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    ‘The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power’ Season 1, Episode 4: Strange Magic

    Prophetic visions, soft power and elf privilege. Here are five takeaways from the fourth episode of Amazon’s “Lord of the Rings” prequel.Season 1, Episode 4: ‘The Great Wave’The title of this week’s “The Rings of Power” refers to a prophetic vision, haunting the Númenor Queen-Regent Míriel’s dreams in the opening scene. As she welcomes an assortment of what look to be elven mothers and their newborn babies, Míriel hears and feels a low rumble, which grows more intense until she looks outside and sees an enormous wave, crashing over the city of Armenelos. Though she wakes up safe (and dry), she fears this will be Númenor’s ultimate end: reclaimed by the Sundering Sea in an act of divine fury. And she feels she needs to do something about it.Is Míriel right? This raises a question worth weighing as we go forward with this series. “The Rings of Power” is a prequel and like most prequels, it is designed to connect to a story most fans already know. We have already been introduced to several characters in this first season who appear in the “Lord of the Rings” novels and movies: Galadriel, Elrond and Isildur, to name just three. Their fates are sealed. So is Númenor’s, for anyone who has read J.R.R. Tolkien’s books.But for me, the best way to approach a TV show like this is to treat it as an unfolding saga, not as a collection of signs and clues pointing to a foregone conclusion. There is a lot of story left to be told here. The ending, when it arrives, will only be one part of it. For now, I am inclined to consider Míriel’s ominous dream just as something that drives the plot. It’s a motivator — and a spectacular one, which kicks off this episode in style.As with last week’s installment, “The Great Wave” leaves some major characters out completely. (No Harfoots, alas.) Besides Númenor, we spend our time in the orc-infested Southlands and deep underground among the dwarves. Here are some takeaways and observations from this portentous episode.Mystical hoo-hah abounds.Last week in the orc’s prison pit, Arondir learned the monstrous hordes had been ransacking villages on behalf of their master, Adar (Joseph Mawle), in search of something unknown. At the end of this episode, we get an inkling of what that treasure might be: the mysterious, broken black sword that Bronwyn’s son, Theo (Tyroe Muhafidin), secretly stashed away in the series’s premiere. The weapon radiates a strange power that allures Theo — not unlike the way Sauron’s One Ring tempts characters throughout Tolkien’s books.Explore the World of the ‘Lord of the Rings’The literary universe built by J.R.R. Tolkien, now adapted into a new series for Amazon Prime Video, has inspired generations of readers and viewers.Artist and Scholar: Tolkien did more than write books. He invented an alternate reality, complete with its own geography, languages and history.Being Frodo: The actor Elijah Wood explains why he’ll never be upset at being associated with the “Lord of the Rings” movie series. A Soviet Take: A 1991 production based on Tolkien’s novels, recently digitized by a Russian broadcaster, is a time capsule of a bygone era. From the Archives: Read what W.H. Auden wrote about “The Fellowship of the Ring,” the first volume of Tolkien’s trilogy, in 1954.This semi-sword is also still lethal, as Theo learns when he fends off orcs while out scavenging for his people, who are hunkered down and starving at the Silvan elves’ abandoned fortress. When Theo returns triumphant, he discovers that his connection with the weapon has earned him an unexpected ally: the old publican Waldreg (Geoff Morrell), who hints that some humans still remember and honor their loyalty to the Dark Lord Morgoth.Meanwhile, in the underground dwarf kingdom of Khazad-dûm, Durin finally reveals to Elrond the big discovery that has made him so nervous around his old friend. It’s a new ore, lighter than silk and harder than iron, but perilous to dig out of the ground. In the eleven tongue, it would be called “mithril,” and it has the potential to make the dwarves who mine it incredibly prosperous — though there is some concern that pursuing this kind of wealth could upset the physical and spiritual balance of Middle-earth, and leave many dead.So … coveted weaponry, magical minerals. We are starting to get into the high fantasy weeds here, folks.Soft power solves hard problems.Durin hesitated to tell Elrond about mithril, lest other elves start swarming to Khazad-dûm to commandeer the mines, as they tend to do whenever they want something. Elrond, though, has insisted, over and over, that he is just visiting as a pal. This isn’t entirely true, of course. Elrond hopes to recruit dwarf labor to build a forge, for a purpose that in the TV show has yet to be revealed. (Hint: Look at the series’s title.) But his methods of persuasion are light. So far he has just been a bosom companion, giving Durin warm praise and sound advice … to make him more inclined to do a favor, eventually.This is a motif throughout this episode, as characters use diplomacy and calming rhetoric to advance their goals. We see it at its best when the Queen-Regent’s top adviser, Pharazôn (Trystan Gravelle), quells a potential riot among the elf-hating guild-members by making them feel ashamed, as proud humans, for being scared of another race. And we see it at its worst when Adar chats with Arondir, calmly suggesting that everything the elf knows about Sauron and the orcs is mere propaganda.Trystan Gravelle, left, and Leon Wadham in “The Rings of Power.”Prime VideoElf privilege is real.Even as Elrond is winning over Durin, there is an element of presumption underlying his every pleasant smile and kind word. Robert Aramayo’s performance conveys this subtle haughtiness well — this sense that Elrond humbly beseeching the dwarves is meant to be a noble gesture, given that the elves, as far as he is concerned, are the superior race.And Elrond is only a half-elf who had to earn his elven bona fides. Galadriel, by contrast, is a pure-blood commander and aristocrat, used to bossing around other elves — which makes it especially tough for her to abide the way Míriel keeps telling her what she can and can’t do. These two headstrong leaders have several face-to-face confrontations in this episode, and Galadriel keeps spitting vinegar instead of honey. She berates the Queen-Regent for betraying her own father, the deposed king, who had an alliance with the elves. And she demands the Númenóreans raise an army against Sauron. (“I call on you to finish the task left undone,” she hisses.)In the end, Míriel agrees to accompany Galadriel to Middle-earth, joined by a volunteer contingent of protectors (including Isildur, who has been kicked out of the sea guard). But make no mistake: No one is helping Galadriel because they find her inspiring or charming. If anything, give some credit to Míriel for making the case to the Númenóreans that they can’t rest forever on their ancestors’ past glories.The dialogue on this show has real gusto.It’s not easy to write lines for fantasy characters. Make the words too modern and they distract from the reality of the story. Make them too old-timey and they come out stiff. For the most part, “The Rings of Power” has struck a balance, combining grand pronouncements that sound chiseled into stone with asides and jokes that keep the show relatively loose. (Note the word “relatively” — the dialogue can still be pretty stodgy.)When Míriel rouses her people by asking, “Is our valor confined to the graves of our slumbering fathers?” or when Adar warns Arondir that he has been told lies that “run so deep that even the rocks believe them,” the lines have a real boldness and resonance. That said, it’s a welcome bit of comic relief when Galadriel shouts, “There is a tempest in me that swept me to this island for a reason, and it will not be quelled by you, Regent!” and then in the next shot she is getting thrown into jail.The future is already written … maybe.When Galadriel left Lindon in this season’s first episode, her king wondered if her Sauron obsession “might have stirred the very evil she is trying to thwart.” On the flip side, in this episode Galadriel warns an overly cautious Míriel that, “Avoiding this war may be the very thing that brings about your downfall.”That’s the thing about omens and visions: They are open to interpretation. Míriel has been consulting a palantír, one of Middle-earth’s seven seeing-stones, which she thinks is telling her that Galadriel is bad news. But when she starts making plans to banish the elf, the petals of the Nimloth tree begin to fall in a flurry, possibly signaling the Valar’s displeasure. What to do?So I ask again: Can Númenor be saved? That answer is out there; you can Google it. For now, what matters is what Míriel thinks — and what she does next. More

