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    Trevor Noah Feels for Trump as He Sits on the Sidelines

    Ron DeSantis is stealing the ex-president’s thunder, Noah says — “he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now.” 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.Twice the TrumpFormer President Donald J. Trump is reported to have expressed anger over the attention Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida is getting for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard — because Trump claims it was his idea.Trevor Noah said the Republican Party had “two Donald Trumps now.”“Oh man, poor Donald Trump. He is just sitting at home like, ‘You stole my idea! And by the way, stealing stuff is also my idea. Read the news!’” — TREVOR NOAH“Can you imagine being such a despicable creep, you’re mad at someone for being a despicable creep sooner than you? That’s like taking credit for being the first guy to put pineapple on pizza.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But you know what’s really telling here is that, in a way, Trump has a point, all right? He is the guy who came up with the idea of turning all politics into a series of stunts. That is what he did — the Muslim ban, ‘build the wall.’ That [expletive] didn’t solve anything but got the people going, and now pulling stunts has become the driving force of the Republican Party, but Trump is stuck watching out on the sidelines.” — TREVOR NOAH“And I feel bad for you, Mr. Trump. But the fact is, Ron DeSantis, you see what he’s doing — he’s slowly becoming the Republican Party now, stealing your tricks, making it his own.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Just a Phase Edition)“Speaking of America, land that I love, President of America Joe Biden made big news on the ‘60 Minutes’ this weekend when he maybe kind of prematurely declared that the pandemic is over, which marks the first time that Joe Biden has ever moved too fast.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“President Biden claimed in a new interview that the coronavirus pandemic is over. Easy for him to say — he just had it. Of course it’s over when you’ve got the antibodies: ‘I’m off to Burning Man, then London for the Queen’s funeral. No masks, baby!’” — SETH MEYERS“Lawmakers and public health officials are concerned his comment could undermine the rollout of new booster shots, as well as funding from Congress. The White House says their Covid-19 policy is unchanged, despite Biden’s comments. It’s never a good sign when even the White House is trying to distance itself from the president, is it?” — JAMES CORDEN“Biden’s announcement took the White House by surprise, and they’re now trying to backpedal, saying ‘Sure, the president could have been more nuanced — he was simply saying we’ve hit a different phase.’ OK, saying something is over, kind of a misleading way to declare a new phase.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Night” writers Amber Ruffin and Jenny Hagel took on Black hobbits and lesbian rom-coms for Tuesday night’s “Jokes Seth Can’t Tell.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightOlivia Wilde, the director of “Don’t Worry Darling,” will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutXavier Collin/Image Press Agency and Sipa USA, via AlamyColin Hanks is inspired by tacos, shaving his head and “What We Do in the Shadows.” More

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    Royal Shakespeare Company Names Two Directors for Top Job

    In an unusual move for a major British theater, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey will jointly helm the major British theater troupe.Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey will start work as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new artistic directors in June.Seamus RyanLONDON — Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey were named early Wednesday morning here as joint artistic directors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the major theater ensemble based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace.The pair is replacing Gregory Doran, who stepped down from the company in April after leading it for almost a decade. He will remain with the company as artistic director emeritus until the end of 2023.Shriti Vadera, the chairwoman of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s board, said in a news release that a selection panel — including the theater director Nicholas Hytner and Mark Thompson, deputy chairman of the company’s board and a former chief executive of The New York Times — chose Evans and Harvey from “an exceptionally strong field of candidates.” Vadera added that Evans and Harvey “bring a brilliant track record of artistic achievement with a strong commitment to education, communities and championing diverse talent and voices.”The decision to split the top job between two individuals is unusual for a British theater so steeped in tradition. It has happened only once before at the company, when Trevor Nunn and Terry Hands shared the role from 1978 to 1986. It is a more common practice in Germany where it is seen as allowing each office holder to focus on contrasting areas of expertise.Evans, 49, the artistic director of the Chichester Festival Theater in southern England, is the better known of the two, having had a high-profile career here as both an actor and director.In a 2011 interview with The Guardian, Evans said visits to the Royal Shakespeare Company as a teenager had sparked his interest in theater. He began his acting career there, too, and later went on to appear in numerous classical and experimental plays in London, including the debut of Sarah Kane’s “4:48 Psychosis” at the Royal Court. He also became known as a star of Stephen Sondheim musicals. In 2008, he was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance in the lead role of Sam Buntrock’s Broadway revival of Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George.”At Chichester, he has been praised for directing new plays, including “Quiz” by the playwright James Graham as well as hit musicals such