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    Es Devlin’s Next Stage

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

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

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

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    In ‘Reboot,’ Everything Old Is New, to Streaming

    This new Hulu comedy pokes fun at TV’s obsession with bringing back past shows.At a recent meeting at Hulu’s offices, over coffee and luxury bottled water, half a dozen executives entertained a pitch for a new series. Well, not exactly new. The idea: Reboot the beloved early ’00s comedy about a blended family, “Step Right Up.” Though it ended abruptly after its lead departed, the show has, surprisingly, found a robust audience on streaming, particularly among, an analytics specialist notes, the family and “live-to-laugh” quadrants.“Are we sure that’s not just people leaving it on for their dogs?” a colleague asks.Her boss voices a further concern: Are reboots still a thing? His team answers him with a very long list, which includes “Fuller House,” “How I Met Your Father,” “Veronica Mars,” “Gilmore Girls,” “Gossip Girls,” “The Wonder Years,” “Party of Five,” “Party Down” and on and on and on.“What the hell,” the boss says, convinced. “Let’s remake something original.”This is the opening scene of “Reboot,” a Hulu half-hour comedy from the showrunner Steven Levitan (“Modern Family,” “Just Shoot Me!”) with a premise so flawless it seems bananas that no one has thought of it before. A turducken of a show, it features a multicamera family comedy, nested inside a single camera workplace comedy, shoved into a behind-the-scenes Hollywood spoof. The series is also a referendum — a pretty fun one — on the way that the sitcom has advanced in the past several decades and its migration from network to cable and streaming.“This really is an affectionate look at our business,” Levitan said, speaking from a home office with “Modern Family” cutouts in the background. “The bizarre characters, the weird situations, the important meetings you have over something that’s unbelievably trivial and embarrassing. It’s really such great fodder for comedy.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” several years ago when “Roseanne” returned and then disappeared, following a racist tweet posted by its star, Roseanne Barr, and then returned again, sans Barr, as “The Conners.” The presumed backstage drama intrigued him.“I remember thinking to myself, Well, that’s the show I want to watch,” he said. “Modern Family” still had a few seasons to go. He assumed that someone else would dream up the same idea in the meantime, but no one did. Or no one was greenlit, anyway. So he took his pitch to Hulu. (He has an overall deal with 20th Television, which is, like Hulu, part of the Walt Disney Company.)Rachel Bloom, left, and Krista Marie Yu in “Reboot,” a show about a show reviving an old show.Michael Desmond/HuluI asked Karey Burke, the president of 20th Television, who helped to develop “Reboot,” if Hulu’s real-life executives had ever expressed any qualms about the show’s satire. (There’s a dazzling swipe at “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the pilot, for example.)“They love it,” she said. “And I don’t know that other platforms would be able to handle the zingers as gracefully as they have.”Craig Erwich, the president of ABC Entertainment, Hulu and Disney branded television streaming originals, confirmed this, saying that he and his real colleagues enjoyed being in on the joke. “We loved it,” he said. “It’s funny. And it’s funny because it probably rings true.”Not all of these jokes target streaming services. A bunch take aim at networks, where Levitan spent most of his career. Others go after changes within the form of the sitcom itself. Many of these last are voiced in the form of arguments between Paul Reiser’s Gordon, who created “Step Right Up,” and Rachel Bloom’s Hannah, the millennial writer-director who pitched the reboot.“Comedy has evolved since you last wrote for television,” says Hannah, tartly. “I mean, honestly, whole species have evolved.”Some of that evolution has pushed sitcoms away from the live-audience multicamera style, the province of a studio comedy like “Step Right Up,” to more visually sophisticated single-camera formats. The move from network to streaming, a move that “Reboot” explores, has wrought other changes. This new “Step Right Up” no longer need to adhere to a 22-minute format with A, B and C story lines and pauses for commercial breaks. More sexually explicit material is now permissible, as are obscenities.