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    Get Your Kill Room Ready. Dexter Is Back.

    Eight years after the lovable serial killer went into bearded self-exile, he returns for “Dexter: New Blood.” Here’s a refresher on where things left off.“Dexter” ended in 2013, with its protagonist self-exiled to the frozen North and most major characters dead. But you can’t keep a high-functioning psychopath down. “Dexter: New Blood,” which premieres on Showtime on Nov. 7, finds Michael C. Hall’s Dexter Morgan working at a fish and game shop under an assumed name. His side hustles including bladesmithing, goat farming and maybe some vengeance.In the intervening eight years, you may have forgotten a few details of the show — other than, say, its wildly unpopular finale. Here are a few mementos.The KillerDexter Morgan, born Dexter Moser, grew up in Miami, the adopted son of Harry Morgan (James Remar), a Miami Metro police officer, and his wife, Doris. He has an adoptive sister, Debra Morgan (Jennifer Carpenter). During the first season, it is revealed that Dexter also has a half-brother, Brian (Christian Camargo), and that the two boys witnessed their biological mother’s murder, via chain saw, and were left with her dismembered body in a blood-flooded shipping container for days. If you’re thinking trauma like that might make anyone into a serial killer, you’re right! Twice!When Dexter was still a child, Harry discovered the corpse of the neighbor’s yappy dog, which Dexter had buried alongside other animal bones. Accepting Dexter’s antisocial tendencies, Harry channeled those impulses into hunting — first animals, then, as Harry put it, “other kinds of animals” who have escaped justice. With Harry’s permission, Dexter killed his first human at 20, offing a nurse who was overdosing her patients.Dexter became a bloodstain pattern analyst for Miami Metro. Deb joined him there as a police officer, working first in vice, then in homicide, and in time becoming a detective. Eventually, Deb learned Dexter’s secret (walking in on your adopted brother mid-stab will do that) and later killed to protect him, which sent her spiraling. She also discovered that she was in love with him, an upsetting twist even for a show that specialized in upset.Armchair psychiatrists watching at home have diagnosed Dexter as a sociopath and a secret schizoid. Dexter claims not to feel human emotion. He lets the audience in on his real thoughts through voice-over, like this one from the pilot: “People fake a lot of human interactions. But I feel like I fake them all. And I fake them very well. And that’s my burden, I guess.” As the original series progressed, Dexter seemed to move closer to authentic emotion, maintaining friendships and romantic relationships and enjoying a close bond with Deb, even as he never lost his need to kill. He personified that predatory urge as his “dark passenger.”Is Dexter a bad person who does good things or a good person who does bad ones? Or neither? Or both? He loves a pulled pork sandwich and is surprisingly good at bowling.James Remar, left, plays Dexter’s adoptive father, Harry, who appears to Dexter in visions to remind him of the code.Sonja Flemming/ShowtimeThe CodeOnce he recognized Dexter’s death drive, Harry taught Dexter to adhere to a code. “There were so many lessons in the vaunted Code of Harry — twisted commandments handed down from the only God I’ve ever worshiped,” as Dexter put it. “One through 10: Don’t get caught.” Other rules: Never kill an innocent person. Kill only those beyond the reach of the justice system. Be prepared. Leave no trace.Dexter occasionally violated some aspect of the code. (He was caught surprisingly often. But that’s what happens when you run for eight seasons.) But he killed the wrong person only once, and he rarely lets emotions cloud his judgment. He often killed when threatened, but he sometimes refused to kill people — even dangerous or inconvenient people — when they failed to meet Harry’s criteria. He has even released a few people from his kill rooms.Dexter (Hall, with Sam Underwood) delivers a lecture to one of his many, many victims per the usual routine.Randy Tepper/ShowtimeThe RitualUnless acting in self-defense or within a significant time crunch, Dexter adhered to a specific ritual. Knocking his victims out with a synthetic opioid, he brings them to a plastic-draped kill room, decorated with photographs of their own victims. He undresses his prey, then binds them to a table with duct tape or cling wrap. Using a scalpel, he makes an incision on his victims’ cheeks, placing a droplet of their blood on a glass slide, adding the slides to his collection of trophies.Before killing his victims, whom he refers to as his playmates, he often toys with them, engaging them in conversation. His preferred weapon is a knife, but he knows his way around a saw — and an anchor, a cleaver and a pen. After the kill, he dismembers the bodies, places the parts into plastic trash bags and dumps them into the bay.Dexter at one of many funerals with his sister, Debra (Jennifer Carpenter, in plaid shirt), who . . . also later died.Sonja Flemming/ShowtimeThe DeadBy the time the original series ended, most major characters had died. There are Dexter’s direct victims, of course, a list that includes his brother, Brian; an ex-lover or two; and more than 100 others. Most of his known associates have also come to bloody ends, like his wife, Rita Morgan (Julie Benz), a victim of the Trinity Killer (John Lithgow), and several of Dexter’s co-workers, including James Doakes (Erik King), an antagonist, and Maria LaGuerta (Lauren Velez), his former lieutenant, shot by Deb in a bid to protect Dexter.Deb died, too. (More on that in a minute.) But deceased “Dexter” characters often cameo, courtesy of Dexter’s vivid imagination.Dexter said goodbye to his sister in the original series finale, and goodbye to his life in Miami.Randy Tepper/ShowtimeThat FinaleThe final season found Dexter stalking the Brain Surgeon, a serial killer with ties to a famous psychologist. The Brain Surgeon shot Deb in the abdomen. In the finale, she suffered a complication during surgery, a blood clot (way to work those metaphors) that left her in a vegetative state.Dexter had planned to escape to Argentina with his onetime girlfriend and fellow serial killer, Hannah McKay (Yvonne Strahovski), a poisoner, and Harrison, the child he had with Rita. But Dexter can’t escape himself. As a storm approached, he murdered the Brain Surgeon. With a pen! Sending Hannah and Harrison ahead, he turned off Deb’s life support and absconded with her sheet-wrapped body, which he dumped alongside his other kills. The hurricane arrived, wrecking Dexter’s boat and ostensibly killing him, too. But the final shots find Dexter in some frozen waste, having grown a lumbersexual beard and invested heavily in flannel.It’s an ending that no one saw coming. Probably because it lacked closure, retribution and attentiveness to Dexter’s journey toward personhood. Maybe the snowy new series, set in upstate New York, will provide that. More