as a revamped “South Pacific.”Harvey, 44, is the artistic director of Theatr Clwyd, in Mold, a town in Wales. She also has a long history with Shakespeare — in 2004, she directed an all-female “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Globe in London — but her recent work has been varied, including last year’s online production of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” updated for the Instagram generation.On Friday, Harvey is premiering “The Famous Five” at Theater Clwyd, a new musical based on a series of children’s books by the English author Enid Blyton that features a puppet dog. It is scheduled to transfer to Evans’s Chichester Festival Theater, in October. The pair have worked together before, on a 2015 production of “Pride and Prejudice” and a 2017 production of “Uncle Vanya.”A spokeswoman for the Royal Shakespeare Company said no one was available for an interview about how the pairing will work. In a news release, Harvey said that she and Evans both believed the company could be “a home for radical, relevant theater made by artists from across the U.K. and the wider world.”Evans and Harvey will take up the post in June 2023. Erica Whyman will continue as the company’s acting artistic director until then, and is scheduled to announce details of the company’s 2023 season next week. More

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    Jack Charles, Grandfather of Aboriginal Theater, Dies at 79

    One of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, he had a resonant voice, a charismatic personality and a troubled personal life that often landed him in jail.MELBOURNE, Australia — Jack Charles, one of Australia’s leading Indigenous actors, who has been called the “grandfather of Aboriginal theater” but whose heroin addiction and penchant for burglary landed him in and out of jail throughout his life, died on Sept. 13 in Melbourne. He was 79.He died in a hospital after having a stroke, according to his publicist, Patrice Capogreco.Mr. Charles had a voice that made people stop and listen.Gravelly and majestic, with rounded vowels honed by elocution lessons in a rough-and-tumble boys’ home, it assured him an audience even over the scrum of the Australian prisons where he spent much of his life.“It’s very unusual for a crim or a screw to listen to a prisoner talk for very long,” he wrote in a memoir, using slang for fellow inmates and prison officers. “But for whatever reason, they’d let me run with whatever I was talking about and actually listen.”That voice catapulted Mr. Charles onto the stage, where he captivated Melbourne theatergoers, and helped make him one of Australia’s leading Aboriginal screen actors.He ascribed his talents to his Indigenous heritage. “We’re great orators,” he wrote in his memoir. “That is merely one element of our culture that white people never saw in our development.”Mr. Charles co-founded Australia’s first Indigenous theater company, Nindethana Theater, with the actor Bob Maza in 1971. He was known in Australia as Uncle Jack, an Aboriginal honorific denoting his status as an elder.His life was chronicled in an unsparing 2008 documentary, “Bastardy”; his memoir, “Born-again Blakfella”; and the 2010 one-man play “Jack Charles vs. the Crown,” which he co-wrote and performed around the world, despite multiple convictions that would ordinarily have limited his ability to travel.“Mr. Trump gave me a waiver to go to New York and perform ‘Jack Charles vs. the Crown,’” he said of the former president in an interview last year with the Australian news outlet The Saturday Paper. “That’s the ultimate for an old thief like me. I’m still thieving, stealing things. I’m stealing hearts and minds nowadays.”His road to stardom was a rocky one. Mr. Charles wrestled with heroin addiction, homelessness and an almost lifelong flirtation with burglary, for which he was incarcerated numerous times. He spent his 20th, 30th, 40th and 50th birthdays behind bars.It was also a journey of self-discovery: of who he really was, where he had come from, his homosexuality and what it meant to be an Aboriginal Australian and a member of the so-called Stolen Generation, Aboriginal people who for decades as children were removed from their families by the government and forcibly assimilated into white society.Raised in an almost entirely white home for boys, Mr. Charles had no knowledge of Aboriginal culture and did not even know he was Indigenous until other children bullied him for it.He would later use that self-knowledge to educate others about Australia’s history and race relations, whether from the back of a taxi cab or on the set of the 2015 Warner Bros. movie “Pan,” where he draped the Aboriginal flag over the back of his trailer. (He played a tribal chief in the film, alongside his fellow Australian Hugh Jackman.)“It became a talking point to discuss the social and political hopes for Aboriginal Australians,” Mr. Charles wrote, “as well as teaching people about the Dreaming,” an Aboriginal concept for the beginning of time.In his final years, after he had kicked his heroin addiction, he was a familiar and striking figure plying the streets of Melbourne atop a mobility scooter, an Aboriginal flag fluttering on the back.“He was someone that embraced everything, even the bad things,” said Wesley Enoch, an Australian theater director who had worked with Mr. Charles. “He embraced them so that he could understand them and incorporate them in who he was.”He added that to be embraced by Mr. Charles himself, who stood less than five feet tall and whose luxuriant white Afro and beard were perfumed with patchouli oil, was a memorable experience.Mr. Charles starred in the Australian superhero TV series “Cleverman.”Lisa Tomasetti/SundanceTVJack Charles was born in Melbourne on Sept. 5, 1943. He was one of 13 children born to Blanchie Muriel Charles, two of whom died at birth. The 11 survivors were seized from their mother in infancy. Mr. Charles was the only one of his siblings to meet her again.He was placed in his first children’s home at four months old. At his second, the Box Hill Boys’ Home in suburban Melbourne, he endured physical and sexual abuse, he said. The few Indigenous children there were forbidden to speak to one another.