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    ‘M*A*S*H’ at 50: War Is Hell(arious)

    Five decades ago, “M*A*S*H” anticipated today’s TV dramedies, showing that a great comedy could be more than just funny.The pilot episode of “M*A*S*H,” which aired on Sept. 17, 1972, on CBS, lets you know immediately where and when you are. Sort of. “KOREA 1950,” the opening titles read. “A HUNDRED YEARS AGO.”The Korean War could indeed seem a century away from 1972, separated by a gulf of cultural change and social upheaval. But as a subject, it was also entirely current, given that America was then fighting another bloody war, in Vietnam. The covert operation “M*A*S*H” pulled off was to deliver a timely satire camouflaged as a period comedy.The year before, CBS had premiered Norman Lear’s “All in the Family,” a battlefield dispatch from an American living room. But “M*A*S*H” was another level of escalation, sending up the lunacy of war even as Walter Cronkite was still reading the news about it. The caption acknowledged the risk by winking at it: Who, us, making topical commentary?Today, “M*A*S*H” also feels both like ancient history and entirely current, but for different reasons.On the one hand, in an era that’s saturated with pop-culture nostalgia yet rarely looks back further than “The Sopranos” or maybe “Seinfeld,” “M*A*S*H” is often AWOL from discussions of TV history. Sure, we know it as a title and a statistic: The 106 million viewers for its 1983 finale is a number unlikely to be equaled by any TV show not involving a kickoff. But it also gets lost in the distant pre-cable mists, treated as a relic of a time with a bygone mass-market TV audience and different (sometimes cringeworthy) social attitudes.Yet rewatched from 50 years’ distance, “M*A*S*H” is in some ways the most contemporary of its contemporaries. Its blend of madcap comedy and pitch-dark drama — the laughs amplifying the serious stakes, and vice versa — is recognizable in today’s dramedies, from “Better Things” to “Barry,” that work in the DMZ between laughter and sadness.For 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” held down that territory, proving that funny is not the opposite of serious.Alda’s Hawkeye was a forerunner of the modern dramedy antihero.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesOff the beaten laugh trackThe characters serving in the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital in Korea were professionals whose vocation was to save lives. But their assignment was to patch up soldiers so that they could return to the front lines and kill other people or get killed themselves. This was the eternal, laugh-till-you-cry joke of “M*A*S*H.”“M*A*S*H” stepped into, and outside of, a tradition of military sitcoms. “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” and “The Phil Silvers Show” poked fun at the hardships and hustles of life in uniform; “Hogan’s Heroes,” which preceded “M*A*S*H” from 1965 to 1971 on CBS, was about shenanigans in a Nazi P.O.W. camp. But as for the abominations of war, these sitcoms, like the bumbling Sgt. Schultz of “Hogan’s,” saw nothing.Only three years earlier, CBS had canceled the successful “Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” amid controversy over its antiwar stances. But by the early 1970s, even die-hard anticommunists saw Vietnam as a lost cause. Pop culture was changing, too, as evidenced by the success of “All in the Family” and of Robert Altman’s 1970 film “M*A*S*H,” based on a novel by Richard Hooker (the pseudonym of H. Richard Hornberger).The show’s creators, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, imagined a version of the story that was more pointedly political than Altman’s dark-comic film, and certainly more so than Hooker’s cheerfully raunchy book.The staff of the 4077th, mostly draftees, channeled their frustration with their situation into pranks, drinking, adultery and gallows humor. The insubordinate-in-chief was Capt. Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce (Alan Alda), who was dead-serious about surgery and dead-sarcastic about every other aspect of the wartime experience.Casting Alda as the ensemble’s moral center and chaos agent was key. He could caper on set like the love child of Bugs Bunny and Groucho Marx (Hawkeye would imitate the latter while making rounds with patients). He gave Hawkeye’s flirtations with nurses a bantering lightness (though from a half-century’s distance, they can come across more like straight-up harassment).But Alda also conveyed Hawkeye’s exhausted spleen, which the doctor poured into letters to his father in Maine, a frequent episode-framing device: “We work fast and we’re not dainty,” he writes in the pilot. “We try to play par surgery on this course. Par is a live patient.”“M*A*S*H” borrowed bits from its sitcom predecessors. It was a workplace comedy, with a goofy boss, Lt. Col. Henry Blake (McLean Stevenson), and uptight antagonists, like the gung-ho lovers Maj. Frank Burns (Larry Linville) and Maj. Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan (Loretta Swit). The staff wrestled with bureaucracy and gamed the system, as when the hyperefficient company clerk, Cpl. Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) mailed a jeep home one part at a time.But the zaniness came with constant reminders that the realities of war could intrude at any moment, like the incoming choppers ferrying the wounded. The producers pushed CBS to dump the laugh track — what’s a studio audience doing in the middle of a war zone? — and eventually compromised on shutting off the yuk machine during operating-room scenes.The show earned its belly laughs and its quiet. Even the sitcom-standard high jinks — dealing with the black market for medicine, inventing a fictional officer in order to donate his pay to an orphanage — were forms of protest.In Season 1’s “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” Hawkeye meets a writer friend, doing research on the war, who later turns up on the operating table with a mortal wound. The executive producer Burt Metcalfe told the Hollywood Reporter that a CBS executive said, at the end of the season, that the episode “ruined ‘M*A*S*H.’”The show would run for another 10 years.“M*A*S*H” shows its age in various ways, including in a subplot in which Farr’s Klinger sought discharge from the Army by dressing in women’s clothes.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesComedy meets dramedy“From any angle, ‘M*A*S*H’ is the season’s most interesting new entry,” the critic John J. O’Connor wrote in The Times in September 1972. Audiences came around in Season 2, after CBS moved the show to a better time slot. It spent most of the next decade in the ratings Top 10 (even as its own timeline hopscotched among different points from 1950 to 1953).The early seasons worked in a vein of joke-heavy dark comedy, branching out into more story forms and social issues. A Season 2 episode involved a gay patient, decades before Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, who had been beaten up by other soldiers in his unit. (“M*A*S*H” had its share of gay-tinged jokes — as well as a long-running subplot about Jamie Farr’s Cpl. Max Klinger trying to win a discharge by dressing as a woman — but they usually played as banter rather than gay panic.)Then, in the Season 3 finale, the series exploded a land mine. Stevenson had signed a deal with NBC, and Henry was written off in affectionate sitcom style, with goodbyes and a party. In the episode’s closing moments, Radar — a farm kid who saw Henry as a father figure — walks into the operating room to read a bulletin: “Lt. Col. Henry Blake’s plane was shot down over the Sea of Japan. It spun in. There were no survivors.”Henry’s death kicked off the series’s peak era, in which it evolved from a lacerating comedy into something closer to what we would recognize today as dramedy.The new commanding officer, Col. Sherman Potter, was a career Army man, played by Harry Morgan, once Jack Webb’s stoic sidekick in the revival