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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Simple as Water’ and the American Music Awards

    HBO airs a documentary about families affected by the civil war in Syria. And Cardi B hosts the 2021 American Music Awards on ABC.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. 15-21. Details and times are subject to change.MondayHOLIDAY BAKING CHAMPIONSHIP: GINGERBREAD SHOWDOWN 9 p.m. on Food Network. There may be few culinary situations more intense than baking for blood relatives. Food Network nods at that fact with this holiday baking competition show, which kicks off Monday night by challenging its contestants to make snow globe scenes out of coconut shavings and gingerbread.TuesdaySIMPLE AS WATER (2021) 9 p.m. on HBO. The Oscar-winning documentarian Megan Mylan gives an intricate, intimate look at the effect that the civil war in Syria has had on families in this ambitious documentary. Mylan follows an array of Syrian families whose lives have been changed by the war. They include a woman and four children living in a refugee camp in Greece; a man working as a delivery driver in Pennsylvania while applying for asylum for himself and his younger brother; and a husband and wife in Masyaf, in northwest Syria.“These stories avoid triteness by lingering on the daily, unassuming routines of their characters,” Claire Shaffer wrote in her review for The New York Times. The result, Shaffer said, is a film that’s “anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.”Daniel Radcliffe in “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.”Warner Bros.HARRY POTTER AND THE SORCERER’S STONE (2001) 6:30 p.m. on Syfy. This first movie in the “Harry Potter” franchise hit theaters 20 years ago this month. The movie made celebrities out of its three young stars, Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint and Emma Watson, and defined the look of the so-called wizarding world in which the stories are set, which until that point had existed only in readers’ imaginations.In a recent interview with The Times, Radcliffe reminisced about shooting the film. He looked back on some elements, like the use of practical special effects, fondly (“one of the great things about the films early on,” he said). Memories of, say, broom riding, came with more of a wince. “It was a broomstick with a thin seat in the middle, and you didn’t have stirrups — or, if you did, they were very, very high up,” Radcliffe explained, “so you were basically leaning all your weight onto your junk when you leaned forward.”WednesdayBOOGIE NIGHTS (1997) 11 p.m. on Showtime. The filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson is set to roll out his latest movie, the 1970s coming-of-age story “Licorice Pizza,” next week. That new movie shares its setting with Anderson’s 1997 period drama, “Boogie Nights” — both are set in the San Fernando Valley in Southern California.The story in “Boogie Nights” follows a young man, Eddie (Mark Wahlberg), who gets discovered in the late ’70s by a successful pornographer (Burt Reynolds) and becomes a star. The film, Anderson’s second feature, was how many viewers first discovered Anderson. In her review for The Times, Janet Maslin wrote that Anderson’s “display of talent is as big and exuberant as skywriting.” Everything about “Boogie Nights,” she wrote, “is interestingly unexpected.”ThursdayHIGH ANXIETY (1977) 10 p.m. on TCM. Mel Brooks spoofs Hitchcock as both the director and star of this satirical mystery movie. Brooks plays an anxious psychiatrist who gets accused of murder. The doctor’s quest to clear his name lets Brooks riff on scenes from “Vertico,” “Psycho,” “Spellbound” and “The Birds,” using the same brand of disgruntled humor he employed to great effect in YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN (1974), which TCM is airing at 8 p.m.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Insecure’ Recap, Season 3 Episode 4: The Earth Moves

    This season, Issa has undergone plenty of personal evolution, but some people still bring out her old self-doubt.Season 3 Episode 4: ‘Faulty, Okay?!’Nathan, Nathan, Nathan. There’s a lot we still don’t know about Nathan but we know that Issa likes him, or at least likes to keep him around. This week, the former and possibly future couple move past their emotional mix-up in the bedroom, from this season’s second episode, and head into new territory in more ways than one.The episode starts at the beach, where Nathan is celebrating his barbershop with his friends. When Issa shows up, with Molly and Kelli, she’s desperate to see if Nathan will be as warm with her as he was before she “cried in his mouth,” as she put it. It’s been a week and even though they have texted, the matter was not discussed.As usual, Issa gets awkward when she is insecure. Watching her talk to Nathan is like hearing nails scratch a chalkboard — it’s beyond cringey. She asks about the weather and talks out of turn. Everything comes out of her mouth except how she feels about the other night. Nathan doesn’t reciprocate her attention and seems cold, which makes Issa think he doesn’t like her anymore.We also don’t know why Issa is nervous here — as far as we knew, she was happy being single. She’s at the beach with Nathan because she wants to be, but why exactly does she want to be there? It’s as if she hasn’t thought it all through herself. Nathan also doesn’t know what she wants, and it seems the failed cuddle muddled what he thought she wanted. He says as much to his friends as they drive to the bar Sharky’s, after an earthquake and the threat of a possible tsunami broke up the beach party.Whether at the beach or the bar or at a random Jason Derulo event later, Molly and Kelli play perfect sidekicks. Kelli is hilarious and experiences a series of emotional breakthroughs — she’s stopped drinking until she becomes “enlightened,” she says. That could be a cue for Issa and Molly to do the same, but no: Molly is being hounded by two of Nathan’s friends and she likes it, and Issa is still sorting through her feelings.These include something like jealousy when, while the others are playing spades, Issa is watching what she interprets as romantic flirtation between Nathan and his friend Resha, a short, voluptuous and bombastic woman. Issa surmises that Resha and Nathan have been intimate, and that pressure forces her to be up front with him.