“I was whitewashed, if you will, by the system,” Mr. Charles told a state commission.At 14, he moved into a foster home and began a glass-beveling apprenticeship. But after a disagreement with his foster mother over a night out — when he met with other Indigenous Australians and learned his birth mother’s identity — he was removed from the home at 17 and taken into police custody.So began a troubled relationship with the law. Mr. Charles spent 22 years in prison, often on burglary charges. He favored homes in the wealthy Melbourne suburb of Kew, where his forebears had originated.Raised as a Christian, he had been taught that stealing was wrong, he told The Saturday Paper. But committing “burgs,” as he called them, on his ancestral homeland “felt great,” he said. “Very, very satisfying.”Incarceration was, for him, as productive as it was frequent: On behalf of fellow inmates, he wrote love letters to their wives in exchange for chocolate and tobacco. He read extensively, completed his high school education and learned and taught pottery.“You only lose your freedom in the nick,” he said in the documentary “Bastardy,” using a slang term for a jail. “You can’t go anywhere, but your mind can go wandering all over the place when you’re incarcerated. I might be locked up, but I’m free, still. Free inside.”Mr. Charles found his way onto the stage almost by accident. In 1964, representatives of Melbourne’s New Theater came to the Aboriginal youth hostel where he was living to cast an all-Indigenous production of Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” He was given a role as an understudy.It was a revelation. In the theater, Mr. Charles had found his people. “They threw great parties, and they didn’t seem to care about my sexuality or my Aboriginality,” he wrote in his memoir.For the next seven years he beveled glass in a factory by day and acted with the New Theater by night.But he slid deeper into addiction and ended up on the street. Stints in prison, he wrote, were a relief, as they offered stable housing and regular meals.From 1971 to 1974, he ran the Aboriginal theater group Nindenthana, whose first hit show, “Jack Charles Is Up and Fighting,” explored whether Indigenous Australians should assimilate or stand apart from the country’s white majority.He starred in plays across Australia, including “Cradle of Hercules,” “No Sugar” and, in 2020, “Black Ties,” at Melbourne’s largest theater, the Arts Center. He appeared in several Australian television series, including “Cleverman,” “Women of the Sun” and “Preppers,” and movies, including “The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith,” “Blackfellas” and “Wolf Creek.”He was eventually reunited with four of his siblings: his brother Archie, and his sisters Esme, Eva-Jo and Christine. He did not learn the identity of his father, Hilton Hamilton Walsh, until last year, when he appeared on the reality genealogy television show “Who Do You Think You Are.”He is survived by Christine Zenip Charles, the only one of his 11 siblings he knew to be still alive.In his last years, Mr. Charles was able to look back at his life with magnanimity, moving from a place of deep anger to one of conciliation.“It’s important to keep in mind my story is also about healing,” he wrote in his memoir. “That’s how I’ve been able to keep going.” More

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    ‘Andor’ Review: Star Wars Without the ‘Star Wars’

    The franchise’s latest series on Disney+ sticks to the story but flushes a lot of the usual trappings out the airlock.As the big science-fiction and superhero franchises have proliferated, their mantra has been that television is a place for diversification and creative freedom — to do something different, within reason. Hence Marvel’s strenuously meta “WandaVision” or Paramount’s goofy, animated “Star Trek: Lower Decks.”“Andor,” the newest series in the “Star Wars” universe (premiering Wednesday on Disney+), doesn’t take one of those hard detours. But it’s different in its own way. In the four (of 12) episodes available for review, it continually feels as if the people who made it like a lot of things — “Blade Runner,” “Avatar,” “Casablanca,” Vietnam War metaphors — better than they like “Star Wars.”Not that there’s anything wrong with that. The defining feature of “Andor” is how it takes a “Star Wars” story and, without getting conceptual, transposes it in visual and tonal terms. Heavily latexed aliens, plastic-suited storm troopers and vast, exotic landscapes are, for the most part, out; humans (or humanoids) wearing nondescript uniforms in a battered, urban-industrial backdrop are in. Costume-heavy Saturday-serial space opera is replaced by straight-ahead sci-fi action with a real-world anti-corporate theme.And the good news about “Andor” is that the new look and feel are rendered meticulously and evocatively; a lot of effort, led by the creator and showrunner Tony Gilroy, has been spent on giving the show a gritty and realistic texture. Moment to moment, it’s easy to just relax and enjoy the change. The opening scene, a “Blade Runner” homage that leads into a dark, seamy version of the typical “Star Wars” cantina, is a witty example of the show’s method.But making “Andor” less like “Star Wars” means, in this case, making it more like a lot of other science-fiction dramas. And while its surface attractions are significant, you may find yourself looking for things that other sci-fi stories supply, like compelling characters and a narrative pulse.Following the general pattern of serialized franchise extensions, “Andor” goes back in time, fleshing out and coloring in a small, retrospective piece of the overall story. (Advancing the narrative is still the province of films.) In this case it’s an even smaller piece than usual. Cassian Andor, played by Diego Luna, was a character created for a movie, “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” that was a stand-alone time capsule in its own right. Giving him a back story in “Andor” is embroidering on an embroidery.Gilroy