of “Dragnet.” (Morgan played a crackpot general earlier in “M*A*S*H.”) More competent and less malleable than Henry, Potter had a gravitas befitting a show that was growing in ambition.The Kafkaesque absurdism deepened, too, as in “The Late Captain Pierce,” in which Hawkeye is declared dead in a bureaucratic mix-up and tries to exit the war on a morgue bus. “I’m tired of death,” he says. “I’m tired to death. If you can’t lick it, join it.”The experimental episode formats became more daring. “Point of View” is shot from the vantage of a wounded soldier whose throat injury renders him mute. In a repeated format, a reporter visits the 4077th for the new medium of television. The unit’s chaplain, Father Francis Mulcahy (William Christopher), described seeing surgeons cut into patients in the winter cold. “Steam rises from the body,” he says. “And the doctor will warm himself over the open wound. Could anyone look on that and not feel changed?”Just as important, the show evolved its supporting characters, especially Margaret, spoofed as a harpy and sex object in the early seasons. In a Season 5 episode, she vents to her subordinate nurses about the pressures that have made her into the stickler they know. Eventually, she becomes a more complex foil and ally.Swit and Larry Linville in the first season of “M*A*S*H.” Her character, Margaret, became more complex as the show went on.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesThe hilarious but one-dimensional Frank even earns some sympathy before his eventual exit, as Margaret throws him over for a fiancé. He’s replaced by the snobby, intelligent Boston Brahmin Maj. Charles Emerson Winchester (David Ogden Stiers), while Hawkeye’s partner-in-pranks Capt. “Trapper” John McIntyre (Wayne Rogers) makes way for the dry, laid-back family man Capt. B.J. Hunnicutt (Mike Farrell).Even in the matured version of “M*A*S*H,” a lot has aged badly. A largely male story, it subscribed to the kind of counterculturalism that saw sexual freedom mostly as license for men. For much of the show’s run, various minor nurse characters were so interchangeable that they were repeatedly named “Able” and “Baker” — literally, “A” and “B” in an older version of the military phonetic alphabet.Ironically, Alda — an outspoken Hollywood feminist and co-star of “Free to Be … You and Me” — became a disparaging shorthand for “sensitive men” among gender reactionaries in the “Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche” era. Late in the show’s run, “M*A*S*H” intermittently interrogated its own attitudes toward women, as in “Inga,” a Season 7 episode with Mariette Hartley as a Swedish doctor whose brilliance Hawkeye finds threatening.Those later years of “M*A*S*H” could be didactic, and few fans would consider them among its best. The camp got cleaner and the hairstyles suspiciously modern. The show’s heart got as soft and the stories as shaggy as B.J.’s mustache. But the final seasons are interesting as a model for how TV would find ways to tell stories pitched between comedy and drama.In the movie-length finale, which aired on Feb. 28, 1983, the laugh track, which had been scaled back over the seasons, was gone entirely. And while the scenario — the war finally ended, after three real-life years and 11 TV seasons — yielded the expected sentimental goodbyes and even a wedding, the core story was as dark as any the series had ever done.Hawkeye is in a psychiatric hospital after a traumatic experience whose repressed memory his psychiatrist, Maj. Sidney Freedman (Allan Arbus), is trying to tease out of him. Hawkeye recalls a carefree day trip to the beach, a bottle being passed around on the bus ride home. Then the booze becomes a plasma bottle; the bus had taken on a group of civilians and wounded soldiers. One Korean woman holds a chicken, whose noises threaten to expose the stopped bus to a passing enemy patrol. Hawkeye urges her to quiet the bird, and she ends up smothering it.Finally — as you will never forget if you’ve seen the episode — the memory clears: The “chicken” becomes a baby. “You son of a bitch,” Hawkeye says, “Why did you make me remember that?”Is it melodramatic? Sure. A downer? Of course. It is also, on rewatching, a striking bit of filmmaking for an ’80s sitcom. Hawkeye’s memory unfolds with the uncanny clarity of a dawning nightmare. No music cues you in to the horror; the images just grow more unsettling and the scene more grim. It is, in a way, like the journey of “M*A*S*H” over the years: A romp in the midst of a war zone goes, bit by bit, deeper into night and the heart of darkness.And 106 million people came along for the ride. A year and a half later, Ronald Reagan, a Cold Warrior who was elected partly on a backlash to post-Vietnam sentiment, won a second term in a landslide. Yet more Americans than voted in that election tuned in to watch a big old liberal antiwar TV show.After ‘M*A*S*H’For most of its 11 seasons, “M*A*S*H” was one of TV’s most popular comedies. But its style went mostly unimitated for decades.It’s not really until the 2000s that you see its heirs emerge. The British version of “The Office” shares its ability to turn from blistering comedy to seriousness. (Stephen Merchant, a creator, has talked about the influence of watching “M*A*S*H” episodes without laugh tracks in Britain.) The mockumentary format of the American “Office” and other comedies hark back to the news-interview episodes (while Dwight Schrute is a kind of Frank Burns of the paper-business wars).Cable and streaming especially became fertile ground for finding laughs in grim situations. “Rescue Me” made trauma-based comedy in a post-9/11 firehouse, “Getting On” in a hospital geriatric wing. The Netflix prison series “Orange Is the New Black” was as thoroughly female as “M*A*S*H” was dominantly male, but it brought anarchic ensemble humor to a deadly dangerous setting.In Hawkeye, meanwhile, you can see a forerunner of the modern-day dramedy antihero, charismatic but damaged and driven by anger. As a kid watching “M*A*S*H” reruns religiously, I loved Hawkeye’s rascally wit, his principles and his pranks. (One of my elementary-school music pageants had us sing the theme song, “Suicide Is Painless.” The ’70s were complicated.)Rewatching episodes as an adult, I enjoy all that still. But he’s also kind of a jerk! He’s self-righteous, attention-seeking, snide and, if you’re on his bad side, a bit of a bully. In a Season 5 episode, Sidney Freedman diagnosed him succinctly: “Anger turned inward is depression. Anger turned sideways is Hawkeye.”This describes not a few difficult modern dramedy protagonists, human and otherwise. In one of the best episodes of “BoJack Horseman,” built entirely around the self-destructive equine protagonist’s eulogy at a funeral, you can hear the echo of the episode “Hawkeye,” in which Alda’s character, concussed in a jeep crash, spends nearly the full half-hour monologuing manically at a perplexed Korean family, to stave off unconsciousness.Making serious comedy is a feat of balance, and some might argue that the legacy of “M*A*S*H” was to give sitcoms license to be self-important, unfunny bummers. In a 2009 episode of the TV-biz sendup “30 Rock” — a proponent of the joke-packed school of entertainment if ever there was one — Alda made a tongue-in-cheek version of that critique himself.Playing the biological father of the NBC executive Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin), he witnesses Tracy Jordan (Tracy Morgan), a performer on the sketch-show-within-a-show, crying over the memory of being too “chicken” to dissect a frog in high school, which he’d covered up with a phony story of having been asked by a drug dealer to stab a snitch named “Baby.”“A guy crying about a chicken and a baby?” Alda’s character says. “I thought this was a comedy show.”Of course, if you got the joke, it was precisely because “M*A*S*H” did its job. It proved, memorably, that a great comedy could cut deep and leave scars. A half-century later, “M*A*S*H” has had the last laugh, or lack thereof. More