“It’s the world of sitcom, but it’s streaming,” Reiser said in an interview, speaking of the move to streaming generally. “So you can say whatever you want, and you’re not going for the laugh, necessarily.”But old constraints die hard. Though “Step Right Up” has taken on a new look, most of the episodes of “Reboot” do still honor a three-act structure. And if the set-up-punchline, set-up-punchline form has given ground, A, B and C plots remain. “It’s inherent,” Levitan said. “It’s baked into my bones right now that shows will have a certain sense of structure and plot.”And yet, as “Reboot” demonstrates, and as a rewatch of most ’80s, ’90s and ’00s comedies will prove, content has changed. Jokes that punched down at women, queer people, disabled people, people of color — rarely make it to air now. Levitan framed this as a limitation, if a good one.“The whole #MeToo, woke culture, it has changed where you can go, and by and large, in a positive way,” he said. “Where it gets tricky is when everybody is so scared of offending somebody that you don’t even go anywhere near the line anymore.”Bloom, who cocreated the sitcom “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” sees this new sensibility as an opportunity rather than a curb or a cause for angst. “There’s a mindfulness that’s being asked of people now that wasn’t being asked of people before,” she said. “I think it’s making us all better people, better comedians.” And she enjoys playing Hannah, even in her occasional humorlessness.“A girl who wears baggy sweaters with anxiety?” Bloom said. “I know that person.” Reiser, who described himself as “a little bit more aware than Gordon” agreed with his co-star. “I never understand people who say, ‘You couldn’t make that joke anymore,’” he said. “I go, ‘Why would you want to? How much do you want to make a joke?’ It’s kind of not cool and insensitive.”Levitan first had the idea for “Reboot” during the controversy in which Roseanne Barr was fired from her own revived sitcom.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesSome of the strongest scenes of “Reboot” are the ones set in the writers’ room that dramatize this tension. The writers whom Hannah has hired — a queer man and two women of color — clash openly with the older Jewish writers of Gordon’s acquaintance. In one scene, a younger writer critiques a joke pitched by the TV veteran Selma (Rose Abdoo, the series’s stealth M.V.P.).“I thought gay people were supposed to be fun,” Selma snaps back. But eventually they find a joke everyone likes. It involves a pratfall. Pratfalls are funny no matter what.But “Reboot” isn’t only funny. There’s a persistent sweetness to it and a sense that people can change, usually for the better.“That’s something that’s quite thrilling about the show,” said Keegan-Michael Key, a “Step Right Up” star. “It’s a Steve Levitan hallmark, isn’t it, that sense of people being open?”“Step Right Up” is the reboot at the center, but nearly all of the characters are rebooting themselves in one way or another, recovering from divorce, addiction, regional theater. Levitan mentioned how fans had told him how “Modern Family” had helped them work through difficult moments in their own lives. He hopes that “Reboot,” a show about Hollywood elites with Bentleys and real estate portfolios and connections to Nordic royalty, can do the same.“Bringing a little laughter into people’s lives is a really joyous thing to do,” he said.“Reboot” remains agnostic on the question of the worth of reboots themselves. Many real-world ones seem like little more than cheap intellectual-property grabs, and few improve on the original. Some are so dismal that they actually poison their predecessors, retroactively. The creators and stars of “Reboot” had varying opinions on the form. Or no opinion at all.“I don’t think that’s for me to say,” Levitan said. “Yeah, I would rather not draw the ire of comedy writers.” Reiser survived the reboot of “Mad About You” pretty much intact and seemed optimistic about the form. Bloom was less so.“The most exciting part of a reboot for me is the headline of a reboot coming up,” she said. The reboot itself was usually a disappointment.Key sounded more hopeful. He thought that reboots might work, at least notionally, and could even be innovative if the animating idea were persuasive enough. “I really think that is possible,” he said. “It’s all about angles.”Until Hollywood figures out those angles, we’ll just have to make do with something original. Like “Reboot.” More