“I just wanted to check in, are we cool?” she asks.“Nothing’s changed for me,” Nathan responds, stoically.“So, we’re still friends?” she says humorously, fishing for warmth.“Yep,” Nathan replies before pulling away.In the last couple of episodes, we have seen how Issa has grown in the year since she broke up with Lawrence. She started her own company and mended her relationship with Molly. She’s confident at work — even though her client has been taking shots at her on social media — and has been taking time for herself. Her awkwardness and insecurity around Nathan illustrates the ways in which, for all of her personal progress and evolution, she’s still the same Issa we’ve known for years.She does not know enough about Nathan to be grounded in how she feels about him. He is a butterfly she is trying to capture in a jar, and he is constantly fluttering out of her reach.All we know about him is that on occasion, he disappears in order to deal with his mental health struggles. That is the reason he ghosted Issa last time, in Season 4. In this episode, we learn more about Nathan through his cousin, Thomas. For instance, when Nathan lived with him, he would leave without warning and come back days later, in the middle of the night. Such unpredictable behavior is why Thomas ultimately wanted Nathan to stop staying with him — this revelation shocks Nathan, who had always blamed his cousin’s wife for kicking him out. (At Sharky’s, the wife suggests that Nathan likes to abandon things.) The conversation reveals that in the time before he met Issa, Nathan was frequently “manic,” as he explains later.While her friends are at a Jason Derulo party, Issa finds Nathan trying to process what he’s learned from Thomas. After a day of multiple misfires, they are finally honest with one another and the ground shakes.“I don’t want to just be friends with you,” Issa says.“I don’t want to be friends with you either,” Nathan responds.Nathan and Issa embrace and as they kiss, there is an aftershock.Issa and Nathan might be getting back together now but it feels like there is much that is not being said, by both of them. I also can’t help but worry about Issa reuniting with an ex, who became an ex for a reason.Is Issa being honest with herself? Can she hold Nathan or will he flit away like he has so many times in the past? More

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    ‘Succession’ Season 3, Episode 5: Imaginary Dead Cat Bounce

    The problem with staking everything on one imposing figurehead is that eventually they get old and senile.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Retired Janitors of Idaho’There was a moment in last week’s episode of “Succession” when Kendall was standing on Josh Aaronson’s patio, reminding Josh of their longtime friendship and boasting about his upcoming birthday party — acting like a big shot, in other words. Kendall had come to the meeting to show he could be the commanding, charismatic figure to lead Waystar into the future. And for a few seconds at least, he had his host’s undivided attention.Then Logan walked through the door, and Josh literally pushed Kendall aside to greet the old man. Point made: Logan is still Waystar’s star.This week’s episode is titled “Retired Janitors of Idaho.” It refers to the faction Roman fears will determine the fate of the Roy family if the Waystar shareholders get the chance to vote on the company’s leadership. Nearly all the action takes place in a luxury hotel and conference center, where the powerful people are sequestered in stew-rooms, scarfing down snacks and strategizing. The general feeling among the Roy loyalists is that Logan needs to address the assembly, calming their nerves with his star power.“Just get the body up there,” Karl says.But just as Logan broke down physically in front of Josh last week, this week his body failed him again. He has a urinary track infection; and when his assistant isn’t around to remind him to take his pills, Logan becomes disoriented. He calls Shiv “Marcia.” He asks to go the bathroom seemingly every few minutes. He does not appear to know where he is or why he is there. And he is convinced there is a dead cat under his chair.So no, there will be no Logan Roy wow factor at this shareholders’ meeting. But the Roys have an even bigger problem. Before Logan loses his wits, he gives the order that they should reject the big peacemaking deal their opponents have offered them. But did he really know what he was saying at the time, or was he already slipping? (Roman: “Can we just give him some cranberry juice and then ask him about the deal again?”)This of course is the problem with staking everything on one imposing figurehead. Leaders can flag. They age, they weaken. While the Roys are making multibillion-dollar decisions based on their patriarch’s mumbling about imaginary cats, Sandi Furness (Hope Davis) is in a suite nearby, consulting with her own father, Sandy (Larry Pine). He has chronic medical problems, too, leaving him mostly immobile and inaudible. When Sandi meets with Shiv to try to find what Gerri likes to call “a deal-space,” each of these two highly intelligent, highly capable women claim, “I just do what my dad tells me.”Instead of bringing their own fresh ideas to the family business, Sandi and Shiv are left defending the decisions their clearly diminished dads are making, even when those choices seem driven more by spite and paranoia than by sound business sense. Sandy, for one, seems motivated primarily by a desire to make a deal that robs the Roys of any of the trappings of power. First, he asks to be granted the right to veto any decision to make a Roy family member a future chief executive. Then, when he gets a begrudging “yes” to that, he comes back with a demand that the Roys give up their private jets. (Roman: “First they came for the P.J.s, and I said nothing. …”)As for Logan, even though he is under criminal