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    Alan Alda on ‘M*A*S*H’: ‘Everybody Had Something Taken From Them’

    As the acclaimed “situation tragedy” turns 50, the star reflects on its innovations: “The crazy behavior wasn’t just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness.”When we think of the default mode of much of contemporary television — mingling the tragic and the offhand, broad comedy and pinpoint sentiment — we are thinking of a precise mixture of styles, emotions and textures first alchemized by “M*A*S*H.”Created by Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, “M*A*S*H” aired on CBS from 1972 to 1983. (It is currently available to stream on Hulu.) Over the course of its 11-year run, it featured alcohol-fueled high jinks and other shenanigans alongside graphic surgical sequences and portrayals of grief, blending comedy and drama in a fashion rarely seen before on television. Set among the doctors and nurses of a Korean War mobile surgical unit, “M*A*S*H” made use of the mockumentary episode decades before “The Office” ever tried it, featured blood-drenched story lines long before “The Sopranos” and killed off beloved characters without warning well before “Game of Thrones.”The “M*A*S*H” series finale, titled “Goodbye, Farewell, and Amen,” remains the highest rated non-Super Bowl program ever broadcast on American TV. The heart of the series was Alan Alda, who played the acerbic and devoted surgeon Hawkeye Pierce throughout the show’s more than 250 episodes and also wrote and directed dozens of them.The actor revisited “M*A*S*H” in a video interview ahead of the show’s 50th anniversary, on Sept. 17. Alda, 86, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2015, discussed famous scenes, the series’s battles with CBS (“They didn’t even want us to show blood at the beginning”) and why he thinks the audience connected so deeply with “M*A*S*H.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.How have you been feeling?Good, thank you. You mean with regard to Parkinson’s or the Covid or what?All of the above, I suppose.Parkinson’s I’m on top of. And I haven’t come down with Covid yet.What does it mean to you to know that people are still interested in “M*A*S*H” 50 years later?I got the script submitted to me when I was making a movie in the Utah State Prison. And it was the best script I had seen since I’d been in prison. I called my wife and I said: “This is a terrific script, but I don’t see how I can do it. Because we live in New Jersey, and it has to be shot in L.A. And who knows? It could run a whole year.” To go from that to 50 years later, it’s still getting, not only attention but it’s still getting an audience, is a surprise.What kinds of conversations did you have with Larry Gelbart before the show began?With “All in the Family,” I think the door was open to doing stories about things that really mattered. So when I got out of prison and went down to L.A. to talk to them, the night before we started rehearsing the pilot, I wanted us all to agree that we wouldn’t just have high jinks at the front. That it would take seriously what these people were going through. The wounded, the dead. You can’t just say it’s all a party. And we talked until about 1 in the morning at a coffee shop in Beverly Hills.Do you feel there was a shift over the first season away from the booze-fueled humor of the early episodes?Yeah, there was. Partly because people who were submitting story lines thought that that’s what was wanted. Larry Gelbart rewrote most of the shows the first season. Midway through the first season, there was a show called “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” and that was a real turning point. Because in that show, a friend of Hawkeye’s shows up among the wounded, and he dies on the operating table. That’s the moment where McLean Stevenson [as Lt. Col. Henry Blake] says: “There’s two rules in war: Young men die, and then Rule 2 is there’s nothing you can do about it.” Something like that.” [The exact quote: “There are certain rules about a war. And rule No. 1 is young men die. And rule No. 2 is, doctors can’t change rule No. 1.”]The network was furious about this. Some guy in charge of programming said, “What is this, a situation tragedy?” Soon after that, we were getting more popular. And the more popular you get, the less they complain.Alda in “M*A*S*H” in 1977, with Gary Burghoff, as Radar, and Loretta Swit, as Maj. Margaret Houlihan, known as Hot Lips. The show lasted nearly four times as long as the Korean War.CBS, via Getty ImagesWas CBS also concerned about the language used to tell these stories?The most striking example to me was early in the series. Radar [Gary Burghoff] is explaining to somebody that he’s unfamiliar with something. And he said, “I’m a virgin at that, sir.” With no sexual context. It was just that he’d never done something before. And the CBS censor said: “You can’t say the word ‘virgin.’ That’s forbidden.” So the next week, Gelbart wrote a little scene that had nothing to do with anything. A patient is being carried through on a stretcher. And I say, “Where you from, son?” And he says, “The Virgin Islands, sir.”Early in the show’s run, Gelbart and Reynolds went to South Korea and recorded 22 hours of interviews with doctors, nurses, pilots and orderlies there. How did those interviews make their way into story lines for the show?We had reams of transcripts of those conversations. I would go through them looking for ideas for stories. And I could see that the other writers were doing the same thing, because there’d be circles around sentences and words. Sometimes one little phrase would spark the imagination of one of us, and that phrase could turn into a story.Larry and Gene went to Korea at the end of the second season, and they got a lot of material for stories. But they had also found that we had, by paying attention to the lives that they lived, we had made up stories that were very similar to things that had actually happened.People may not remember that you directed 32 episodes of “M*A*S*H” and wrote 19 episodes. How did you start getting interested in writing and directing?At the end of the first season, I wrote a show called “The Longjohn Flap.” I borrowed the idea of “La Ronde,” but made it long johns instead because it was reflective of what their lives were like in the cold. I had been trying to learn writing since I was 8 years old. I wanted to be a writer before I wanted to be an actor.Were there story lines that you thought “M*A*S*H” hadn’t quite tackled yet that you wanted to bring into the world of the show as a writer and director?When I wrote, I tried to find out a little bit more about each of the characters. Who is Klinger [Jamie Farr] really? What was underneath — I almost said, what was underneath the dresses. [Laughs.] What was underneath the wearing of the dresses? Who was Margaret [Loretta Swit]?I see on the internet that people assumed that because I was politically active, trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment passed, that in my writing I was trying to make political points, too. And I wasn’t. I really don’t like writing that passes as entertainment when it’s really propaganda. I want to hear a human story.“When I wrote,” Alda said, “I tried to find out a little bit more about” characters like Klinger, played by Jamie Farr.CBS, via Getty ImagesThe unexpected death of Colonel Blake (McLean Stevenson) in the Season 3 finale, “Abyssinia, Henry,” remains one of the biggest surprises in television history. What was it like to shoot that sequence?Gelbart showed me the scene. I think [it was] the morning of the shoot. I knew, but nobody else knew. He wanted to get everybody’s first-time reactions. And it really affected Gary Burghoff on camera. I think everybody was grateful for the shock.It shocked the audience, too. I had a letter from a man who complained that he had to console his 10-year-old son who was sobbing. But it was one of the ways for the adults in the audience to realize that another aspect of war is that things happen that you don’t expect.Was there ever a point when you got tired of fighting the Korean War on TV? The old joke is the show lasted almost four times as long as the actual war.Around a year before we finally ended it, I felt we were getting toward the end of our ability to be fresh every week. I started suggesting that we do a final movie-length episode that really could end it. First of all, we were getting too old to play these people. And after you tell stories about a group of people 250 times, it’s hard not to repeat yourself or say things that sound like they’re supposed to be funny but aren’t really.The series finale remains the highest rated non-Super Bowl program ever broadcast on American TV. With, from left, Alda, Harry Morgan, Swit and David Ogden Stiers.CBS, via Everett CollectionWhat did it mean to you to have Hawkeye leave Korea scarred by the death of a child in the final episode?You just described exactly what I wanted to do with all the characters on the show. I was looking for stories, each in a different way, that showed how everybody left the war with a wound of some kind. Everybody had something taken from them. And Hawkeye was just one of them.Earlier in your career, you had been on another great military comedy, “The Phil Silvers Show,” also known as “Sergeant Bilko.” What did you learn about acting from your pre-“M*A*S*H” TV work?The first thing I learned on the “Bilko” show was you have to know your lines before you go in for the day’s work. I had come from the stage, where I would learn my lines during rehearsal. And the first thing they did is say, “OK, you’re up for your phone conversation,” where it’s a page of dialogue. It was an eye-opening experience. [Laughs.] I staggered through that.Why do you think the audience connected so deeply with “M*A*S*H”?Aside from really good writing and good acting and good directing, the element that really sinks in with an audience is that, as frivolous as some of the stories are, underneath it is an awareness that real people lived through these experiences, and that we tried to respect what they went through. I think that seeps into the unconscious of the audience.They didn’t even want us to show blood at the beginning. In the pilot, the operating room was lit by a red light, so you couldn’t tell what was blood and what wasn’t. Which, once we got picked up, was ditched.And giving us a feel for the circumstances that the real people had to go through, so that you could see that the crazy behavior wasn’t just to be funny. It was a way of separating yourself for a moment from the nastiness.You can’t get as harsh as it really was. More