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    Late Night Recaps the Queen’s Funeral

    “There is no iPhone at the end of that line, all right?” Trevor Noah said of the long lines of mourners on Monday.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.Fit for a QueenQueen Elizabeth’s funeral took place on Monday, with crowds waiting in line for up to 24 hours to pay their respects.Trevor Noah called the wait “no joke,” saying, “There is no iPhone at the end of that line, all right? It’s just a box and you don’t even get to open the box.”“The line to see the queen’s coffin stretched for miles, similar to what goes on here in America when Popeye’s comes out with a new chicken sandwich.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The procession was lengthy, with King Charles and siblings walking behind the coffin for nearly one and a half hours. That’s not easy. For years, the royal family’s only form of exercise has been walking back statements from Andrew.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And it was a three-mile march from Westminster Abbey to Windsor Castle, also known as the long walk. Yeah, or as Kylie Jenner calls it, ‘Why didn’t they take the jet?’” — TREVOR NOAH“Leaders, dignitaries, and politicians from around the world gathered in London for the funeral of Queen Elizabeth. Meanwhile, Trump showed up at a Burger King and said, ‘Sorry for your loss.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Freddy Krueger Edition)“In an interview yesterday, President Biden said while we still have a problem with the virus, quote, ‘The pandemic is over.’ Yes. Yeah. But I get why Biden said this. I mean, he just had Covid. Everyone — everyone who gets Covid is over Covid.” — TREVOR NOAH“Biden then announced that skinny jeans, neutral tones, and chrome nail polish are also over.” — JAMES CORDEN“He said ‘the pandemic is over,’ which is weirdly not reassuring at all. It’s like saying ‘Freddy Krueger is dead and he’s never coming back!’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It’s kind of huge news to mention so casually, you know? I wasn’t expecting the end of a two-and-a-half-year nightmare to be announced on the floor of the Detroit Auto Show.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and his “Tonight Show” guest Margot Robbie got blasted in the face with an air cannon for every wrong answer in a guessing game called “Blow Your Mind.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightBilly Eichner will talk about his new movie “Bros” on “The Late Show.”Also, Check This Out“M*A*S*H,” which debuted in September 1972, feels both ancient and current. With Jamie Farr, seated, and, from left, Mike Farrell, David Ogden Stiers, Alan Alda, Loretta Swit, Harry Morgan and William Christopher in a later season.CBS Photo Archive/Getty ImagesAfter 50 years, “M*A*S*H” holds up as a precursor to modern-day comedies that are more than just funny. More

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    Chris Redd Is Latest Cast Member to Leave ‘S.N.L.’

    Redd, who contributed impersonations of Kanye West and Mayor Eric Adams, is leaving “Saturday Night Live,” where four new featured players are joining the show.The number of departing “Saturday Night Live” cast members has now risen to eight: Chris Redd, who has been with “S.N.L.” since fall 2017 and has played characters including Kanye West and Mayor Eric Adams of New York, will not be returning this season, NBC said on Monday night.Redd said in a statement: “Being a part of ‘S.N.L’ has been the experience of a lifetime. Five years ago, I walked into 30 Rock knowing that this was an amazing opportunity for growth. Now, with friends who have become family and memories I will cherish forever, I’m grateful to Lorne Michaels and to the entire ‘S.N.L.’ organization. From the bottom of my heart, I can’t thank you all enough.”Redd has also co-starred in the NBC sitcom “Kenan,” with the longtime “S.N.L.” cast member Kenan Thompson; in the Peacock comedy series “Bust Down”; and in movies like “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping.” His standup special “Chris Redd: Why Am I Like This?” will be released on HBO Max later this year, NBC said. Redd is one of several “S.N.L.” veterans who have exited the show ahead of its coming 48th season. Kate McKinnon, Aidy Bryant, Pete Davidson and Kyle Mooney all left “S.N.L.” at the conclusion of its 47th season in May. Earlier this month, Melissa Villaseñor, Alex Moffat and Aristotle Athari also departed the cast.Last week, NBC announced that “S.N.L.” had hired four new cast members. Those performers — Marcello Hernandez, Molly Kearney, Michael Longfellow and Devon Walker — will all begin as featured players when the new season begins on Oct. 1. More

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    One Last Broadcast for Queen Elizabeth II