investigation and in danger of losing control of everything he has built, he still refuses to believe that he is not holding all the trump cards. Any time the Sandy and Stewy side offers a concession — just to avoid the uncertainty of a vote — Logan sees it as a sign they are scared. Before he lapses into incoherence, he suggests either calling their bluff or leaking to the press that they’re wavering, to show the shareholders who is really the boss.One of those shareholders is Logan’s own brother Ewan: another old man stifling a youngster. In Ewan’s case, he is making life difficult for Greg, who has disappointed his grandfather by signing onto the Waystar joint defense agreement, throwing his lot in with the people Ewan calls, “My brother and his gang of crapulous shills.” He informs Greg that he has changed his will, giving all of his money to Greenpeace. (“Even my part?” Greg asks. “That was the first part,” Ewan replies.) Trying to shake his grandson up, he says, earnestly, “Your life is not a bagatelle,” adding: “You need to take yourself seriously, kid.” Greg nods, then later asks someone else, “Do you think it’s possible to sue a person … a grandparent, for example … in a way which is, like … in an affectionate way?”The last old man playing a major role in this story is the president of the United States — “the Raisin” — who has been feeling real pressure ever since ATN pivoted from backing him unconditionally to questioning his mental fitness. The Raisin calls the Roys, asking to speak directly to Logan, who is still indisposed. So they pass him off to Roman, who is the closest thing to “bootleg Logan.” After Roman bumbles through the small talk and is sworn at by the commander in chief, he gets the news that the president is withdrawing his re-election bid.This is not really how the Roys wanted their whole “Is the President secretly senile?” maneuver to work out. Their access to the Oval Office gives them crucial leverage in their business deals — and, they had hoped, in the Justice Department’s Brightstar investigation. They have outsmarted themselves and are losing a major asset. (Roman, with maximum irony, looks on the bright side: “It’s kind of nice to know we can puppet-master the whole American republic project.”)The outcome isn’t much better with the agreement Sandi and Shiv hurriedly hammer out: The Roys will eat the P.J.s, the Sandy and Stewy side will get four seats on the board (including one for Sandi), and Waystar will grab another seat as well (possibly for Shiv). When Logan regains his faculties, he is peeved, certain that any agreement that satisfies Sandy must be a dud. He can’t say what he would have done differently. He just knows it would have been better.But the real loser from all the frantic deal making is — as it so often seems to be — Kendall, who never gets to be in any room where a final decision is made. Early on, he boasts to Stewy that his suite is “the real annual meeting,” insisting he has back channels to everyone who matters. But Shiv ignores him when calls to offer insights and gossip, Roman screams at him when he pops by the main Roy room, and even Stewy busts his chops a little, saying, “Shouldn’t you be standing on a rainbow soapbox somewhere screaming, ‘Time’s up!’?” In danger of being left out of the day’s narrative altogether, Kendall makes a sad, desperate final showboating move, storming the stage in front of the shareholders to speak up for the Brightstar victims.In one last twist of the knife, Logan asks for a quick end-of-the-day meeting with Kendall but then ghosts him, leaving his son sitting completely alone in a tiny room. Kendall tries to call his dad, but Logan blocks his number — permanently.So just as Logan has no access to the Raisin, Kendall now has no access to Logan. And both men are about to find out whether their power has more to do with who they are or who they know.Due DiligenceKendall must still have the Beatles on the brain because when he gets a phone call from one of his kids, he answers with, “What’s goin’ on, wild honey pie?” (That call has to do with whether or not his daughter’s pet rabbit should be allowed to eat a bagel. Kendall says it is probably OK. He is wrong.)Kendall insists to Greg that he’s not mad about his cousin’s signing the joint defense agreement. But “as a pal,” he says, he feels obliged to warn Greg that “I may have to burn you.” Greg briefly wonders, “How bad will the burning be?” but then immediately says, “Even as I ask that, I can tell.”Speaking of old men outstaying their welcome, while all the back room negotiations are raging — and while Logan remains incapable of making a public appearance — Frank is left to vamp onstage for the shareholders, spouting banalities for what must’ve felt like an eternity.I confess to having a moderate obsession with what people eat (or are served and then don’t eat) in movies and TV shows. For me the most poignant moment in this episode came toward the end, as the cater-waiters disposed of all the uneaten nibbles on the various buffets. So many squandered pastries. More

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    Review: This Revival of Sondheim’s ‘Assassins’ Misses Its Mark

    The production lacks the power to unsettle despite a fine cast of killers and wannabes who changed, or at least made, history gunning for presidents.The one reliably blood-chilling moment in Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman’s “Assassins” comes courtesy of a killer who is, at best, a footnote in American history: Charles J. Guiteau, the lawyer who shot President James A. Garfield in 1881.Guiteau aims his gun at the audience, panning over us slowly, deliberately, in tension-filled silence. The music is stopped. The menace is visceral.