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    Ron DeSantis’s Migrant Stunt Gets Poor Reviews From Late Night

    The Florida governor claimed credit for sending migrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Trevor Noah accused him of trolling on the taxpayers’ dime.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.Florida Man Owns the LibsGov. Ron DeSantis of Florida took credit for sending two planes filled with migrants to Martha’s Vineyard from Texas on Wednesday. His communications director said it was part of a state program to transport undocumented immigrants to so-called sanctuary destinations.“Ron DeSantis is the governor of Florida, so why is he grabbing refugees in Texas and shipping them to Massachusetts, huh? Why? So he can prove that America’s immigration system is broken? Yeah, everyone knows that. But instead of pushing lawmakers to actually reform the system, he’s using taxpayer money to, what, go viral?” — TREVOR NOAH“If you told DeSantis to spend the same amount of money helping these asylum seekers, he’d be like, ‘Oh, we don’t have the funding for that,’ but to troll the Democrats, suddenly he’s like, ‘Put it on my card, yeah!’” — TREVOR NOAH“And by the way, America actually has a history of doing this. In the 1960s, racist organizations in the South shipped Black people up to Northern states to make liberals uncomfortable. But Ron DeSantis obviously doesn’t know about that, because the pages in his history books were torn out in his state.” — TREVOR NOAH“I guess Ron DeSantis doesn’t know about the Statue of Liberty.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Ron DeSantis is that guy you went to high school with who desperately wanted to be prom king but didn’t have any charisma, so instead, he just pulled the fire alarm and ruined the dance for everybody.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yesterday, DeSantis flew two planes of Hispanic immigrants to Martha’s Vineyard. Hey, Ron, if you’re trying to discourage immigration, maybe don’t send people to one of the loveliest parts of New England just in time for leaf-peeping season.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Delays and Cancellations Edition)“A possible national railroad strike was averted today after 20 hours of talks between the union’s leadership and labor negotiators from the railroads — 20 hours of talks that were very annoying to everyone else in the quiet car.” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, the president helped broker a deal that went down to the wire all night long. Biden was like, ‘I think I can, I think I can, I think I can.’” — JIMMY FALLON“There’s no way that there could have been a rail strike under Biden. I mean, he rode a train to work every day for 40 years. That’d be like a tanning bed shortage under Trump, you know what I’m saying?” — JIMMY FALLON“A strike would have meant lots of Amtrak delays and cancellations — and now that the strike has been avoided, there will still be delays and cancellations.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingDavid Blaine involved the entire audience in a freaky magic trick during Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Joyce DiDonato, Kelli O’Hara and Renée Fleming.Ana Cuba and Thea Traff for The New York TimesRenée Fleming, Joyce DiDonato and Kelli O’Hara star in an adaptation of “The Hours” at the Metropolitan Opera in November. More

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    ‘A Perfect Party’ That Celebrates All Its Guests

    Trusty Sidekick Theater Company has created an outdoor adventure for young people on the autism spectrum.Like many festive occasions, “A Perfect Party for Trees” involves giving and receiving presents: a pine cone, a jar of found objects, a song, even a badger and a bird (both are inventively portrayed by puppets). But perhaps the greatest gift this new play offers its audience is intangible: the freedom to be themselves.The show’s producer, the Trusty Sidekick Theater Company, has created an interactive woodland adventure for children ages 5 and older who are on the autism spectrum. In the show, which is filled with music, young spectators become part of the cast and can participate — or not — while happily defying the constraining conventions of traditional theater. Sit still? This production is a promenade. Be quiet? Please sing along. Don’t get your hands dirty? The plot of “A Perfect Party” includes treasure boxes, filled with trinkets and real dirt, that children can dig into.“It feels like a celebration of this audience instead of a segregation of this audience,” Leigh Walter, Trusty Sidekick’s executive creative producer and the play’s director, said in a recent interview with the show’s creative team. “It’s us, like, going into a public space and throwing a party like we’re throwing a party.”City parks provide the convivial setting. Originally scheduled to debut in June on the Autism Nature Trail at Letchworth State Park in Castile, N.Y. — a coronavirus outbreak in the cast ended that plan — “A Perfect Party” will now have multiple performances, all free, on Sunday at the Little Island Storytelling Festival in Manhattan and Sept. 23 to 25 at Brooklyn Bridge Park. (Email registration is strongly encouraged, though walk-ups are allowed, space permitting.)John Rankin III, left, as the Beekeeper, and Jesse Greenberg as the Bear.Leah ReddyThe show is a birthday tribute to the spirit of the forest. Two quirky characters — the Beekeeper (John Rankin III) and the Bear (Jesse Greenberg) — join forces with Ms. Branch (Naeemah Z. Maddox), a cheerful delivery person who transports both the birthday presents that the cast and the audience create and the offerings that the forest spirit unexpectedly leaves.Arriving in acorn-shaped containers, the spirit’s gifts include the Badger, assembled on the spot from a sock, a cushion and a couple of back scratchers, and the Thrush, whose components are a gourd, a handkerchief and a penny whistle. Designed by Eric Wright, a founder of the Puppet Kitchen, these transformative animals underscore that objects, like people, can play many roles.“We’re trying to create this perfect party for the spirit to come out and visit us,” Walter said. “And all along the way as well, our characters are sort of stumbling along in this story of self-acceptance, really of discovering themselves.”Trusty Sidekick is undergoing its own process of self-discovery. A pioneer in theater for audiences with autism — it has created two such commissions for Lincoln Center, whose Big Umbrella Festival for children on the spectrum is also this weekend — the company is staking new territory with this mobile, open-air play.“I wanted to see what we could do to give all the characters a little story arc and have the audience move with that story arc,” said Marty Allen, the show’s playwright.Because the spectators change locations twice during each 45-minute performance, Greenberg and Maddox, who are also the production’s composers, chose percussive, acoustic instruments that are easily transportable, including a kalimba (thumb piano), a pandereta (hand-held drum) and a West African bell. (At one point, children can choose from a variety of small instruments to join in.) The main musical source, however, is a lightweight glockenspiel, which Greenberg plays with yarn mallets, yielding a softer, more ethereal sound.Cast and audience members celebrating with a collective interactive puppet, the Spirit of the Trees, in a rehearsal of the show’s finale.Leah Reddy “We definitely wanted textures and timbres that would be clear, but not too intense,” he said.Reactions to sound, however, were just one consideration. In creating theater for audiences who might find certain sensations stressful, Trusty Sidekick not only tried out aspects of the show in classrooms of autistic children but also, for the first time, brought people on the spectrum onto the creative team.“There’s the common saying, ‘If you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum, you’ve met one person on the autism spectrum,’” said Andrew M. Duff, the play’s associate director, who was diagnosed when he was 2. In addition to making audience members comfortable by incorporating repetitive gestures and rhythms into the show, Trusty Sidekick will email registering families an intake form about their children’s individual sensitivities. The company can then take the responses into account when performing.Every moment of interactivity is also a choice: Audience members who don’t want to dig with their fingers can use small shovels or simply “supervise”; those who don’t want the treasure boxes’ unearthed trinkets to become gifts can hang onto them during the show.Children might even “chuck the box and dirt,” Duff said. He added, “I think my job, more than anything, was just to encourage our cast and crew to not only be prepared for that, but to look for moments of encouragement in these styles of play.”“A Perfect Party” ultimately teaches that perfection is illusory: In life, the different, the unusual, the flawed can often be the most prized. When a speech to that effect was cut during the play’s development, Twig Hu, the show’s 18-year-old assistant director, who is also on the spectrum, asked that it be restored. “It was important for people to hear,” she said.Trusty Sidekick, which also produces theater for general audiences, wants these children to know that they won’t be judged. However they choose to participate, Allen said, “there’s just not a wrong way to be here with us.” More