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    Jimmy Kimmel: ‘Aaron Is a Karen’

    As Covid sidelined the Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, Kimmel and other hosts scorned him for implying that he’d been vaccinated.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.Rodger ThatThe Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers tested positive for Covid this week, which means he’ll sit out Sunday’s game against the Kansas City Chiefs (or as Stephen Colbert put it, “the next five State Farm commercials”).“He’ll be watching it from ‘Mahome.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL, referencing Chiefs quarterback Patrick MahomesLate-night hosts found it egregious that Rodgers had vaguely referred to himself as “immunized,” leading some to believe he’d been vaccinated. Instead, according to a report, he received homeopathic treatment.“I’m no expert, but I’m guessing it’s a lot easier to just play football with a shot in your arm than a jade egg stuck where the sun don’t shine. Then again, they are called the Packers.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s not the only confusing statement that he’s made about his vaccine status. For example, in one press conference he said, ‘I’d like to think of myself as vaccine-adjacent.’ In another press conference he said, “In a spiritual sense, are any of us truly vaccinated?’ And finally, he cleared things up by saying, ‘I didn’t not, not, not not, not get the shot. Not.’” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s really vague. He better not talk that way in the huddle.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Honestly, the only thing worse than not getting vaccinated when you’re in close contact with other people is letting them think you’re vaccinated when you’re not. It’s basically the Covid equivalent of ‘The condom fell off.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Aaron is a Karen, that’s the fact of the matter.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (More Shots Edition)“The Biden administration today ordered U.S. companies with 100 or more employees to have their workers fully vaccinated or regularly tested for the coronavirus by Jan. 4. All right, you heard the man, Arcade Fire.” — SETH MEYERS“It’s great timing — make sure everyone is vaccinated right after the holidays.” — JIMMY FALLON“Team Biden today announced that more than 100 million American workers are required to be fully vaccinated by Jan. 4. And if I know my fellow American workers, everyone’s going to be super chill about that.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Because I guess Jan. 1 — just way too obvious.” — JAMES CORDEN“What’s the thinking here? ‘Nobody expects this policy to start on a random Tuesday, let’s do that!’” — JAMES CORDEN“Like the drunkest friend at a bachelor party, Joe Biden’s going to make sure everyone gets shots.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn “The Tonight Show,” Ariana Grande got to see Jimmy Fallon play a clip of her singing the national anthem at eight years old.Also, Check This OutMeryl Streep as President Orlean, a commander in chief very focused on her approval ratings, in “Don’t Look Up.”Niko Tavernise/Netflix Finally, a world in which Meryl Streep is president — in Adam McKay’s apocalyptic satire “Don’t Look Up.” More

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    Alice Childress Finally Gets to Make ‘Trouble’ on Broadway

    Wiletta Mayer walks into the theater already knowing how things will go. Smartly dressed, attractive and middle-aged (don’t ask for a number, because “a woman that’ll tell her age will tell anything”), she is a veteran actress who’s played maids and mammies and knows how to cater to white directors and producers. You can call it “Uncle Tomming.” Or you can call it plain common sense. Either way, it’s a living.Until enough is enough.Alice Childress created Wiletta Mayer, the protagonist of her 1955 play, “Trouble in Mind,” to paint a realistic portrait of what it was to be Black in the theater industry. Or to be more accurate: She wanted to portray what it is to be Black in theater, because 66 years later, as the play opens on Broadway in a Roundabout Theater Company production, the words Childress wrote remain just as relevant.And yet this author and play, a comedy-drama about an interracial cast rehearsing an anti-lynching play written by a white author and led by a white director, haven’t gotten their proper due in the decades since its premiere. Childress was supposed to be the first Black female playwright on Broadway, with a play critiquing the racism and misogyny of the theater industry.Thanks to interfering white theatermakers and a Broadway unwelcoming to challenging Black art, things didn’t turn out as planned. But the content of the play, and its troubled production history, prove how rightly “Trouble in Mind” and its author should be celebrated as part of the canon.From left: Chuck Cooper, LaChanze, Danielle Campbell and Michael Zegen in “Trouble in Mind,” which will have its long-awaited Broadway opening night this month.