“Facing the barrel of a gun, even when it’s just in a musical, is the kind of shock that can exist only in live theater,” Sondheim wrote in his 2011 book “Look, I Made a Hat,” in which he called this lingering, life-or-death moment in “Assassins” his favorite in a show rife with gun-waving murderers and murderers manqué.I’d wondered how that confrontation would land in John Doyle’s current revival at Classic Stage Company, not so much because of the state of our armed-to-the-teeth nation but because of the shooting last month on the set of the Alec Baldwin film “Rust,” where a real gun fired a real bullet that killed a real person, when it was all meant to be pretend.The surprising answer is that it doesn’t land at all, because Doyle has defanged the moment, speeding it up to a manic pace. His jittery Guiteau, played by a creepily unnerving Will Swenson, swings the gun left, right and center so fast that there’s no time for us to feel endangered, no time for the threat to lodge inside us and turn to fear.Granted, maybe we’re all too freaked out right now anyway to have a prop gun pointed at us. But I wish that Doyle had plastered the lobby with unmissable posters explaining, as the digital program does, that the show’s guns “are replicas that were provided, checked, and rendered inoperable” by a weapons specialist. I wish he’d had leaflets printed with the same message, and handed to each person on the way in.I wish he’d kept that long, scary moment. Because racing through it undermines the potency of the show, Classic Stage’s first since the shutdown.Even with a powerhouse cast, this stripped down, off-balance production — originally slated for spring 2020 as part of the Sondheim 90th-birthday festivities — never does find a way to make the audience feel the stakes of its characters’ actions. That’s true whether we view the assassins purely as historical figures or also as metaphors for an aggressive strain of lethal discontent as American as Old Glory.From left: Tavi Gevinson, Kuhn, Will Swenson, Uranowitz, Andy Grotelueschen, Adam Chanler-Berat, Wesley Taylor and Pasquale.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show’s vaudevillian patchwork of stories about volatile 19th- and 20th-century misfits who murdered a president, or tried to, makes us laugh and leaves us humming. But we are ultimately unperturbed.And maybe that, too, is a sign of the times: that we have lately lived through such virulent, brutal threats to our democracy that this motley bunch (John Wilkes Booth! Lee Harvey Oswald! Lynette (Squeaky) Fromme!) hardly seems ominous. What risk they posed, what damage they did, is past.But there are also plenty of parallels to the present in Sondheim’s sharp-eyed song cycle of the ostensibly dispossessed and in Weidman’s often casually violent dialogue. Doyle, a Sondheim veteran who staged the 2017 revival of the Sondheim-Weidman “Pacific Overtures,” infers one contemporary correlation outright with his final stage image, which I will not spoil.“No one can be put in jail for his dreams,” Booth — the alpha assassin, played by Steven Pasquale as a smooth Southern shark — sings to the others in the delusion-packed opening number, “Everybody’s Got the Right.”Gathered at a fairground shooting gallery, they are encouraged to kill a president to win a prize. On Doyle’s set, above a bare thrust stage painted with the Stars and Stripes, a giant round target flashes with projections (by Steve Channon) of the various presidents’ faces.That same screen, bordered with lights that shine red, blue and — peculiarly — not white but pale yellow, is pretty much all the scenery the show gets, which is in keeping with Doyle’s pared-back aesthetic. But the storytelling would have benefited from more visual cues. Many projections are too coldly literal and too far removed from the action to aid it properly.When Giuseppe Zangara (Wesley Taylor), the would-be assassin of Franklin D. Roosevelt, is executed, an image of an electric chair is projected above him. When Guiteau ascends to the gallows for his hanging while singing, with increasing franticness, “I am going to the Lordy, I am so glad,” Swenson has no stairs to dance on; there’s merely a distant projection of an empty noose.From left, Swenson, Rob Morrison (rear) and Ethan Slater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSimilarly, when Booth is in hiding, having shot Lincoln, there is no visual indication that he himself is injured, his leg broken. Pasquale is darkly charismatic, though: singing softly, beguilingly of “blood on the clover” from the Civil War in “The Ballad of Booth,” before the mask of romance slips and he spits a racist slur about Lincoln at venomous volume.The three-piece orchestra, led by Greg Jarrett, is supplemented in trademark Doyle style by some of the cast, notably Ethan Slater as the appealing Balladeer, who strolls the stage in a blue jumpsuit, playing an acoustic guitar. (Costumes are by Ann Hould-Ward.) Later he transforms into Oswald, a despondent young man with a powerful gun that — like many things here — comes wrapped in the flag.Heretical as it sounds, comic dialogue, not song, is this production’s strongest suit. But aside from a curiously underwhelming rendition of “Unworthy of Your Love,” the pretty, poppy duet between Fromme (Tavi Gevinson) and John Hinckley Jr. (Adam Chanler-Berat, who is suitably skin-crawling as the man who attempted to assassinate Ronald Reagan in 1981), it’s not that the musical performances are lacking.It’s that the lighter book scenes really shine, especially the hilariously mercurial ramblings of the wannabe Richard Nixon killer Samuel Byck (Andy Grotelueschen) and the terrifically lively scenes between Gerald Ford’s foiled assassins, Fromme and Sara Jane Moore (Judy Kuhn, handily transcending the role’s scatterbrained-broad stereotype).“Assassins” has been faulted since its premiere three decades ago for a supposed failure to make its disparate parts cohere. It’s also proved many times that they can, yet Doyle’s staging never manages to harness that cumulative power. Faithful though it is to the show’s sung and spoken text, it’s missing some vital connective tissue.Of course, the same could be said of the country. This is a musical with a deep, warning sense of something frighteningly wrong in the fabric of the United States — a nation where, as the song goes, “Something just broke.”You can still hear that alarm in this production. But don’t expect to feel it more than distantly.AssassinsThrough Jan. 29 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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    'S.N.L.': Taylor Swift Performs and Jonathan Majors Hosts