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    On TV, the Faces That Look Back at Us When We Come Out

    Pattern Recognition is a series that looks at the building blocks of culture.Produced by Alicia DeSantis, Nick Donofrio, Gabriel Gianordoli, Jolie Ruben, Tala Safie and Josephine Sedgwick.Images: “Ellen” (ABC), “Dawson’s Creek” (WB), “This is Us” (NBC), “Seinfeld” (NBC), “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” (WB), “Master of None” (Netflix), “The Golden Girls” (NBC), “Schitt’s Creek” (Pop TV), “My So-Called Life” (ABC), “All in the Family” (CBS), “BoJack Horseman” (Netflix), “Glee” (Fox), “Heartstopper” (Netflix), “The Office” (NBC), “The Jeffersons” (CBS), “Big Mouth” (Netflix), “Everything Sucks!” (Netflix), “Andi Mack” (Disney Channel), “Never Have I Ever” (Netflix), “Atypical” (Netflix), “Stranger Things” (Netflix), “Sense 8” (Netflix), “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina” (Netflix). More

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    ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Review: For the Cliques

    This musical may lack the 1989 movie’s nihilism, but the gags still work and the songs are great — who are we to quibble?The wicked comedy “Heathers” (1989) has not mellowed with age. To the contrary, the film’s acerbic description of deception, murder and high school cliques feels even more brazenly arch in our age of catfishing and banalized violence. Kevin Murphy and Laurence O’Keefe’s musical adaptation pulls its punches compared to the original but it still has some bite, and a quiver of great songs. The show, which opened Off Broadway in 2014, has even acquired an international following of its own — this Roku Channel capture, directed by Andy Fickman, was filmed in London’s West End in May.As in the movie, nice-girl Veronica (Ailsa Davidson) enjoys a brief alliance with a trio of queen bees all named Heather and led by the imperial Heather Chandler (Maddison Firth) — they get the best number, the brilliantly glam-pop “Candy Store.” Eventually Veronica joins forces with J.D. (Simon Gordon), the manipulative loner who is the musical’s biggest casualty: the story hinges on him being unabashedly nihilistic but both the show and Gordon’s portrayal are too timid. Vivian Panka, on the other hand, easily commands center stage as a robotically intense Heather Duke, and nails her solo, “Never Shut Up Again.” That new song is among the changes Murphy and O’Keefe have made since the New York version — some underlining Veronica’s agency, others sanitizing a few lyrics (though there are still healthy helpings of the indispensable profanity). But despite these flashes of timidity and an overlong running time, the musical is a fun romp with plenty of, ahem, killer tunes.Heathers: The MusicalNot rated. Running time: 2 hours 16 minutes. Watch on the Roku Channel. More

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    Plays of Helplessness, and Hope, as the Planet Burns