    Television introduced Queen Elizabeth II to the world. It was only fitting that television should see her out of it.The queen’s seven-decade reign almost exactly spanned the modern TV era. Her coronation in 1953 began the age of global video spectacles. Her funeral on Monday was a full-color pageant accessible to billions.It was a final display of the force of two institutions: the concentrated grandeur of the British monarchy and the power amassed by television to bring viewers to every corner of the world.“I have to be seen to be believed,” Elizabeth once reportedly said. It was less a boast than an acknowledgment of a modern duty. One had to be seen, whether one liked it or not. It was her source of authority at a time when the crown’s power no longer came through fleets of ships. It was how she provided her country reassurance and projected stability.The last funeral service for a British monarch, King George VI, was not televised. For one last time, Elizabeth was the first. She entered the world stage, through the new magic of broadcasting, as a resolute young face. She departed it as a bejeweled crown on a purple cushion, transmuted finally into pure visual symbol.Americans who woke up early Monday (or stayed up, in some time zones) saw striking images aplenty, on every news network. The breathtaking God’s-eye view from above the coffin in Westminster Abbey. The continuous stream of world leaders. The thick crowds along the procession to Windsor, flinging flowers at the motorcade. The corgis.Viewers also saw and heard something unusual in the TV news environment: long stretches of unnarrated live action — the speaking of prayers, the clop of horse hooves — and moments of stillness. This was notable in the golf-whisper coverage on BBC World News, which let scenes like the loading of the coffin onto a gun carriage play out in silence, its screen bare of the usual lower-thirds captions.The commercial American networks, being the distant relations at this service, filled in the gaps with chattery bits of history and analysis. News departments called in the Brits. (On Fox News, the reality-TV fixtures Piers Morgan and Sharon Osbourne critiqued Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s media ventures.) “Royal commentators” broke down points of protocol and inventoried the materials and symbolism of the crown, scepter and orb like auction appraisers.The queen was the first British monarch to have a televised coronation, in June 1953.AFP via Getty ImagesBut even American TV fell still during the funeral ceremony. The cameras drank in the Gothic arches of Westminster Abbey, bathed in the hymns of the choirs, goggled at the royal jewels, lingered on the solemn face of Charles III during the performance of — it still sounds strange — “God Save the King.” Finally, we watched from above as bearers carried the coffin step by step across the black-and-white-diamond floor like an ornate chess piece.The quiet spectating was a gesture of respect but also a kind of tourist’s awe. We had come all this way; of course we wanted to take in the sights.Elizabeth’s reign was marked by unprecedented visibility, for better or worse. Her coronation in 1953 spurred the British to buy television sets, bringing the country into the TV age and inviting the public into an event once reserved for the upper crust.This changed something essential in the relation of the masses to the monarchy. The coronation, with its vestments and blessings, signified the exclusive connection of the monarch to God. Once that was no longer exclusive, everything else in the relationship between the ruler and the public was up for negotiation.The young queen resisted letting in the cameras. The prime minister Winston Churchill worried about making the ritual into a “theatrical performance.” But Elizabeth could no more stop the force of media than her forebear King Canute could halt the tide.TV undercut the mystique of royalty but spread its image, expanding the queen’s virtual reach even as the colonial empire diminished. There were other surviving monarchies in the world, but the Windsors were the default royals of TV-dom, the main characters in a generational reality-TV soap opera. They became global celebrities, through scandals, weddings, deaths and “The Crown.”The coronation had worldwide effects too. It began the age when TV would bring the world into your living room live — or at least close to it. In 1953, with live trans-Atlantic broadcasts still not yet possible, CBS and NBC raced to fly the kinescopes of the event across the ocean in airplanes with their seats removed to fit in editing equipment. (They both lost to Canada’s CBC, which got its footage home first.)The next day’s Times heralded the event as the “birth of international television,” marveling that American viewers “probably saw more than the peers and peeresses in their seats in the transept.” Boy, did they: NBC’s “Today” show coverage, which carried a radio feed of the coronation, included an appearance by its chimpanzee mascot, J. Fred Muggs. Welcome to show business, Your Majesty.The one limit on cameras at Elizabeth’s coronation was to deny them a view of the ritual anointment of the new queen. By 2022, viewers take divine omniscience for granted. If we can think of it, we should be able to see it.The hearse was designed to allow spectators to see the coffin as it passed by.Molly Darlington/Getty ImagesSo after Elizabeth’s death, you could monitor the convoy from Balmoral Castle in Scotland to London, with a glassy hearse designed and lit to make the coffin visible. You could watch the queen’s lying-in-state in Westminster Hall on live video feeds, from numerous angles, the silence broken only by the occasional cry of a baby or cough of a guard. The faces came and went, including the queen’s grandchildren joining the tribute, but the camera’s vigil was constant.After 70 years, however, television has lost its exclusive empire as well. Even as it broadcast what was described — plausibly but vaguely — as the most-watched event in history, traditional TV shared the funeral audience with the internet and social media.Elizabeth and the medium that defined her reign were both unifiers of a kind that we might not see again. Though not all of the British support the monarchy, the queen offered her fractious country a sense of constancy. TV brought together disparate populations in the communal experience of seeing the same thing at once.Now what? Tina Brown, the writer, editor and royal-watcher, asked on CBS, “Will anyone be loved by the nation so much again?” You could also ask: Will Charles’s coronation next year be nearly as big a global media event? Will anything? (You could also ask whether an event like this should be so all-consuming. While American TV news was wall-to-wall with an overseas funeral, Puerto Rico was flooded and without power from Hurricane Fiona.)Monday’s services felt like a capstone to two eras. For one day, we saw a display of the pageantry that the crown can command and the global audience that TV can.American TV spent its full morning with the queen. (Well, almost: CBS aired the season premiere of “The Price Is Right.”) The day’s pomp built toward one more never-before-broadcast ceremony, the removal of scepter, orb and crown from the coffin, which was lowered into the vault at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor. Then followed something almost unimaginable: A private burial service, with no TV cameras.Television got one final spectacle out of Elizabeth’s reign. And the queen had one final moment out of the public eye. More