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIn the play, Wiletta arrives for her part in “Chaos in Belleville” alongside a young Black actor named John; an older Black actor named Sheldon; a younger Black actress named Millie; and two white actors, Judy, a well-meaning yet naïve Yale graduate, and Bill, a neurotic character actor. The play within the play is about a Black man who dares to vote and is killed for it.During rehearsals Wiletta tries to give the newcomer John tips on how to survive as a Black actor in the business, but her own advice fails when the white director, Al Manners, pushes her to perpetuate stereotypes.It’s a familiar scenario, one Childress encountered herself as a young actress in the 1944 Broadway production of “Anna Lucasta.” She based Wiletta on the character actress Georgia Burke, who appeared with her in that production. Like Wiletta, Burke had also done her fair share of mammy roles, and she would later appear in the original Broadway “Porgy and Bess.”Burke had problems with the director of “Anna Lucasta,” but Childress knew her to complain only to her fellow Black actors; when it came to white directors and producers she kept quiet for the sake of her career.In “Trouble in Mind,” Childress wrote a version of Burke who finally had to speak up.“Darling, don’t think. You’re great until you start thinking,” Al Manners says to Wiletta during rehearsals. That kind of condescending treatment may have been par for the course for Black theater performers. Childress, however, was uncompromising.“She was a woman of amazing integrity,” said Kathy Perkins, Childress’s friend and the editor of a major anthology of her plays. (She is also the lighting designer for Roundabout’s production.) “She hated the saying ‘ahead of your time.’ Her thing was that people aren’t ahead of their time; they’re just choked during their time, they’re not allowed to do what they should be doing.”Childress, at left, with actors rehearsing the premiere of “Trouble in Mind” in 1955.Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library for the Performing ArtsIt’s this integrity — or, more accurately, the times choking a great writer of integrity — that cost Childress Broadway. In an ironic echo of the play’s plot, Childress found herself at odds with the would-be director when “Trouble in Mind” was slated for its Off Broadway premiere. Unwilling to budge, she took over as co-director, along with the actress Clarice Taylor, who starred as Wiletta.The play premiered on Nov. 5, 1955, at the Greenwich Mews Theater, and ran for 91 performances.But that version isn’t the version we know today.The white producers were concerned about the play’s ending, which they thought was too negative. According to Perkins, as a relatively new playwright Childress was intimidated by these experienced producers.And then there was the rest of the cast and crew to think about. Childress was a fierce advocate for unions and workers’ rights, and feared that pulling the play would cost everyone their jobs. So she conceded, providing an ending of reconciliation and racial harmony, even though she maintained that it was unrealistic.The New York Times praised the play as “a fresh, lively and cutting satire” — except for the ending. Childress always regretted the change, and said she’d never compromise her artistic integrity again. So when “Trouble in Mind” was optioned for Broadway with the happy ending and a new title (“So Early Monday Morning”), Childress refused. She would have been the first Black female playwright to see her work there; instead, that honor would go to Lorraine Hansberry four years later, for “A Raisin in the Sun.”Childress, who died in 1994, never had the financial success nor popular recognition that her work merited in her lifetime. It’s unfortunate because her plays are works of merit. Many of her works, like “Florence” (1949), “Wedding Band: A Love/Hate Story in Black and White” (1966) and “Wine in the Wilderness” (1969), are confrontational without being pandering or preachy. Not simply about race, they are also about gender and class and artistry, and challenge their audiences to look at their own prejudices and misconceptions. (Theater for a New Audience is reviving “Wedding Band,” a tale of interracial love set amid the 1918 flu pandemic, Off Broadway this spring.)And they’re clever. The meta structure of “Trouble in Mind” makes Childress’s satire especially poignant; it’s both explicitly biting and subtly searing.Childress, at right, with James Broderick and Ruby Dee, the stars of the 1972 production of her play “Wedding Band.” Theater for a New Audience will present a revival in 2022.Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesOne reason Childress is often left out of conversations about the American canon is her style. In an essay in “The Cambridge Companion to African-American Theater,” the historian and dramaturge Adrienne Macki Braconi calls Childress a “transitional” writer, unheralded because her work reflects “the conventions of dramatic realism.”“Critics often overlook their subtle variations on the form, including such innovations as bold thematic content; assertive, complex female characters; and a focus on lower-class and middle-class blacks,” Macki Braconi wrote of Childress and the writer Eulalie Spence.Sandra Shannon, a scholar of Black theater and emeritus professor of African-American literature at Howard University, maintained that Childress’s blend of naturalistic dialogue and social commentary put her “at the top of her game” among playwrights in the late ’40s and early ’50s. Her plays, Shannon said, “raise awareness, stop short of just getting out and marching in the streets.”And La Vinia Delois Jennings, the author of the 1995 book “Alice Childress” and a distinguished professor in the humanities at the University of Tennessee, pointed out the “dynamism” of Childress’s works, which so often feature Black women taking agency. The stereotypical trope of the angry Black woman gets turned on its head, Jennings said, proving that anger can be “liberating — a force that brings about change.”But for all of Childress’s dynamism, it still took over 60 years to get her work to a Broadway stage.A 1950 portrait of Alice Childress, painted by Alice Neel, was included in a recent Metropolitan Museum of Art show.The Estate of Alice Neel and David Zwirner; The Collection of Art BerlinerCharles Randolph-Wright, who will be directing the Broadway production, said he’s been eyeing this play for the big stage for more than a decade.On June 20, 2011, a nonprofit called Project1Voice hosted an event in which 19 theaters across the country did readings of “Trouble in Mind.” Randolph-Wright directed a Roundabout reading at the American Airlines Theater, which included André De Shields, Leslie Uggams, Bill Irwin and LaChanze, who will be starring as Wiletta in the full production at the same Broadway venue.