    The sketch show, hosted this weekend by Jonathan Majors, also featured a 10-minute performance from the musical guest Taylor Swift.Back in 2012, when the then-Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney professed his affection for Big Bird but nonetheless vowed to cut funding for PBS, “Saturday Night Live” brought in Big Bird himself to explain that he wasn’t a political creature and didn’t “want to ruffle any feathers.”Almost a decade later, after the fictional, good-natured Big Bird said in a tweet that he had received a Covid vaccine, he has drawn the ire of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, who complained that the tweet was “government propaganda for your 5-year-old.”This time around, “S.N.L.” didn’t get the support of any actual Muppets, so the show created its own alternate version of “Sesame Street,” which it called “Cruz Street.”Aidy Bryant, who played Senator Cruz in the opening sketch, stood in front of what looked like a familiar brownstone and explained, “For 50 years I stood by as ‘Sesame Street’ taught our children dangerous ideas, like numbers and kindness.”She continued: “But when Big Bird told children to get vaccinated against a deadly disease, I said enough. And I created my own ‘Sesame Street,’ called ‘Cruz Street.’ It’s a gated community, where kids are safe from the woke government.”Following the show’s theme song, Bryant was joined by Cecily Strong as Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, toting what she said was an AR-15.Strong said she was “just taking a break from releasing the phone numbers of Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill so they and their families get death threats, and I thought I’d stop by.”Bryant’s Cruz was also visited by Kyle Mooney, dressed in a makeshift Big Bird costume that probably wasn’t fabricated by Sesame Workshop. He said that in the week since he had gotten the vaccine, his feathers had fallen out (among other physical side effects he claimed to be experiencing).To help out Mooney, Bryant brought out Pete Davidson, who played the comedian and podcast host Joe Rogan. He offered his own unreliable remedies, which consisted of “zinc and ayahuasca and some horse medicine.”Other cast members played alternate versions of “Sesame Street” characters, including Alex Moffat and Mikey Day as Bert and Ernie; Chris Redd as a furry green creature called Oscar the Slouch (“Papa Joe Biden gave me so many stimmies, I decided to quit working and live in this trash can”); and Aristotle Athari as the Recount Count.And hey, for good measure, the sketch brought out Chloe Fineman as Britney Spears, newly released from her yearslong conservatorship. “Oh my God, you guys, we did it,” she said.Fake ad of the weekSpare a thought for all the men who discovered during the pandemic that they didn’t know how to form adult friendships and are now bereft of peer groups.For their support — and for the benefit of their spouses and significant others — “S.N.L.” has given us the Man Park, a dog park-like place where these well-meaning recluses can come together and share useless trivia, argue about “Rick and Morty” or communicate with one another simply by saying “Marvel” over and over.We’re not saying we’re the target audience for this particular service, but when Andrew Dismukes asked “Who’s the GOAT, Michael Jordan or Tom Brady?” and Athari answered “How about Bo Burnham?” it felt so real.Musical performance of the weekTaylor Swift got only one song on the show, but boy did she make it count: She delivered a blistering, 10-minute rendition of “All Too Well” from her newly released album of re-recordings, “Red (Taylor’s Version).”Her performance — which ran even longer than Prince’s fabled eight-minute, three-song medley from an “S.N.L.” appearance in 2014 — was accompanied by a short film that Swift directed, starring herself and the actors Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien. The re-emergence of “All Too Well” (a shorter version of which was originally released in 2012) has also resurfaced speculation on who the song might be about — speculation that the film seems to be reinforcing? — and we recommend that you give the song a full listen if you want to at least understand the leadoff joke on Weekend Update.Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che riffed on the indictment of Stephen Bannon, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial and, yes, Taylor Swift.Jost began:Well, guys, I think the lesson we all learned this week is, never break up with Taylor Swift. Or she will sing about you for 10 minutes on national television. At the very least, return the scarf.He continued:But in real news — I don’t really know what’s real anymore — ex-Trump adviser Steve Bannon, seen here moments after shooting out of a sewage pipe — sorry, I should use his full name, Stephen K. Bannon; the K stands for three Ks — was indicted this week for contempt of Congress. If convicted, Bannon would face up to two years in prison. Which from the looks of him, might be a life sentence.Che pivoted to Rittenhouse:Legal experts are saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crying on the stand as he described how he shot his victims will help him with the jury. Man, is there a White Tears Law School that I don’t know about? I notice that every time y’all get in trouble, you start crying, and everything just works out for you, whether you’re trying to beat a murder charge or trying to be a Supreme Court justice. [His screen displays a picture of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.] More

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    Review: Theater Professors Are Under the Gun in ‘Preparedness’