    New works by major German-language dramatists at the Kunstfest Weimar festival tackle ethical questions at a moment of environmental anxiety.WEIMAR, Germany — Once again, summer brought with it a barrage of unnatural natural catastrophes: floods, forest fires, droughts, deadly heat waves and mass die-offs of fish and fowl. Much of what climate scientists foretold is coming true. It was against this background that the Kunstfest Weimar, a late summer event that is the largest contemporary arts festival in eastern Germany, took place with an emphasis on climate justice and our collective responsibility to strive for a better world.Helpless in the face of these environmental calamities, many of us are probably feeling a measure of “solastalgia.” That term was coined in 2004 by the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who defined it as “a type of homesickness or melancholia that you feel when you’re at home and your home environment is changing around you in ways that you feel are profoundly negative.” Put more succinctly, it is “a form of homesickness one gets when one is still at ‘home.’”“Solastalgia” is also the name of a new play by Thomas Köck that had its premiere last week at the Kunstfest, held annually since 1990 in this small, culturally rich city and shrewdly curated this year by Rolf C. Hemke. A coproduction between the festival and Schauspiel Frankfurt, “Solastalgia” is an artful and elegant lamentation about the state of our planet. Köck, a young Austrian theater maker, finds an arrestingly poetic register for this meditation on the grief and panic that are common responses to seeing nature perish. Essentially a 70-minute-long monologue that Köck, who also directs the energetic and music-filled production, distributes among three actresses, it is by turns humorous, absurd, surreal and horrifying.On a simple, semicircular set, the actresses Miriam Schiweck, Katharina Linder and Mateja Meded, in costumes that seem stitched together from garbage, declaim Köck’s fragmented text, which contains ruminations on Germany’s increasingly ravaged forests and a narrative about a former builder for whom solastalgia becomes not only an existential but also a physical malady. Köck’s text is lyrical and poetic, with rhythms and cadences of overlapping dialogue creating musical effects.For artists who set out to make works about burning issues like climate change, there is always a danger of sliding into righteousness, or sermonizing. Yet there’s a fundamental openness to Köck’s play that prevents it from becoming propagandistic. How ought we mourn the destruction of our habitat? How best do we live with the knowledge that the forests, beaches and oceans we love are vanishing? “Solastalgia” offers few answers, but its barrage of powerful images and incantatory language creates room for poetic and philosophical reflection.Ylva Stenberg, holding sign, as Greta Thunberg in “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” directed by Andrea Moses.Candy WelzThe ecological outrage and anxiety at the core of “Solastalgia” were also central to “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” a musical theater work that might best be described as an immersive environmental agitprop Gesamtkunstwerk. During the performance, the audience follows a cast of actors, singers and musicians through various indoor and outdoor locations in a former electrical power plant on the edge of Weimar’s historic center. Unfortunately, much of “Welcome to Paradise Lost,” adapted from a recent play by Falk Richter, a leading German dramatist, has a hectoring tone that makes it less compelling than the inventive production, directed by Andrea Moses.Although the direct source material for “Welcome to Paradise Lost” is the Persian verse epic “The Conference of the Birds,” in which winged creatures gather to seek an enlightened sovereign, Richter’s text also nods to Aristophanes and Alfred Hitchcock. In Farid ud-Din Attar’s 12th-century poem, the birds travel through a succession of allegorically named valleys where they are confronted with human vices and stupidities. In Richter’s version, the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg (sung by the young Swedish soprano Ylva Stenberg) guides a chorus of 14 youngsters wearing rubber bird masks on the path of resistance and uprising.As Greta leads her panicked flock, alarmed over the loss of their habitat, their methods evolve. Impassioned yet peaceful gatherings reminiscent of Fridays for Future give way to the disruptive tactics associated with Extinction Rebellion in an exciting smoke- and flare-filled outdoor scene where the birds plot terroristic revenge on humankind. But for all the undeniable energy of the production and the performances, “Welcome to Paradise Lost” isn’t exactly the climate change opera we’ve been waiting for.The music by the local composer Jörn Arnecke has moments of arresting lyricism yet is just as often pedestrian. Most crucially, perhaps, the libretto itself, containing numerous outside texts, including Thunberg’s “How dare you” speech to the United Nations, neither hangs together nor gives any sense of a narrative or a poetic progression. It is loopier and more freewheeling than “Solastalgia” but also has the subtlety of a cudgel, thanks to sloganizing and finger wagging.Shifting registers, the Kunstfest turned from environmental alarm to the scourge of right-wing radicalism in Germany.The cast of “Werwolfkommandos,” directed by Marie Schwesinger.Candy Welz“Werwolfkommandos,” a sobering piece of docudrama directed by Marie Schwesinger, is an almost clinical probe into two recent trials that roiled the nation: the first, of a neo-Nazi who in 2019 assassinated Walter Lübcke, a regional official in the city of Kassel; the second, of the German military officer who had posed as a Syrian refugee and was planning a string of assassinations at the time of his arrest in 2017.Rage-filled yet coolly dispassionate, “Werwolfkommandos” consists largely of verbal reconstructions of the trials. Dressed monochromatically, four steely actors bring sang-froid to the courtroom proceedings. The way the actors keep sifting through the evidence, the arguments and the timelines, and the minutiae of the proceedings becomes infuriating and exasperating, which is, of course, precisely the point. At the end of the production, the house lights go dark, and the actors, their faces uncannily illumined by the glow of their cellphones, recite headlines about right-wing extremism. The night of the premiere, the most recent news item was just three days old.Right-wing terror has a particular significance in Weimar. You have only to venture 20 minutes outside of the picturesque old city, with its monuments to Goethe and Schiller, to arrive at the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald. To travel the six miles between them is to be confronted with the proximity of culture and barbarism that is inscribed in German history.An installation by the American artist Aura Rosenberg, which is part of the Kunstfest’s program, offers a poetic reflection on Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History,” which famously interprets a print by the Bauhaus artist Paul Klee, “Angelus Novus,” as the emblem of history, unable to turn away from the catastrophes of the past as it is blown into the future.At the center of Rosenberg’s installation, on view at the Bauhaus Museum Weimar until Oct. 31, is a multilayered video work, “Angel of Paradise,” that literalizes Benjamin’s vision of history as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage” in a trippy computer-animated collage. And yet, at the center of the rubble of civilization heaped together onscreen, we find visual echoes of Benjamin’s “spark of hope in the past” that drives us to imagine a brighter tomorrow, despite the calamities of history.A similar hope courses through the works of artists invited by the Kunstfest Weimar to share their theatrical responses to our deeply imperfect present.Solastalgia. Directed by Thomas Köck. Sept. 23 through Oct. 21 at Schauspiel Frankfurt.Welcome to Paradise Lost. Directed by Andrea Moses. Deutsches Nationaltheater Weimar. Sept. 18.Werwolfkommandos. Directed by Marie Schwesinger. Oct. 20 through Nov. 4 at Landungsbrücken Frankfurt. More