“I’ll never forget everyone coming up to me saying, ‘Did you rewrite this?’ and I was like, ‘No, she wrote this in 1955.’ And they said, ‘But you tweaked it —’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t touch one thing,” Randolph-Wright explained.After all, theater insiders and outsiders are still loudly calling for improved representation more than a half-century later.“There’s been a false sense of progress. That progress has been in fits and starts,” Shannon said. “The same issues that Childress deals with, or dealt with in the 1950s with ‘Trouble in Mind,’ have always been bubbling beneath the surface. They’ve never gone away.”In one scene in the play, Manners says, “I want truth. What is truth? Truth is simply whatever you can bring yourself to believe, that is all. You must have integrity about your work.”Though the statement comes from a flawed character, the sentiment is Childress all the way. Perkins said that at the end of the day, Childress wouldn’t say she was writing for white audiences or Black audiences; she only wrote for herself, and she concerned herself first and foremost with the truth, whatever form that would take.Randolph-Wright said he thinks of John Lewis when he approaches the play. “It is ‘good trouble,’ ” he said, referring to the call to action made famous by the activist and congressman. “It agitates, it illuminates, it makes you laugh, it’s entertaining.”But he hopes this production will only be the beginning — that audiences will learn more about Childress’s work, and that she and other Black writers will get greater recognition for their contributions to the art form. Because this moment — after Black Lives Matter and “We See You, White American Theater,” and when seven new Broadway plays this fall are by Black writers — is perfect for Childress, but also for Spence and Ed Bullins and Angelina Weld Grimké and other Black playwrights past and present.So will change really come this time around? The version of “Trouble in Mind” that’s finally arriving on Broadway ends inconclusively, not optimistically. The ending Childress’s producers rejected back in 1955 seems right for right now. More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in November

    Our picks for November, including ‘tick, tick … BOOM!’, ‘The Great’ Season 2, and ‘Passing’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for November.New to NetflixNOV. 5‘A Cop Movie’An inventive and tricky hybrid of fiction and nonfiction, the documentary “A Cop Movie” tells the mostly true story of two Mexico City police officers: a man and woman who briefly dated and were dubbed “the love patrol” by their colleagues. The director Alonso Ruizpalacios defies expectations throughout, using dramatic recreations, surprise reversals and raw interviews to keep the audience guessing about whether this is an earnest film about the challenges of being a cop or an exposé of institutional corruption.NOV. 10‘Passing’Based on Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel, “Passing” stars Tessa Thompson as Irene and Ruth Negga as Clare, two Black women who were friends when they were younger and who meet again later in life. Irene is a social activist, living with her husband (André Holland) in an upscale Harlem brownstone. Clare is passing as white, and is married to a rich, racist businessman (Alexander Skarsgard). Written and directed by Rebecca Hall — herself biracial — this handsome-looking black-and-white period drama examines the boundaries of race and class in early 20th century New York.NOV. 19‘Cowboy Bebop’ Season 1This live-action remake of the popular anime series “Cowboy Bebop” retains what made the original so beloved: a genre-bending story about planet-hopping bounty hunters, an eye-catching style that draws on old westerns and film noir, and a jazzy up-tempo Yoko Kanno score. John Cho stars as Spike Spiegel, who, alongside his partner Jet Black (Mustafa Shakir), chases criminals across the colonies built by the refugees of a post-apocalyptic Earth. The heroes add allies and enemies with each new adventure, in a show that mixes action, comedy and science-fiction weirdness.‘tick, tick…BOOM!’Netflix‘tick, tick … BOOM!’The “Hamilton” creator and star Lin Manuel-Miranda makes his feature film-directing debut, paying homage to one of his biggest influences: the late “Rent” writer and composer Jonathan Larson. In this adaptation of Larson’s lesser-known, semi-autobiographical theater piece, Andrew Garfield plays an aspiring Broadway composer named Jon, still working at a diner and waiting on his big break at the dawn of the 1990s. Miranda and the screenwriter Steven Levenson tinker a little with the stage production (which originated as a concert, before being turned into a small-scaled musical by David Auburn), turning “tick, tick … BOOM!” into more of a straight biopic with catchy songs.NOV. 24‘Bruised’Halle Berry both directs and stars in this underdog sports melodrama, about a down-and-out MMA fighter named Jackie Justice who comes out of retirement after the son she gave up for adoption shows up on her doorstep. Berry had to train hard to play an experienced, hardened athlete, and to take on this role of a woman trying to shake herself out of a fog and prove to her family and her sport that she’s still a winner. ‘Robin Robin’This half-hour Christmas special comes from the team at Aardman Animations, the studio behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep. “Robin Robin” tells the story of a small bird (voiced by Bronte Carmichael) who was raised by a family of mice, and who goes on an adventure during the holiday season where her unusual upbringing proves to be an asset. The adorable character-designs and the voice performances of Richard E. Grant (as a magpie) and Gillian Anderson (as a cat) accent what should be another of Aardman’s classy, funny, cleverly constructed family comedies.Also arriving: “The Claus Family” (Nov. 1), “The Harder They Fall” (Nov. 3), “The Club” Season 1 (Nov. 5), “Love Hard” (Nov. 5), “Narcos: Mexico” Season 3 (Nov. 5), “The Unlikely Murderer” (Nov. 5), “Father Christmas Is Back” (Nov. 7), “Swap Shop: Dash for Cash” Season 1 (Nov. 9), “Gentefied” Season 2 (Nov. 10), “Red Notice” (Nov. 12), “Christmas Flow” Season 1 (Nov. 17), “Tiger King” Season 2 (Nov. 17), “The Princess Switch 3: Romancing the Star” (Nov. 18), “Blown Away: Christmas” Season 1 (Nov. 19), “Waffles + Mochi’s Holiday Feast” (Nov. 23), “A Boy Called Christmas” (Nov. 24), “True Story” (Nov. 24), “A Castle for Christmas” (Nov. 26), “School of Chocolate” Season 1 (Nov. 26), “Charlie’s Colorforms City: Snowy Stories” (Nov. 30).New to Stan‘The Great’ Season 2StanNOV. 