    In this workplace comedy, beleaguered colleagues struggle to come together for an active-shooter training exercise.Theater people and academics share two traits: They are convinced of their calling’s moral importance to the world, which can provide a feeling of superiority, but they also often feel misunderstood and beleaguered, which makes them defensive. As members of a university’s theater department, the characters in Hillary Miller’s new comedy “Preparedness” — presented by the Bushwick Starr and HERE — belong to both constituencies, which means that their shoulders slump under boulder-size chips.That wariness is warranted, though, as their department is under attack from the university’s brass, which wants not just to cut their budget, but eliminate the program altogether.Figurative and literal survival become entangled when an irrepressibly chirpy H.R. representative, Kath (Alison Cimmet), turns up in the department’s shabby — and decidedly not chic — conference-slash-break room. If the teachers undergo state-mandated training on how to handle a potential mass shooting, they will have a better chance of surviving both a gunman and the dean’s delete button.An assistant professor in the English department at Queens College and the author of books on theater, Miller is fluent in academia’s quirks and jargon, as well as interdepartmental rivalries — don’t get the theater professors started on their brethren in film and digital tech. She also nails bureaucracies’ love for acronyms, deployed here in a dizzying alphabet soup that includes MeRP (Mutual Respect Pledge), ACOST (Active Campus Operations Shooter Training) and GOHOHOF (Get Out, Hide Out, Help Out, Fight), as well as references to “FERPP requests” and “FULAP forms.”Miller and the director Kristjan Thor neatly sketch certain types that turn up in pretty much every group of educators. Most memorable are the beleaguered chairman, Jeff (Lou Liberatore), doing his darnedest to save his department, and Laurette (the wonderful Nora Cole, master of the haughty side eye), a grande dame prone to statement shawls and imbued with the authority that comes from charisma, experience and lofty ideals about her vocation. “We’re theater artists,” she says. “We create sacred spaces for a living!”Just as familiar is the high-strung, humorless Haydée García-Shelton (Tracy Hazas), who seems to have a hard time gelling with her colleagues — she casually informs them that she got married over the weekend, as if it were no big deal — and shows disdain for musicals and their fans. “If you ask these people about my work, they’ll pretend to care, and then they’ll go right back to pushing their GoFundMe for bouffant wigs,” she says. One guess as to who will eventually use pepper spray.Getting this motley bunch to agree on anything, especially an administrative injunction perceived as an imposition, is akin to herding cats — real ones, unlike Cat Blanchett, the department’s new robotic “Resilience Mascot,” a gesture meant to help improve the sinking morale.Liberatore (with Hazas at right) shows off the department’s “Resilience Mascot,” a robot named Cat Blanchett.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesUltimately, though, Miller can’t resolve a central issue: Some of the professors’ refusal to undergo training is mystifying. It’s easy to understand resistance to H.R., but a quick training session that both covers a very real concern — mass shootings in schools — and saves your funding feels like a gimme. And yet they bicker.Having painted herself into a corner, Miller can’t figure out how to end the play. So she gives Laurette, who is retiring, the last word in the form of an address to her students. It is a good speech, and a dodge.PreparednessThrough Dec. 11 at HERE Arts Center, Manhattan; thebushwickstarr.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    Review: In ‘Nollywood Dreams,’ a Star and an Industry Are Born

    Jocelyn Bioh’s new comedy about making movies in Nigeria throws some side-eye on Hollywood as well.Producing more than 1,000 movies a year each, Bollywood, India’s Hindi film industry, and Nollywood, the Nigerian version, have long outpaced the California dream-makers who think they rule the world in Hollywood.It is against this shift in the shaping of global culture that “Nollywood Dreams,” a giddy if wobbly comedy by Jocelyn Bioh, plays out.But the template is pure MGM: Our sweet heroine, Ayamma Okafor (Sandra Okuboyejo), works, along with her tart sister Dede (Nana Mensah), in their parents’ travel agency in Lagos. When the rising film director Gbenga Ezie (Charlie Hudson III) announces open auditions for the title role in his latest project, “The Comfort Zone” — yes, there’s a title role — Ayamma sees a chance to “be like the women in all of those Hollywood films I spent my life watching” and become a star herself.There are complications, of course, but this being a 90-minute comedy, not many. Gbenga has all but promised the role of Comfort to his former lover, Fayola Ogunleye (Emana Rachelle), a somewhat tarnished star known as “the Nigerian Halle Berry with Tina Turner Legs.” And what of Wale Owusu (Ade Otukoya), Nigeria’s “Sexiest Man Born,” slated to play the hero in the movie and perhaps in Ayamma’s life as well? What, indeed!If this sounds more like a soap opera than a film, that’s because Nollywood in the early 1990s, when the play is set, was still in its artistic infancy. (Bioh writes in an introduction to the script that movies of that period, which she watched as a child, were low budget, “shot with very limited takes” and heavily dependent on improvisation.) Half the fun of Saheem Ali’s staging for MCC Theater, which opened on Thursday night, is in seeing how those drawbacks, when borrowed by West Africans, become selling points of a new aesthetic.Or perhaps an old one: “Nollywood Dreams” is spirited and casual, with the knockabout rhythms and narrative shortcuts of Hollywood in its early years, before flickers became films. On Arnulfo Maldonado’s shape-shifting set, the action cuts between three locations: the travel agency, Gbenga’s office and a television studio where the beloved talk-show host Adenikeh, “the Nigerian Oprah Winfrey,” conveniently interviews the other characters so they can provide bald updates on the plot.Sandra Okuboyejo, left, and Nana Mensah as sisters in the play, a production of MCC Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs played by the one-named actor Abena, who was a lovely Anne Page in Bioh’s