was brought in to do rewrites on “Rogue One,” and perhaps he had a sense of unfinished business, because the real challenge of putting Cassian at the center of a series is that he’s a cipher in that movie — a rebel operative with a ruthless streak and a shady past who’s just there as a foil for the film’s young heroine. When he joins her in a haze of self-sacrificial glory, his epiphany feels completely unearned.There’s no reason that such a character couldn’t be turned into something more interesting for the series, but through the early going, “Andor” doesn’t pull it off. Cassian’s antisocial tendencies, and his resourcefulness, are given a foundation in a childhood on a planet whose Indigenous people are exploited by an Empire-sanctioned mining company. (These forest-planet flashbacks are an unusually clear expression of the hoary colonialist clichés “Star Wars” falls back on when depicting the Empire’s reach.)Like many “Star Wars” projects, “Andor” includes a scene-stealing droid, named B2EMO.Lucasfilm/Disney+But that new information doesn’t make him any more interesting; neither does the attempt to make his adult character, a thief and black marketeer, into a Humphrey Bogart-style cynical romantic, declining to choose sides until his hand is forced. That’s the primary narrative thrust of the early season, as a covert rebel leader played by Stellan Skarsgard tracks down Cassian and enlists him in a dangerous mission against the corporation that ravaged his home planet.The scene in which Skarsgard’s character recruits Cassian while they’re pursued by corporate goons takes up much of the fourth episode, and it’s an exciting, well-executed action set piece. But the recruitment pitch is notably uninspiring, and that’s typical of “Andor,” in which action and design are more than satisfactory while the thinness of the characterizations leaves you unfulfilled. (The same could be said of old-school “Star Wars” films under George Lucas’s helm, of course, but they could make up some of the balance in emotion and sheer, propulsive entertainment value.)Luna, who shot to stardom in America with “Y Tu Mamá También,” in 2001, is a fine actor, but he’s still unable to bring much besides an air of juvenile grievance to Cassian, who’s just awfully hard to care about. Thin writing is an issue up and down the cast list; people seem less important than the depictions of political intrigue and corporate malfeasance, which are handled well but aren’t that different from any number of other dystopian dramas. Fiona Shaw stands out in a supporting role as Cassian’s rough-and-tumble mentor, and Adria Arjona is fun to watch as his sparring partner and probable love interest.It’s typical of “Star Wars” projects that the best performances tend to be given by robots. That was the case in “Rogue One,” where the hulking war droid voiced by Alan Tudyk was the best reason to watch. “Andor” has a small, decrepit, R2-D2-like figure named B2EMO, voiced by Dave Chapman and sort of a cross between a toolbox and a shop vac. He doesn’t have a lot to do in the early episodes, but he has signs of personality. Keep an eye on him when the fighting really breaks out. More

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    Review: ‘Marie It’s Time’ Pieces Together a Woman in Fragments

    This three-actor play initiates a dialogue with Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” examining men’s violence against women.Girlish, perilous, sexy and bleak, Minor Theater’s “Marie It’s Time,” at HERE, resurrects a marginal character from an influential work of modern drama. Then it kills her again. In this three-actor play, the playwright Julia Jarcho and the director Ásta Bennie Hostetter initiate a dialogue with Georg Büchner’s “Woyzeck,” an expressionist take on true crime left unfinished at the time of Büchner’s early death.“Woyzeck,” inspired by an early 19th-century scandal, centers on a sometime soldier who murders Marie, his common-law wife and the mother of his child, after she sleeps with a drum major. Woyzeck’s Marie isn’t granted much interiority in Büchner’s text, which makes “Marie It’s Time” a kind of reclamation, homage and clapback, even if Marie doesn’t survive for long here either.Jarcho splits Marie’s identity between two actors. Jarcho is one of them. Jennifer Seastone, a Minor Theater regular, is the other. Seastone plays a character named Marie — a breathy, lipsticked femme who knows the fatality is coming. Jarcho is Mag, a harassed mom in jeans and a sloppy sweater, introduced while cradling a screaming baby. (Each also takes turns playing Frank, the baby’s volatile father.) The women’s eyes are caught by Major (Kedian Keohan), a traveling musician in skinny jeans with a louche repertory of songs that describe and promise violence. Violence may be what Marie and Mag want. Certainly, it is what they expect. (Jarcho is also an academic, and her new book project explores theater and masochism. These ideas clearly absorb her.)As a playwright, Jarcho (“Pathetic,” “Grimly Handsome”) specializes in the weirdness and danger throbbing just below the surface of ordinary life, like a forehead vein that won’t stop pulsing. This creates an odd tangle of heightened emotions and ultranormal textures. Here, the style is broadly presentational, with some dialogue spoken into stand microphones and other lines rendered without amplification. It’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s a mind game. Or maybe it’s all mind games?Mag and Marie’s home, represented by an alphabet rug and a pile of laundry baskets, doubles, without adjustments, as a nightspot, a barbershop, a field. (The set is by Meredith Ries.) Hostetter doesn’t make the most of the confined downstairs space at Here. Despite the collection of doors and apertures in the set, the actors’ bodies inhabit it in limited ways. Still Ebony Burton’s lighting, which suggests a club in the weary, early morning moments before the work lights come on, and Ben Williams and Elliot Yokum’s ominous sound design provide greater ambience.Running just over an hour, “Marie It’s Time” is an intentionally narrow work and a recursive one, an echo