5‘Bobby’Sometimes written as “Bo66y” — to commemorate England’s 1966 World Cup championship — the title of this documentary refers to Bobby Moore, the star defender and team captain whose creativity and doggedness electrified his home country. After his pro career ended, Moore struggled with money and health woes, and at times felt like a forgotten man. “Bobby” is an attempt to right some of those wrongs, telling a triumphant and tragic story via thrilling vintage footage and impassioned testimonials from teammates and fans.NOV. 8‘Yellowstone’ Season 4One of TV’s most popular dramas returns, after a season three finale which saw the Montana ranching family the Duttons facing multiple threats. Will the “Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan actually kill off any of his leads? Probably not. (Sheridan’s central antihero, the grizzled cowboy power-broker John Dutton, is played by Kevin Costner, one of the show’s producers.) After a season which saw the Duttons beset by investment bankers, environmental activists and revenge-minded outlaws, a few bombs and machine-guns shouldn’t keep them down too long.NOV. 20‘The Great’ Season 2Elle Fanning returns as Catherine II and Nicholas Hoult as Peter III in season two of the satirical dramedy “The Great,” an “occasionally true” look back at the tumultuous marriage between a cruel Russian emperor and his ambitious, coup-minded young bride. Gillian Anderson joins the cast this season, playing Catherine’s mother, who tries to manipulate things behind the scenes as her daughter prepares to become a mother herself. Expect more of the creator Tony McNamara’s puckish mix of purposeful anachronisms and courtly intrigue.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    ‘Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord’ Review: Our Sewing Superhero

    The first post-shutdown live performance at New York Theater Workshop is almost a debriefing after the crisis we have endured.Before the lights go down at New York Theater Workshop, Kristina Wong gets up from her Hello Kitty sewing machine, where she’s been making a face mask, to deliver some trigger warnings about the solo performance she’s about to give.Her tone is tongue in cheek — she is, after all, a comedian — but her heads-up to the audience is for real, because she’s wading straight into one of the great divides in live theater right now: between people hungry for drama that examines the last 20 months and people desperate for psychic escape from all that.“This show takes place in the pandemic,” Wong says. “I know. I know! Now you get to find out if watching live theater about the pandemic, during a pandemic, is your thing. And because it’s set in the pandemic, there are mentions of death, illness, poverty, mental health stressors, racism, trauma.” A pause, and then she adds one more possible trigger: “The last U.S. president.”Truth be told, I have not been clamoring for theater about dire recent events. And I confess that, en route to Wong’s show, I was feeling particularly ground down by all the barefaced people I’d seen, once again, on the subway.Yet “Kristina Wong, Sweatshop Overlord” turns out to be a spiky comic tonic for just such gloom. Directed by Chay Yew, it’s the first post-shutdown live performance at New York Theater Workshop, and it’s ideally suited as such: almost a debriefing after the crisis we have endured, even though we haven’t reached its end.Wong’s outfit includes a bandoleer with bright spools of thread, which she slings across her chest, and, strapped to her back, a giant pair of scissors.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesDon’t be fooled by the bluster in the show’s title. The tale that Wong tells isn’t truly self-aggrandizing. It’s about the Auntie Sewing Squad, a far-flung group of volunteers she assembled from her home in Los Angeles in March 2020 to make face masks, which were desperately needed then and perilously hard to come by. Selflessness and human connection are dominant themes of this narrative.“Sweatshop Overlord” is also about mothers and daughters and heritage — sewing skills passed down from one generation of Asian American women to the next — and how at a time of horrific anti-Asian bigotry and violence in this country, some of those women harnessed perennially undervalued skills for an urgent common good. Amid corrosive cultural discord, as President Trump and others loudly blamed Asians for the coronavirus, they acted with a kind of ferocious grace.Wong, whose Zoom version of the show was part of New York Theater Workshop’s online programming last May, didn’t mean the Auntie Sewing Squad to last more than a few weeks.“There is a rumor that the U.S. post office will be delivering five masks to every address in America,” she tells the audience, one month into the project, “and that will make us obsolete very soon.”Remember that rumor? “Sweatshop Overlord” is full of little memory jolts like that. Those deliveries never happened, of course, and Wong’s group grew to include hundreds of people — including her own mother — who sewed more than 350,000 face masks for vulnerable communities before disbanding in August 2021.“Is America a banana republic disguised as a democracy?” Wong asks more than once, aghast at what she sees as the government’s failure to protect its citizens from the pandemic threat.Alternating dark humor and wry social commentary with anger, sorrow and fear, she tells the story of the Aunties inside the chronology we all lived through. These were ordinary Americans — many Asian, mostly female — enlisting in a fight for the health and well-being of their country. Sort of like a patriotic war movie in which the hostilities involve a lethal virus and belligerent resistance to mask wearing, and where people under fire volley back with the copious fruits of traditional “women’s work.”To immerse herself in this battle, Wong dons a wonderfully playful action-hero costume by the Tony Award winner Linda Cho. The bandoleer that Wong slings across her chest holds bright spools of thread, not bullets; a jumbo pair of scissors is strapped to her back.Junghyun Georgia Lee’s set has an upstage wall made of surgical masks, which becomes an ideal screen for Caite Hevner’s many projections.