.Mr. Lithgow also directed the show, a childhood recollection of Mr. McGrath’s about a middle-school teacher in Texas who gave him an inappropriate amount of attention.“He was a dream to direct,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “None of us had ever worked with someone who was so happy, proud and grateful to be performing his own writing.”Mr. McGrath in his one-man play “Everything’s Fine,” which opened Off Broadway last month to good reviews.Jeremy DanielMr. McGrath had a wide-ranging if under-the-radar career in television, film and theater. In the 1980-81 season, just out of Princeton and still in his early 20s, he was a writer for “Saturday Night Live.” Over the next decade he wrote humor pieces for The New Republic, The New York Times and other publications.By the 1990s he was making inroads in Hollywood. He wrote the screenplay for the 1993 remake of the 1950 romantic comedy “Born Yesterday,” and the next year he and Woody Allen collaborated on the script for Mr. Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway.” The two shared an Oscar nomination for best original screenplay.In 1996 he adapted the Jane Austen novel “Emma” for the big screen and also directed the film, which starred Gwyneth Paltrow. In 2000 he and Peter Askin shared directing and screenwriting duties on the comedy “Company Man,” in which he also starred, as a schoolteacher who stumbles into a career as a C.I.A. officer.That movie drew some unflattering reviews. But his next, “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), an adaptation of the Dickens story that he both wrote and directed, was well received. In The Times, A.O. Scott said that Mr. McGrath’s adaptation was rendered “with a scholar’s ear and a showman’s flair.”“The director has produced a colorful, affecting collage of Dickensian moods and motifs,” Mr. Scott wrote, “a movie that elicits an overwhelming desire to plunge into 900 pages of 19th-century prose.”Mr. McGrath, center, on the set of his film “Nicholas Nickleby” (2002), with the cast members Barry Humphries, left, and Alan Cumming.United Artists, via AlamyIn addition to his screenwriting and directing credits (which also included “Infamous,” a 2006 film starring Toby Jones as Truman Capote), Mr. McGrath occasionally took small acting roles in other people’s projects, including several of Mr. Allen’s films. In 2016 he directed “Becoming Mike Nichols,” an HBO documentary about the film director, on which he was also an executive producer. He shared an Emmy nomination with the other producers for outstanding documentary or nonfiction special.Throughout, he continued to work in the theater. In 1996 he wrote and starred in “Political Animal,” a one-man comedy that played at the McGinn/Cazale Theater in Manhattan, in which he played a right-wing presidential candidate.“Beyond the stand-up parody,” Ben Brantley wrote in his review in The Times, “the larger point of ‘Political Animal’ is that it takes a hollow, desperate man to run for president these days.”In 2012 his play “Checkers” — the title refers to a famous 1952 speech by Richard M. Nixon — was seen at the Vineyard Theater in Manhattan, with Anthony LaPaglia as Nixon and Kathryn Erbe as his wife, Pat.Then came Broadway: Mr. McGrath wrote the book for “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical,” which opened in January 2014 and ran for more than five years. His book was nominated for a Tony Award.Last month Mr. Lithgow told The Daily News of New York that Mr. McGrath had sent him “Everything’s Fine” unsolicited, and that he had no intention of directing a play until he read the piece.“It was so play-able,” he said, “I could simply imagine an audience being completely captivated by it.”The show opened in mid-October to good reviews.“It is impossible to overstate Doug’s pure likability,” Mr. Lithgow said on Friday. “In his solo show, he told a long story about his 14th year, and it worked so well because he had retained so much of his sense of boyish discovery.”Ms. Roth, another of the show’s producers, said that Mr. McGrath had been thoroughly enjoying the way audiences were reacting as he unspooled the tale.“The wonderful response from the audience was cathartic, meaningful and joyful to him,” she said by email. “He often told me he was in his ‘happy place’ onstage telling his story.”Mr. McGrath on the set of “Infamous,” his 2006 film about Truman Capote.Van Redin/Warner Independent, via Kobal, via ShutterstockDouglas Geoffrey McGrath was born on Feb. 2, 1958, in Midland, Texas. His father, Raynsford, was an independent oil producer, and his mother, Beatrice (Burchenal) McGrath, worked at Harper’s Bazaar before her marriage.“People often ask me what growing up in West Texas was like,” Mr. McGrath said in “Everything’s Fine.” “I think this sums it up: It’s very hot, it’s very dusty, and it’s very, very windy. It’s like growing up inside a blow dryer full of dirt.”He graduated from Princeton in 1980.“Planning my future,” he wrote in a 2001 essay in The Times, “I had a very clear idea of what I wanted to do, but a very blurry one of how to do it. I knew I wanted to write and perform in my own films in the manner of my idol, Woody Allen. But when I went, that once, to the Career Counseling Center and faced the bulletin board, none of the cards said, ‘Needed: writer-actor-director for major feature, no experience required, must be willing to earn high salary.’”Yet when a friend told him “S.N.L.” was hiring writers, he sent in some sketches and landed an $850-a-week job.“It seemed too good to be true,” he wrote. “It was. My year, 1980, was viewed then and still as the worst year in the show’s history, which is no small achievement when you think of some of the other years.”In a 2016 interview, Mr. McGrath said his disappointment with the way his screenplay for “Born Yesterday” was handled changed the direction of his career.“I remember thinking, well, if I don’t want to spend the rest of my life doing this, meaning watching someone else muck up what I did, there’s only one way around that,” he said. “I have to become a director.”Mr. McGrath, who lived in Manhattan, married Jane Read Martin in 1995. She survives him, as do a son, Henry; a sister, Mary McGrath Abrams; and a brother, Alexander. More