chamber in which love and harm reverberate. It explores men’s violence against women, but as there aren’t any cisgender men onstage (Keohan is a trans actor), it does so in a way that feels both dangerous and appropriately safe, provocative without being exploitative. It returns agency to Marie, particularly when Seastone, an actress of great and strange charisma, steps up to the microphone. Then again, agency only goes so far. Marie still dies. She always dies.Jarcho and Hostetter create a world in which violence against women exerts a constant pressure — a grim attitude, but not one that invites a lot of argument. In a bitter coincidence, one of Major’s songs, “Keys in My Hand,” somehow reframed a joke I made to a friend a couple of weeks ago: that I never feel more feminine than when I’m walking home at night, keys laced through my fingers. Which is to say that “Marie It’s Time” — small and finely wrought — is a jewel box of a play. And that you may not want to reach your hand inside.Marie It’s TimeThrough Oct. 1 at HERE, Manhattan; here.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Colin Hanks Finds Perfection in ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ and Tacos at Every Meal

    The actor, who moves out of his comfort zone in Peacock’s “A Friend of the Family,” talks about his love affair with soccer and the pleasure of a shaved head.When Colin Hanks learned that he was being considered for “A Friend of the Family,” he thought, “Awesome — it sounds fabulous.”Then the scripts arrived.“I went, ‘Oh, this is just the saddest show I’ve ever read, so I don’t know what to think if you’ve been thinking of me,’” he recalled. “It was one of those stories that was incredibly intimidating and my first instinct was just, ‘No, I can’t.’”But he couldn’t get the true-crime show out of his head. Debuting Oct. 6 on Peacock, Nick Antosca’s limited series is based on the real story of the Brobergs (who were also the subjects of the 2017 Netflix documentary “Abducted in Plain Sight”).Hanks plays Bob Broberg, a stalwart Mormon in bucolic Idaho whose family implodes when Robert Berchtold (Jake Lacy) — or Brother B, to his adoring neighbors — moves to town and perverts everything they thought they believed in. He also kidnaps the Brobergs’ eldest daughter, Jan. Twice.Before he took on the role, Hanks made it clear that he wasn’t interested in re-enacting a laundry list of all the bad decisions the Brobergs made while being emotionally and sexually manipulated by Berchtold, even as they questioned his growing fixation on their daughter. Rather, Hanks wanted to examine why they made these choices.The Vampire Antics of ‘What We Do in the Shadows’The FX series based on the 2015 film by the same name follows a crew of vampires and their struggles to settle down in Staten Island.The Movie: “At heart a dotty look at oldsters struggling to adapt to an unwelcoming modernity, ‘Shadows’ has the bones of an anarchic sitcom,” The Times wrote upon the film’s release.The Creators: Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi wrote, directed and acted in the mockumentary. Here is why they decided to return to the vampire world with a show.Series Review: “If ‘Shadows’ doesn’t seem entirely necessary, it’s perfectly fun,” our critic wrote when the TV show debuted in 2019.Harvey Guillén: The actor plays Guillermo, a human in a house full of vampires. Though it was supposed to be a minor role, he quickly became a fan favorite.“And that was exactly what Nick was wanting to explore,” he said.It has been a hectic year for Hanks, who played an F.B.I. agent in “Impeachment: American Crime Story,” about the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal, and a studio executive in “The Offer,” about the making of “The Godfather.” A San Francisco Giants fan, he has also produced a documentary about Willie Mays, out November on HBO.Calling from London, where he’s shooting an independent film, Hanks ticked off 10 things that have kept him grounded during the hustle, including “What We Do in the Shadows,” his cast-iron skillet and the Atlanta BeltLine.These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “The Baseball 100” by Joe Posnanski I’ve been slowly reading this book because I don’t want it to end. They’re really more of a character study on players from all different points in baseball’s history, as well as players from Japan and players from the Negro leagues.2. My cast-iron skillet I’m not very skilled at cooking, not yet at least. But there’s something about the idea of using this one skillet and seasoning it and being able to cook almost anything in it and that’s all you need. In a strange way, it’s also a little bit like a baseball mitt. You’ve got to break it in. You’ve got to take care of it. You’ve got to clean it properly. It’s not something that you use and then throw in the sink and don’t think twice about.3. “Sunderland ’Til I Die” on Netflix I’ve made a bunch of documentaries. That’s sort of my show business side hustle. I did one about Tower Records. I did another about Eagles of Death Metal going back to Paris, playing after the Bataclan attack. Recently, I got obsessed with this fantastic sports doc called “Sunderland ’Til I Die,” about an English football team that’s been demoted. That’s just heartbreak, the likes of which I’ve not seen in sports in quite some time.4. Shaving my head I had to have a very specific hairstyle to play Bob Broberg. So half of my head has been shaved because I had a very serious wig process that I had to go through. I had to paint my head every morning and then do four layers of makeup and then put a wig on top. I’ve been wearing a hat every day since. I’m currently doing a job in which I had to have another wig made that looks like my normal hairstyle. I’m very much looking forward to about seven days from now, being able to shave my head and start all over again.5. Tacos The perfect food. Period. Exclamation point. They can be lunch, they can be dinner and, if you’re really lucky and you’ve got a good spot, they can also be breakfast as well.6. Discovering “new” music I find something really joyful in discovering music that’s