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs vital as her humor is to the tone of the performance, the production design is just as important. The set, by Junghyun Georgia Lee, has an upstage wall made of about 1,400 surgical masks — an ideal screen for Caite Hevner’s many projections — but the real eye-catcher is the candy-colored sewing room laid out before it.The objects there are built on an Alice in Wonderland scale: tomato-shaped pincushions as big as chairs, a gargantuan seam ripper in royal blue, bobbins a giant could use. It feels heightened and hallucinatory, like the first year of the pandemic, but also safe, like a child’s playroom. Amith Chandrashaker’s saturated lighting aids the shift between those moods.“Sweatshop Overlord” sags a bit in its last third, and one moment meant to be solemn is puzzling instead. But Wong is good company and an accomplished storyteller, and she and Yew have made a show that is both heartening and cathartic. Tripping our collective memories of a strange, scary, isolated time, it asks us to recall them together. Which helps, actually.Back out on the street afterward, we’re lighter — and, thanks to the Aunties, imbued with hope.Kristina Wong, Sweatshop OverlordThrough Nov. 21 at New York Theater Workshop, Manhattan; nytw.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Camille Saviola, ‘Deep Space Nine’ and Stage Actor, Dies at 71

    She was known for her comic work in cabarets, for her performance in the musical “Nine” on Broadway and for her role in a “Star Trek” spinoff.Camille Saviola, an actress and singer who made an impression in the musical “Nine” on Broadway, in assorted cabaret spoofs and on television in “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine” and other series, died on Oct. 28 in a hospital in North Bergen, N.J. She was 71.Alyssa Romeo, a great-niece, said the cause was heart failure.Ms. Saviola frequently drew comparisons to Ethel Merman for her big voice, which she liked to use to comic effect. One character she played in more than one cabaret show received the Ten Commandments of Soul from James Brown, earning her something of a nickname: “the Italian Godmother of Soul.”Onstage, she was best known for originating the role of Mama Maddelena, a spa manager, in the original production of “Nine,” the Arthur Kopit-Maury Yeston musical about a film director having a midlife crisis, which opened on Broadway in May 1982 and ran for almost two years. She was featured in a comic number, “The Germans at the Spa.”But she wasn’t limited to comedy. In 2005, for instance, she starred in a production of “Mother Courage and Her Children,” Bertolt Brecht’s famed antiwar play, in Pasadena, Calif.“As Mother Courage, Camille Saviola is wily, indomitable and eminently practical,” Daryl H. Miller wrote in reviewing that performance in The Los Angeles Times.She endeared herself to a different group of fans when she was cast in “Deep Space Nine” as Kai Opaka, a spiritual leader on the planet Bajor. Though she appeared in only four episodes, from 1993 to 1996, Ms. Saviola was well known to followers of the franchise, many of whom posted about her death on social media.In a 1995 interview with a “Deep Space Nine” fan magazine that is quoted on the website Memory Alpha, Ms. Saviola talked about how she got the part.“I went in — every character actress was there — and did a little reading, the real thing,” she said, referring not to a script reading but to a tarot card reading. “My grandmother read cards and tea leaves down in Greenwich Village — she never charged people money — and I have a little bit of that gift.”Camille Saviola was born on July 16, 1950, in the Bronx to Michael and Mary (D’Esopo) Saviola. The performing bug bit early.“I wanted to be Elvis Presley, and at 6 I was already lip-syncing to his records and putting on magic shows,” she told The New York Times in 1985. “By the time I was 7, I knew a thousand jokes. Around puberty, I discovered Judy Garland.”Ms. Saviola in 2003. She was seen on Broadway, in cabarets and in more than 40 film and television roles. Bruce Glikas/FilmMagicShe graduated from the High School of Music and Art in New York and, her great-niece said, studied voice for a time at City College, but she left to work Off Off Broadway and in summer stock. She also sang with an all-female rock group for a time.In 1980 she was in the original Off Off Broadway cast of “Starmites,” a science fiction musical, billed only as Camille and belting out a number called “Hard to Be Diva.” (The show made Broadway briefly in 1989, though without her.) She was also in a touring production of the rock opera “Tommy,” playing the characters the Mother and the Acid Queen.In March 1985, at the Ballroom Theater in Manhattan, she was the central figure in a cabaret musical called “Hollywood Opera” that parodied eight classic films.“At the center of this nonsense stands the commandingly funny singer-actress Camille Saviola, who delivers two showstopping bits,” Stephen Holden wrote in a review in The New York Times. “The first is a heaving caricature of Anna Magnani retelling the story of ‘The Rose Tattoo’ in a pattery tarantella called ‘Della Rose’s Turn.’ Later, with Perry Arthur taking the Paul Henreid role, Miss Saviola, impersonating Bette Davis with Groucho Marx eyebrows, demolishes once and for all our fond memories of the two-cigarettes-in-the-dark love scene from ‘Now Voyager.’”Later that year she incorporated some of those bits into her own cabaret show, “Secrets of the Lava Lamp,” which found her alternately singing and telling stories.Ms. Saviola had small parts in two Woody Allen movies, “Broadway Danny Rose” (1984) and “The Purple Rose of Cairo” (1985), the first of her more than 40 film and television roles. She had recurring roles on the 1990s TV series “The Heights” and “Civil Wars” and, more recently, on “First Monday,” “Judging Amy” and “Entourage.” In 2018 and 2019 she had a recurring role on the TV Land series “Younger.”Ms. Saviola, who at her death lived in West New York, N.J., is survived by a sister, Mary Ann Horman. More

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    in Theater

    ‘Tick, Tick … Boom!’: A Musical Based on a Musical About Writing a Musical. We Explain.

    Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut is an adaptation of a show by Jonathan Larson, creator of “Rent.” This guide unpacks the many layers.Lin-Manuel Miranda’s new film adaptation of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” is the musical version of the “Rent” creator Jonathan Larson’s musical about writing a musical.To clarify, that musical is not “Rent.” (Yes, our brains hurt, too.)“Tick, Tick … Boom!,” which premieres Nov. 12 in theaters and Nov. 19 on Netflix, portrays Larson (Andrew Garfield) and his efforts to find success in his late 20s. The audience watches him struggle to write “Superbia,” a retro-futuristic musical, while he frets about whether he should choose a more conventional career.To help you keep “Superbia” (Larson’s never-produced musical) straight from “Tick, Tick … Boom!” (Larson’s autobiographical show about writing “Superbia”) straight from “Tick, Tick … Boom!” the new film that tells Larson’s story, we’ve created this guide:Who was Jonathan Larson?The composer and playwright is best known as the creator of “Rent,” a musical loosely based on Puccini’s 1896 opera, “La Bohème.”But Larson never got to see the smash-hit success of his rock opera, which went on to win four Tony Awards. The composer died unexpectedly at age 35 in 1996 from an aortic aneurysm — on the morning before the first Off Broadway preview of “Rent” and a few months before its Broadway debut.But “Rent” was hardly his first musical, and was in many ways shaped by an autobiographical show he was writing at the same time, about his struggles to write “Superbia.”Larson himself in 1996.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWhat was “Superbia”?No up-and-coming playwright in New York City is living in the lap of luxury, but Larson’s digs were especially hardscrabble. He lived and worked in a fifth-floor walk-up in Lower Manhattan, an apartment with no heat and a bathtub in the kitchen that he shared with two roommates and a couple of cats. He would write for eight hours on days off from his weekend job waiting tables at the Moondance Diner in SoHo.The musical he was working on was “Superbia” (based on George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” even though he had been denied the rights). He won a number of grants and awards to continue writing the show, including the Richard Rodgers Development Grant, chaired by Stephen Sondheim, which paid for a workshop production at Playwrights Horizons in 1988.But effort did not equal success. Though the music and lyrics won high praise among some downtown theater people, the show was considered too big and too negative, and no producer was ready to take it on, according to a 1996 article by Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times.So, Larson decided to do a monologue.Where does “Tick, Tick … Boom!” come in?Not dissuaded by the flop of “Superbia,” Larson began working on a new musical — “Rent” — as well as another idea: an autobiographical “rock monologue” that chronicled his struggles writing “Superbia.” Initially titled “30/90” — because he was turning 30 in 1990 — and then “Boho Days,” the one-man show that would later become “Tick, Tick … Boom!” was first staged, starring Larson, in a 1990 workshop at the Second Stage Theater. The show — part performance-art monologue, part rock recital — captivated a young producer named Jeffrey Seller, who became a champion of Larson’s work and later persuaded his fellow producers to bring “Rent” to Broadway.But “Boho Days” was difficult to pull off: Larson had to nail long monologues, often while playing several characters; sing musical numbers that represented multiple points of view; and simultaneously accompany himself on the piano and direct his band through a score that was a combination of pop, rock and Sondheim pastiche.Tommasini described the show as an “intense, angry solo” in which a man “wakes on his 30th birthday, downs some junk food and complains for 45 minutes about his frustrated ambitions, turning 30 in the tenuous ’90s and much more.”After the workshop, Larson continued to revise the piece, including changing the title to “Tick, Tick … Boom!” — a reference to the clock he felt was continually ticking on his life and career — and presented it at New York Theater Workshop in 1992 and 1993. It was still a work-in-progress when he died in 1996, and he left behind at least five versions of the script and a bevy of song lists.The 2001 Off Broadway version of “Tick, Tick … Boom” at the Jane Street Theater, featured Jerry Dixon, left, Raul Esparza (as Larson) and Amy Spanger.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesHow did the solo show become a three-person musical?After Larson’s death in 1996, the playwright David Auburn, who won the Pulitzer Prize for drama for “Proof,” revised the show as a three-person chamber musical that lessened the burden on the actor playing Jon. Now two additional actors played Michael, Larson’s advertising-executive best friend, and Susan, his dancer girlfriend, in addition to each portraying a variety of ancillary roles. Songs were rearranged for three voices, though the music and lyrics remained Larson’s.With the permission of Larson’s family, Auburn also excised most of Larson’s references to his terror of growing older and the feeling of being under so much pressure that his heart was about to burst in his chest, which would only seem callous given the audience’s knowledge of the composer’s fate.The revised “Tick, Tick … Boom!” premiered Off Broadway in 2001 at the Jane Street Theater, and went on to have a West End production, an Off West End production, two Off Broadway revivals, in 2014 and 2016, and an American national tour.Reviews were positive, with the New York Times critic Ben Brantley noting that the songs “glimmer with hints of the urgency and wit” that lend the musical score of “Rent” irresistible momentum.”Miranda — who’d found success with “In the Heights” but had not yet debuted his smash hit “Hamilton” — played Jon in a 2014 revival at New York City Center, a performance that the Times critic Charles Isherwood said “throbs with a sense of bone-deep identification.”Isherwood pointed out that it hadn’t been long since Miranda was “teaching high school English while scribbling songs on the side,” trying to make it as a musical-theater composer.Garfield in the new film, directed by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who played the role in a 2014 stage revival. Macall Polay/NetflixHow does the film adapt all this?Twenty years after seeing the Off Broadway revival of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” as a 21-year-old theater major struggling to write “In the Heights,” Miranda directed the new film adaptation, which follows a young composer named Jon in the eight chaotic days leading up to a workshop production of his musical “Superbia.” As in the Off Broadway revival, Larson’s rock monologue has been expanded, this time to a cast of more than a dozen characters. (Bradley Whitford now plays an encouraging Stephen Sondheim.) The film cuts between Jon’s performance of Larson’s original staging of “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the story as it unfolds in real time.Miranda has said the show is a combination of Larson’s rock monologue, the 2001 Off Broadway revival, and a cinematic exploration of Larson’s thought process. He used the Library of Congress archives to craft the film’s score entirely using Larson’s music, both from “Tick, Tick … Boom!” and the composer’s larger body of work.“It was like we were putting together an original musical with Jonathan Larson’s songs,” Miranda told Entertainment Weekly, explaining the process as finding the best way to “unlock” the songs and stories.Did Larson himself feel the urgency of his work? Sometimes it seems, to quote a “Rent” anthem, that he understood “There was no day but today” to do it. More