adaptation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” this summer, Adenikeh exemplifies the play’s twinned pleasures. While translating Oprah’s American mannerisms into florid Nigerian ones, she also offers a warped fun-house reflection on the original. That’s a neat double flip Bioh sticks throughout the play: In having her characters worship American brands (Steven Spielberg, “Chicken Soup for the Soul,” N.Y.U.) she pokes gentle fun at both.That’s by now a Bioh trademark. “School Girls; Or, the African Mean Girls Play,” a hit for MCC in 2017, wrings all possible laughs (and a few impossible ones) out of its Ghanaian variation on familiar mean-girl tropes — while also offering, underneath the genre trappings, a critique of American cultural imperialism. “Merry Wives” is similarly complex, finding doubles for Shakespeare’s characters among the African diasporic community of South Harlem.If “Nollywood Dreams” is not quite as successful as those previous works, it’s at least in part because Bioh set out to keep the new play as light as possible. Like Gbenga, told by producers in the United States to “write movies about what they assumed was my experience” — which is to say, war and poverty — she was determined in “Nollywood Dreams” to focus on what’s “funny and wild and silly.” In a recent profile in The New York Times, she recalled a literary manager who despite admiring the play expressed surprise at its happy characters; hadn’t she read about Boko Haram?I am grateful that Bioh declined to interpolate that Nigerian terrorist group into the action. Too few playwrights have a gift for comedy, and she is the rare one who not only provides zingers but also the structures in which they make sense.A play about the enjoyable makeshiftness of early Nollywood films therefore gets an enjoyably makeshift treatment: Form follows dysfunction. Ali’s direction emphasizes color and comfort over snap and discipline. (Dede Ayite’s costumes nail all four.) The downside is occasional bagginess, as in the overlong audition scenes; “The Comfort Zone,” a love triangle in which a man must choose between his haughty American wife and his humble Nigerian sweetheart, is so deliberately bad that we cannot register, as we’re evidently meant to, Ayamma’s skill in performing it.Ade Otukoya as the magnetic leading man Wale and Abena as a beloved talk-show host known as the “Nigerian Oprah Winfrey.”Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesBut then Ayamma is the only character not forcibly enlisted in Bioh’s fun-at-all-costs agenda; Okuboyejo grounds her with warmth and common sense. The others are all over-the-over-the-top caricatures, hardly distinguishable from those in the films they make. (Even in movies, people are rarely as magnetically smooth as Otukoya’s Wale, who can seduce just by draping his arm on a couch.) To bring the point home, Bioh buttons the play with a spoof trailer for “The Comfort Zone” that’s both sincere and hilarious, a kiss and a kiss-off.Fair enough, but the best comedy nevertheless plants its feet in the same ground as tragedy. “Nollywood Dreams” evidently means to do so as well; Bioh sees in “The Comfort Zone” the “sad duality” of a country in which people have the choice to “live like the rich” by participating in the unjustness of society “or suffer like the poor” by refusing. “There is,” she writes, “no middle.”How “The Comfort Zone” — let alone the play that contains it — represents that idea I was unable to fathom. As subtext it’s in any case too sub to provide adequate ballast for the comedy. If only against the high standard of “School Girls,” that makes “Nollywood Dreams” feel slightly unmoored — which wouldn’t matter if American comedy were more like Nigerian film. In that case there would be 999 more productions like it, coming soon to a theater near you.Nollywood DreamsThrough Nov. 28 at the MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    in Television

    ‘I Don’t Know What a Carrie Is’: Candace Bushnell Works It Out Onstage

    The writer maps her life in a one-woman show, “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” beginning previews this weekend at the Daryl Roth Theater.I must tell you that after a long day of rehearsal in five-inch heels and a photo shoot at which she had posed atop, bestride and semi-supine on a corner banquette, Candace Bushnell, the woman who made the cosmopolitan the most famous drink of pre-Y2K New York, slipped into a chair in the gallery of the Carlyle Hotel and ordered an unglamorous pot of Earl Grey tea. With slices of lemon to soothe her throat.Bushnell, 62, broke out in the mid ’90s as a sex and relationship columnist for The New York Observer, centering her columns on a character named Carrie Bradshaw, a chic stand-in for Bushnell herself. She collected those pieces into a spiky 1996 book, “Sex and the City,” autofiction before it was cool. HBO premiered a series adaptation two years later. It ran for six seasons. Two movies followed, as did licensed fragrances, bus tours and candy.Bushnell’s life diverged from Carrie’s. She turned her talents to fiction. Her marriage to the ballet dancer Charles Askegard, whom she nicknamed Mr. Bigger, ended in divorce. After fleeing Manhattan for the Hamptons and despairing of dating, she wrote another novel, “Is There Still Sex in the City?”I couldn’t help but wonder: Has Bushnell adapted that novel into a one-woman show? She has. In “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” which begins previews at the Daryl Roth Theater on Saturday, Bushnell makes her stage debut, tracing her life — like a fever chart plotted in tasteful pink lipstick — from her Connecticut childhood to her party girl pinnacle to marriage, divorce and beyond. Is this fiction, autofiction, memoir?Bushnell at a rehearsal for “Is There Still Sex in the City?” in Midtown Manhattan. She hired an acting coach and a voice coach, and is doing Pilates to build up her core strength for the show. Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I’m not trying to play a character,” she told me. “But I have a feeling that maybe I am a character. Like kind of naturally.”Bushnell arrived at the Carlyle, a few blocks from her Upper East Side apartment, in a sensible gray sweater dress and a fresh pair of absolutely senseless shoes — red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles — that she walked in with impossible ease. (A line I’d heard during the rehearsal for the show earlier that day: “Do I have a shoe obsession like Carrie Bradshaw? No. Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me.”) In person, she has the wide-set eyes and porcelain poise of a Meissen figurine and conversation as polished as the Carlyle’s silverware.As a child in Glastonbury, Conn., Bushnell acted sporadically, though she spent most of her free time scribbling short stories and riding her horses. When she moved to New York at 19 — “wild and full of philosophies,” she said — she flirted with acting (that’s her frisky verb), studying at HB Studio.“I didn’t think I was really very good at it, which I probably shouldn’t say,” she said.Besides, she never loved it the way that she loved writing. “I really felt like, I’ve got to be a writer, or I’m going to die,” she said. So she wrote, signing away the theatrical rights to each new book. But a few years ago, when apportioning the rights to “Is There Still Sex in the City?,” she decided to hold onto the theatrical rights for herself.She wasn’t sure what to do with them. But then she met a talent manager, Marc Johnston, at the Carlyle, which Bushnell seems to treat as a bonus living room. He had helped to create a touring show for his client, the composer and accidental reality TV star David Foster. He thought that he could do the same for her.So again she wrote, this time in monologue form, repurposing stories from her books, her life, her lecture tours. That first draft ran about 200 pages. To shape up the script, Johnston and his fellow producer, Robyn Goodman, introduced Bushnell to the director and choreographer Lorin Latarro.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said of preparing for the role.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn June, the show had a tryout at Bucks County Playhouse in New Hope, Penn. Set in a near-replica of Bushnell’s apartment, which includes her actual sofa, her actual carpet and her actual poodles, it unfurls as a chatty girl’s night.And though Bushnell is a practiced hostess, those first performances were unnerving. “It was like, Oh, God, this is really acting,” Bushnell said. Gradually the script shortened and Bushnell relaxed and improved.“She’s really miraculous,” Goodman told me in a phone interview. “She was determined to understand acting and she’s done it.”Understanding meant hiring an acting coach and a voice coach, and committing to Pilates three times a week to build up her core strength for the show. Which is to say that Bushnell takes the work of rehearsal and performance seriously — hence the afternoon Earl Grey — comparing it to the dressage drills she practiced as a girl, repeating the same small moves over and over until she gets them right.“I have that aspect of my personality where I’ll put in hours and hours and hours into something just to try to make it better,” she said.I joked that this made her seem not entirely like a Carrie. “I don’t even know what a Carrie is,” she said.HBO is busy reviving Carrie with a new series, “And Just Like That…,” which follows most of the original “Sex and the City” characters into their 50s, but Bushnell is not involved. In several places, her stage show emphasizes differences between Bushnell and Carrie, but those differences pertain to matters of men and fashion, not ideology or temperament. Carrie is flighty; Bushnell has her feet, if not her heels, firmly on the ground. While Carrie’s story ultimately became a romance, Bushnell maintains extreme ambivalence about romantic relationships.Bushnell in red satin Manolo Blahniks with diamanté buckles. “Carrie Bradshaw has a shoe obsession because of me,” she quips in her one-woman show. Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesHer feminism, which lurks at the margins of her books, emerges cogently and unashamedly in conversation. She speaks persuasively about the deforming effects of patriarchal power and the need for, as she put it, an equality of “mind, body and earning potential” — a nice surprise from a woman once known for table dancing at Da Silvano.A Page Six darling, Bushnell has rarely received much credit for her politics, her obvious intelligence, her psychological acuity. (Let’s just say that when I read her most recent book I found a few pages that described my foundered marriage so entirely that I had to text them to half a dozen friends and then lie down for a while.) And this is just ever so slightly on purpose.She recalled that as a child, angry about the inequities of gender, her father sat her down and told her that while she had ideas that people would need to hear, no one would listen if she yelled them. “So I learned very early on to coat everything in a candy-colored, sugarcoated message. Because that’s how you move society,” she said.Latarro, during a pre-rehearsal chat, agreed. “She writes feminism in a way that makes it palatable for a lot of women who have internalized misogyny and a lot of men who think everybody looks great in their sexy dresses.”The stage show, rich in quip and pop song snippet, is candy-colored, too — a chocolate martini with a sugared rim. Bushnell is recognizably herself, at least in the hour of rehearsal I saw, but buffed and glossed: a person repurposed as a fun and fabulous character. I asked her why she hadn’t attempted something sharper, more bitter. Earlier drafts had darker elements, she said. But those were cut.“The message that I’m delivering is probably risky enough as it is. I sit there and say, ‘I’m not married, I don’t have kids. And I’m grateful.’”Not that she wants to bother her audience with too many messages, which is probably why the producers have created a post-show nightspot, the Candi Bar, in the basement of the Daryl Roth.“Cosmos all night!” Johnston had enthused in a phone interview.Bushnell, as she drank her tea, put it more practically. “People just want to feel good,” she said. “And I want to give them a good time.” More