new for you but might not necessarily be new for all. I found this record by this band called Jagwar Ma from 2013, and I’ve been listening to it nonstop walking around London. Wherever I travel, I go to local record stores, and I will label what city I’ve bought the records in. And so all of my records are sort of a memory, if you will, of where I was literally, physically, but also where I was in my life and what I was doing.7. Fall Fall is one of those moments that I really enjoy — you see the leaves change and you feel the temperature drop and everyone gets excited, for a little while at least, to button up their coats. It also means that the Fall Classic is right around the corner.8. The Atlanta BeltLine I live in Los Angeles, but I had to relocate to Atlanta for “A Friend of the Family.” It’s this fantastic walkway that circles the entire city. It is just this incredible conduit to Atlanta. Since I was staying right by it, I could throw some shoes on and go for a walk and see people and have dinner someplace and walk back. It’s not too dissimilar from the High Line in New York. It made me feel like I was part of the life there.9. Soccer They call it the beautiful game for a reason. The simplicity of it — a sport that is played everywhere around the world, and all you really need is a ball. I was actually supposed to see Liverpool play and it was going to be the first time I was going to see them live in person, and the match was postponed because of the Queen’s funeral. So it was very, very sad. Hence, now a Sunday spent at a pub drinking my sorrows away.10. FX’s “What We Do in the Shadows” It’s one of those shows where you might watch the first two episodes and your instinct is to say, “OK, I get it. They’re vampires. It’s a fake documentary. Everyone is speaking in funny accents.” Pardon the pun, but that show crept up on me in such a way that I am crying laughing practically every single episode. The concept of a vampire that sucks your energy by boring you to death, I thought that was so hilarious. Oddly, you wouldn’t necessarily think that a show that broad would be able to grip you and make you fall in love with the characters. But I absolutely have. More

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    Es Devlin’s Next Stage

    The British designer, whose new installation will be unveiled at Tate Modern this week, made her name in theater. These days, you’re as likely to find her work in art galleries, stadium gigs and fashion shows.LONDON — Es Devlin was sitting in her garden communing with nature. Or rather, she was waving her phone, trying to get a bird song identification app to pick up chirrups from the surrounding trees. “Definitely two birds talking to each other, isn’t it?” she said. “I always want to know what they are. I’ve got a bit obsessed.”Obsessed is one way of putting it. For the past few years, Devlin, one of the world’s most in-demand stage designers, has been moonlighting as a conservationist. Most recently, she has been getting to know the birds, bats, moths and fungi that are most at risk in London from threats including the climate crisis and habitat loss.Those creatures will be celebrated in “Come Home Again,” a “choral sculpture” created by Devlin and her studio that will be unveiled on Wednesday. Installed outside Tate Modern until Oct. 1, it will be filled with the sounds of birds, bats and insects and decorated with Devlin’s black-and-white drawings of 243 species on an endangered list prepared by the London authorities. Devlin had been sketching for almost four months, she said, sometimes for 18 hours a day.Her work ethic is relentless. She reckoned that, since beginning as a theater designer in the mid-1990s, she had worked on “about 380” projects — but also that she’d done “a few since I last counted.” And while plenty of visual artists have made cameo appearances as stage designers (Chagall, Dalí, Picasso, Indiana, Hockney), Devlin is rare in having traveled in the opposite direction. These days, you’re as likely to encounter her work in art galleries, stadium gigs, fashion shows or architecture expos as in theaters or opera houses.The animals in “Come Home Again” are all featured on an endangered list prepared by the London authorities.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThe list features birds, bats and insects.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesDevlin said she had been sketching for almost four months, sometimes for 18 hours a day.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesEarly on, she developed a reputation for crafting stage visuals that became the talking point of a show. In 1996, for her first professional job at a regional English theater — Christopher Marlowe’s murderous “Edward II” — she studied plumbing to create a bathhouse-style set whose showers ran with blood. Two years later, at the National Theater, a ghostly set for Harold Pinter’s “Betrayal” impressed the famously cantankerous playwright. According to newspaper reports, he asked during an opening night meet-and-greet, “Have you met Es Devlin? She wrote the play.”One reason Devlin drew so much attention was that she rejected the English theater orthodoxy that designs should be attractive décor that would blend into the background. “I wasn’t ever afraid for the objects I made to be the protagonists,” she said. “Not everyone thought like that.”When one of Kanye West’s assistants called, in 2005, and asked Devlin to help save his ailing “Touch the Sky” arena tour, she was on a plane to New York 24 hours later, with books about James Turrell and Wagner to inspire the rapper, with whom she collaborated on new designs. Her most recent large-scale triumph, a set for the Super Bowl halftime show, last February, involved a larger-than-life-size model of part of Dr. Dre’s hometown, Compton, Calif.