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    in Television

    ‘Dexter’ and the Shows That Wouldn’t Die

    The revival of the serial-killer drama is TV’s latest refusal to let a supposedly finished franchise rest in peace.The first thing to die in “Dexter: New Blood” is irony. The murder weapon is the subtitle.Oh, there’s blood, all right. That’s what Showtime’s righteous-serial-killer franchise promised from 2006 to 2013, and we get it in the very first episode of this revival, in snow-staining buckets. What we don’t get, in the four competent but redundant episodes screened for critics, is the “new”: any hint of a fresh creative impulse in a series that had worn itself out years before it left the air.Then again, in “New Blood,” as in so many of TV’s ubiquitous revivals, novelty is not really the point. The point is to give people more of what they already expect, by pulling out the electroshock paddles and reanimating any property with a following.You might have thought that interest in a “Dexter” comeback would have been squelched by the (supposed) series finale, a contender for the TV disappointment hall of fame. Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), whose foster father taught him to channel his bloodlust into killing only the deserving, seemed to end his story by piloting a boat into a hurricane off the coast of Miami, to join his murdered sister, Debra (Jennifer Carpenter), in death. That is, until the final scene upended the closure and consequence, revealing our slayer alive and working in a lumber yard.“New Blood,” which begins Sunday on Showtime, finds Dexter living a new life — but not that one. He’s living in upstate New York (played by picturesque Shelburne Falls, Mass.) as “Jim Lindsay” (a seeming nod to the novelist Jeff Lindsay, whose “Darkly Dreaming Dexter” the series was based on). Hall’s distinctively icy delivery now has a climate to match.Jim’s a solid citizen, dating the local police chief (Julia Jones), chopping firewood, going out line dancing and working at a sporting goods store selling knives and guns. (In the original series, he worked as a forensic blood-spatter expert; “Dexter” loves its wry vocational choices.)Do we need to call it a spoiler that Jim/Dexter finds it not so easy to control the “dark passenger” that drives him to kill? That his romance with a law officer becomes uncomfortably complicated, as his relationship with the police officer Debra once was? That he still retains the knowledge of how to set up a home slaughter shack? Then consider all eight seasons of “Dexter” a spoiler, because “New Blood” gives you little that you aren’t used to, beyond the temperature.It even brings back Debra, now a taunting imaginary presence in Dexter’s mind. It’s a fun, flashy role for Carpenter, but it does little dramatically except to rehash Dexter’s past torments and manically externalize his inner state, which is already amply told-not-shown through the series’s voice-over.Jennifer Carpenter returns as Debra, Dexter’s dead sister, who is now an imaginary presence.Seacia Pavao/Showtime, via Associated PressThe newish wrinkle is the sudden appearance of his son, Harrison (Jack Alcott), last seen as a tot heading off into exile in Argentina. He is now a teenager with Dexter’s thousand-mile stare and a lot of questions.His inopportune visit, and Dexter’s worry that Harrison has inherited the dark passenger, has the potential to emotionally complicate the story. But it mostly serves as one more source of pressure in the season’s busy cat-and-mouse game. There’s also a string of missing young women in the area; a potential school shooting; and the appearance of that staple of brooding cable dramas, a Symbolic Mystical Deer.Sanguinary and superfluous, “New Blood” ends up being an example of the worst traits of two different TV eras at once.The original “Dexter” began well into cable’s antihero period, a flourishing of difficult protagonists that, at best, gave us “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad,” series that forced their audiences to confront the moral implications of being invested in the villain. At worst, it simply offered audiences excuses to revel in the vicarious thrill of bad behavior.For its first couple seasons, “Dexter” was a mischievously provocative narrative. It offered a funhouse-mirror reflection of gory police shows like “CSI” — Dexter was both spatter-analyzer and spatter-maker. And it invited us to wonder about the nature of morality: Was Dexter actually a moral person, or just a monster who’d learned a neat trick?But as it went on, the show gave its protagonist and its audience more and more loopholes. Interrogating the show’s premise — basically, a permission structure for the audience to have fun with a vigilante murderer — would ruin the fun. Instead, the show let you enjoy Dexter’s macabre handiwork and even cheer him on to evade capture, because his victims were evil, because without him someone would commit even worse crimes, because he was in the end a kind of victim.The new series likewise seems to be mostly comfortable as a darkly comic romp, opening with a stalking sequence set to Iggy Pop’s “The Passenger” — get it? — and quickly setting up new cartoon antagonists who are basically begging to get themselves serial-killed. The series’ promise of guilt-free bloodletting hasn’t aged well, even on ice.In the current era of TV, “New Blood” is the latest revival indulging the idea that fans always deserve to get more of the things they liked, because they can — creative dead-ends and supposedly final endings be damned. But this time at least, Dexter did not act alone.This fall brought us the “Sopranos” prequel movie, “The Many Saints of Newark,” a well-made and pointless exercise in remember-when (as Tony once put it, “the lowest form of conversation”) that allowed stars like Vera Farmiga and Corey Stoll to trot out their impersonations of beloved characters while adding nothing to the original story beyond a hint of sadness.“The Many Saints of Newark” features younger versions of “Sopranos” characters like Junior (Corey Stoll) and Livia Soprano (Vera Farmiga).Barry Wetcher/Warner Bros.Because fan bases existed and the checks cleared, we got more “Gilmore Girls,” “Roseanne,” “Will & Grace,” “Arrested Development” and “Veronica Mars,” plus the “Breaking Bad” movie “El Camino” — efforts that played on the affection for TV classics without building on them. This December, a de-Samantha-fied “Sex and the City” will return in the form of HBO Max’s “And Just Like That …”Not every revival or spinoff is a bad idea — but it needs to have an idea beyond “I want more.” “Better Call Saul” can stand with the original “Breaking Bad” because the prequel developed its own picaresque story and voice. “Twin Peaks: The Return” in many ways surpassed the original, by embracing artistic adventure rather than nostalgia.Good, bad or adequate, though, the collective effect of all these continuations and extensions is to rob finales of finality. It denies artists and audiences the power of believing that “The End” is the end. Maybe the “New Blood” season could serve as a do-over, a for-real-this-time finale for “Dexter” after its unsatisfying first try. But would anyone bet on that?Of course, nobody wants critics saying that John Updike shouldn’t return to Rabbit or Margaret Atwood to Gilead; no one wants to squelch the next “Godfather, Part II” in the name of preventing the next “Godfather, Part III.” Sometimes franchises genuinely have more creative life in them.But often they just need to stay buried. As “Jim Lindsay” says in “New Blood,” explaining why he changed his name: “Dexter had to die.” Amen, brother, and yet here we are. You had one job. More