“Whatever she’s working in, Es does it with absolute commitment,” said Alex Poots, the artistic director of The Shed, in a phone interview. He first spotted Devlin’s work at a fringe London theater in the early 2000s and convinced her to design a gig for the British art punk band Wire, her first foray into music. “There are so many different sides to what she can do. That was obvious even then.”Devlin’s set for Kanye West and Jay-Z’s 2011 “Watch the Throne” tour. via Es Devlin StudioThe work at Tate Modern is a case in point. Like many of Devlin’s projects, “Come Home Again” has many layers and teems with references: From outside, it resembles the dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral, which it faces across the River Thames. Inside, the audience will be invited to sit down and enjoy performances by London-based choirs. When they aren’t performing, the space will be filled with recorded bird song and animal noises.Devlin explained that visitors would also be able to scan QR codes inside the installation that will bring up information about the endangered species. “If we give something a name, we give it a place in our imagination,” she said. “The piece is all about imagination.”When it was suggested that this sounded complicated, Devlin grinned. “I really like complexity,” she said.Devlin’s set for “The Lehman Trilogy,” which premiered at the National Theater in London, in 2018, before transferring to the West End and Broadway. via Es Devlin StudioThough more and more of her work is taken up by self-initiated projects, rather than commissions, Devlin said she still sees herself as a collaborative artist; well-funded gigs in fashion and music help her maintain a small studio of architects and designers. “I will often have an idea, but I really lean on my studio to help me evolve it,” she said, adding that concurrent projects often fed into each other, even if they’re wildly different.A “rain box” — a glass enclosure onto which images of rain were projected — cropped up in both a London production of Brian Friel’s play “Faith Healer,” in 2016, and a stadium tour by Adele that same year. Boxes, indeed, have become something of a Devlin signature: A spinning cube stood in for a Manhattan gallery and a Beijing police interrogation room in her design for Lucy Kirkwood’s 2013 play “Chimerica,” and the action of Stefano Massini’s “The Lehman Trilogy,” which came to Broadway earlier this year, took place inside an airless, rotating glass tank.The curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, who has collaborated with Devlin several times, said that her determination to work in several fields had opened a path for younger artists. “You see that happening more and more,” he said. “People are working in poetry, but also visual art. They’re making music as well as tech. The thing that’s impressive about Es is that she’s been doing it a long time, and that her work is taken seriously in all these different places.”Devlin had broken ground, Poots agreed. “I’m not sure she’d have been able to have this kind of career 10 years ago,” he said. “It’s like the world is finally ready for her.”Devlin said that she had worked on “about 380 projects” since she started out as a theater designer in the mid-1990s.Suzie Howell for The New York TimesThe fall is turning into something of a Devlin retrospective in London. Last week, revivals of two operas she designed for the Royal Opera House, “Salome” and “Don Giovanni,” returned to the company’s stage. On Wednesday, a new production of Arthur Miller’s “The Crucible” directed by another longtime collaborator, Lyndsey Turner, opens at the National Theater.Alongside the drama and opera work that still occupies much of her time, she is planning an art show in New York with Pace gallery, exhibiting her drawings. Oh, and there is a book for Thames and Hudson in the works — highlights from her vast back catalog. It was meant to come out a few years ago, but she hasn’t had time. “I should really finish it,” she said, grimacing.How does she describe herself these days? Designer? Artist? Something else? She laughed, and said she drew inspiration from Christopher Wren, the polymathic astronomer-turned-architect who designed St. Paul’s Cathedral: “Multi-hyphenate is fine.” More

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    How a 79-year-old Film Director Learned to “Fly” on a Trapeze

    It’s Never Too Late is a series about people who decide to pursue their dreams on their own terms.There are people who dream of directing a play or a movie. The director Tom Moore has done both. But he has always dreamed of “flying.”“It was a childhood fantasy,” said Mr. Moore, 79, a film, TV and theater director whose credits include the original Broadway production of “Grease” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning play “’Night, Mother.”“I liked the circus, but loved the ultimate act, which was the trapeze,” he said. “I would wait for that.”But Mr. Moore never thought he had the athletic ability to swing, stretch out, then fly from a long horizontal bar, often 30 feet in the air. He wasn’t good at baseball, and, at 5 feet 7 inches and 150 pounds, he was too small for football at West Lafayette High School, in Indiana. “I just assumed I was not good at sports,” he said.Mr. Moore mapped out his tricks, moves that elicit surprise and applause, during a recent afternoon practice at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesSo instead of running off to join the Barnum & Bailey Circus, Mr. Moore, who grew up in Meridian, Miss., before moving to Indiana, went to the Yale School of Drama. He did rather well, with “Grease” on Broadway back in 1972, which ran for more than 3,300 performances; the show “Over Here!” with the newcomers John Travolta, Marilu Henner and Treat Williams; and the play “’Night, Mother,” which he also directed for the 1986 film starring Sissy Spacek and Anne Bancroft.His TV credits include episodes of the 1980s drama “Thirtysomething,” “ER,” “Felicity” and “Ally McBeal.” Along the way he was nominated for two Tonys and three Emmys. (More recently, he coedited the book “Grease, Tell Me More, Tell Me More,” for the Broadway show’s 50th anniversary this year.)Around the age of 50, after the demise of a relationship, he was looking for new adventures. (He is single now and cheekily describes his longtime partners as “a series of valued novellas rather than the one great American novel.”) In 1996, while on vacation at the now-defunct resort Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico, he was drawn to a trapeze rig on the beach, and signed up.Mr. Moore wrapped his hands in tape to reduce blistering during trapeze practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore prepared to “fly” during practice. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesTrapeze was a perfect blend of theatricality and athleticism, and he loved it. He made a “catch” — that is, he managed to grasp the bar in midair — on his first try, and even took part in a show at the end of the week.This spoke to his nascent acting ambitions. “I was never a good actor,” he admitted. “Acting is all about revealing and opening oneself up, and I couldn’t do it.” But he was a performer.He “flew” a few more times at another Club Med in Huatulco, Mexico, over the next year, and decided he wanted to incorporate his holiday pastime into real life. By then he was living in the Hollywood Hills, still directing but feeling somewhat restless, and he asked around for names of trapeze teachers. One kept popping up: Richie Gaona, who came from a famous trapeze family, the Flying Gaonas. Mr. Moore wasn’t sure Mr. Gaona would work with an amateur, but Mr. Gaona agreed. And so, he began learning trapeze in earnest on a rig in Mr. Gaona’s backyard in the San Fernando Valley, about a 40-minute drive from Mr. Moore’s home.“I learned everything from Richie,” he said. “He was amazing. And then I was into it big time and would go three to four times a week.”Mr. Moore climbs to start a trapeze trick. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesHe got so immersed in the art of trapeze that he ended up making a documentary about the Gaona family called “The Flight Fantastic.”“I think I did things a bit backward because I was so passionately involved in my work and building a career, I didn’t explore the athletic side of me until late,” said Mr. Moore, who considers himself an intermediate amateur. “Sometimes people say, ‘Oh, you’re a trapeze artist.’ I’m nothing of the kind. It’s a sport for me and fun, but I know the skill and talent required to practice the art of trapeze.” (The following interview has been condensed and edited.)What’s your favorite thing about the sport?You can’t think about anything else on the trapeze. If you think about anything else, you’ll fail. That’s a great escape in itself.Mr. Moore resting on the platform at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co. Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore, left, in midflight with Mr. Weaver.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesWhat’s the hardest thing about the trapeze?Swinging on the bar is the preparation for all tricks that one does on the trapeze. The stronger it is, the higher it is and the more precise it is, the better the trick. It takes a long time to learn to swing. Timing is everything. People think you need strength to do it. Men particularly try to muscle up, but that’s not really it. It’s all about timing and grace. Trapeze at its best is more of a dance in the air.Have you ever gotten hurt?I once had an accident. People think you have a net so you’re fine, but the net can be the most dangerous part. You have to land on your back. If you come in on your legs and feet or knees, you’ll bounce wildly out of the net. You can get severely hurt. The safety lines were holding me back from extra height, so I took them off for a trick, but I was so excited that as I was coming into the net, I was landing on my stomach. I was in the middle of flipping over to my back and I didn’t make it all the way. I bounced extraordinarily high into the air and I came down on the ridge rope, the edges of the net, face first. It sliced through my entire nose all the way to the cartilage underneath.A friend handed me a towel and said, “Put this over your face.” I thought she was trying to stop the bleeding, but everyone was so traumatized by my face. I had done some real damage. An amazing surgeon was able to do the work, a reconstruction of the nose. Mind you, I had done this without telling anyone I was going to do it, or I would never have been allowed. So, I deserved what I got.Mr. Moore in full flight practicing a trick at the Santa Barbara Trapeze Co.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesHow often do you trapeze these days?Maybe once a month. Twenty-five years ago I was willing to sacrifice anything — even time in my career — to get to trapeze, but one matures, even in trapeze. I go when I feel like it rather than on a regular schedule. I’d like to be as good as I was at 60 when I was doing it all the time and when I had a big trapeze birthday party for 250. But I’m not, and that’s OK. But I don’t have any intention of giving it up because I still enjoy doing it.Do the physical demands of trapeze take a toll?Any time I’m away from it and go back, I hurt. As you get older, it’s the joints. They’re in more pain. It’s not as easy as it used to be, but I don’t want to ever stop because I know that once I stop I won’t go back. If you keep doing it, then your body gets used to it.I always practice my hardest trick first, because it requires everything I have to give. I’m telling my body, “This is what you have to do.” It’s like going into the water, whether you edge out inch by inch or plunge right in. It’s better for me to plunge in.Mr. Moore landing after a trick during trapeze practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesMr. Moore’s dog, Finnegan, accompanies him to practice.Nicholas Albrecht for The New York TimesWhat has trapeze given you on an emotional level?My athletic pursuits have given me a great sense of self. Many people my age have long ago retired to observation. They’re no longer a participant. I don’t feel that way at all. Attitude, spirit for life, capacity for curiosity and joy are the most important things one can have.I just keep doing what I can do, and fortunately that seems to be quite a bit.I feel my whole life has been reinvention when needed, which I think is a fantastic way to keep staying young. There’s always something new if one stays open to it. More