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    Waving Goodbye to ‘Dear Evan Hansen’

    Sam Primack almost made it.“All I see is sky …” he sang. Then the actor, who was playing Evan Hansen on Broadway, paused, looked out at the 1,025 faces in the sold-out Music Box Theater. He shifted. Choked up. Looked down.“… for forever,” he finished, wiping back a tear as he let out the final two words of the show. It was the closing night of “Dear Evan Hansen,” the musical about a socially awkward teenager who tells a terrible lie.The audience — including superfans in striped blue polos; a handful of first-timers with suitcases who’d arrived straight from the airport; the musical’s creators, Benj Pasek, Justin Paul and Steven Levenson; and its director, Michael Greif — broke into a thunderous round of applause. (Five Evans — Andrew Barth Feldman, Stephen Christopher Anthony, Jordan Fisher, Michael Lee Brown and Zachary Noah Piser — arrived onstage later for a final bow.) Since its Broadway debut on Nov. 14, 2016, and with Sunday’s performance, “Dear Evan Hansen” had been seen by more than 1.5 million theatergoers and played 1,699 total performances.“I feel very loved,” a smiling Primack, 21, said in his dressing room after the show. Looking dapper in a maroon suit, he was clutching one of the bouquets of white hydrangeas given to cast members onstage after the performance.“It’s been unexpectedly short, but also, I’m happy that this is the way that it’s ending,” said Primack, who took over the titular role earlier this month.Calla Kessler for The New York Times“Dear Evan Hansen,” which won the Tony Award for best new musical in 2017, had its world premiere at Arena Stage in Washington in 2015, followed by an Off Broadway run at Second Stage Theater before a Broadway transfer. It went on to win six Tonys, as well as a Grammy Award for its cast album, and the Olivier Award for best new musical for the London production.But, like other long-running shows that restarted after the pandemic, it faced a new challenge: Tourists and international audiences that had not yet fully returned. In June, its producers announced that the curtain would soon come down for the final time; the West End production in London will also close in October, but the North American tour will continue. (Most recently, “The Phantom of the Opera” announced on Friday that it would close next year after 35 years.)“I’d like to blame it on Covid, I really would,” Stacey Mindich, the musical’s lead producer, wrote in an essay for American Theater magazine earlier this week. “But perhaps our story was too emotional for these already difficult times. Perhaps the poorly reviewed film of the same name diminished our audience. Perhaps it was just our time.”It was a bit of a cruel twist for Primack, whose casting was announced in February — before the show had set a closing date — and who took over the role less than two weeks ago, on Sept. 6. Though he began his career, when he was 17, as an understudy in the Broadway production for all three of the male leads — Evan, Connor Murphy and Jared Kleinman — and then joined the national tour as the Evan alternate, he got to play Evan just 12 times on the Broadway stage this month before clearing the rack of polo shirts out of his dressing room.Five actors who had previously played the socially awkward teenager in “Dear Evan Hansen” appeared onstage with the cast for a final bow on the show’s closing night. Calla Kessler for The New York Times“It’s been unexpectedly short, but also, I’m happy that this is the way that it’s ending,” Primack said before the show, seated in his dressing room surrounded by a red Upstate & Chill sticker, the book “Creativity, Inc.,” by the Pixar Animation co-founder Ed Catmull, and a closet cracked open to reveal a rack of striped blue polos.In an interview before that performance, and then in a brief conversation afterward — he had an after-party to get to, after all! — Primack, who grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz., reflected on being the final actor to play Evan on Broadway, how his own experiences with bullies informed his performance and whether Evan is a good person. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.You clearly had a lot of supporters in the house tonight. Who all did you invite?My whole family — my grandparents, my whole team, some of whom had never seen me perform before. And my teachers from high school are here.Were you a fan of the show before you were cast?I remember staying up until midnight knowing that the cast recording was going to come out, not even knowing what the show was about. I had heard “Waving Through a Window” and I was intrigued. I begged my mom to come to New York to see it, and I saw it with the original cast and got to meet Ben [Platt] afterward. I remember saying to all my friends, “I would love to be in this show more than anything,” so closing it feels like coming full circle.What’s the most challenging part of the show?The last 30 minutes, Evan gets to a real desperate and ugly and scary place that every night is a challenge. He is at a point where he will really do anything.What’s the best advice a former Evan has given you?Just breathe. Because you’re out there by yourself a lot of the time in these really dark scenarios, your mind can wander into really dark places.The musical was one of several long-running shows that restarted after the pandemic. “Perhaps our story was too emotional for these already difficult times,” wrote Stacey Mindich, the musical’s lead producer.Calla Kessler for The New York TimesCan you personally relate to Evan?I was in high school when the show came out, so I know what it was like, and what it’s still like, to go through this age of social media where everyone feels disconnected and people are putting on a front online. And I also have family members — and myself — who go through anxiety.How did you put your own stamp on the role?In middle school, I used to wear these really big shirts and I would pull on them a lot to hide myself from the bullies at school. And I fidget with my hands a lot, both of which are things I tried to bring in.Would you be friends with Evan?I would hope so — I was a theater kid in high school, so I always felt like I was on the outside looking in.Is he a good person?I don’t think people are good or bad. I think all people are flawed, and so is Evan.Why do you think the show resonates with people?People see themselves in the characters, and not just Evan. This is the first time a piece of theater has really touched on suicide and mental health and the stigmas around them. After the show, I have gotten a copious amount of “Thank you for seeing me, thank you for understanding me” messages. Or “This show has made me open up conversations with my own family.” That’s what kept me going for the last three and a half years.What’s next for you?I don’t know! I have to, for the first time since I got this, go back to auditioning, go back to all the hardships of being a working actor. But I’m really excited for the future and am just really happy that this show has propelled me to be able to get in some doors.Asked what’s next, Primack said that he was “just really happy that this show has propelled me to be able to get in some doors.”Calla Kessler for The New York TimesIf we looked in on Evan on his 27th birthday, what would he be doing?I hope that he’s still writing; I hope that he’s at a place in life where he knows that he can keep going forward. I think he ends the show in a place where he starts to learn that, but I hope that, 10 years down the line, he does really understand that things can get better.Let’s do a quick round of confirm or deny.OK!Evan is a Hufflepuff.Confirm.You have a striped polo in your closet.I do own a polo, but I don’t know if it’s striped.You use a saw to get the cast off your arm at intermission.Yes, thank goodness the dressers are also good at their jobs because we haven’t had an injury yet.The best song in the show is “You Will Be Found.”Oh, no, I think the best song is “For Forever.” It’s the first time we get to see Evan let go and be happy.When you saw the trailer for the film, you thought Ben Platt was wearing a wig.No comment!Given a choice, you would see “Hamilton” over “Dear Evan Hansen.”You can’t do that! But, I mean, I’d love to see “Hamilton” again — I’ve seen this show a thousand times. [Laughs] More

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    Jennifer Bonjean, the Lawyer Who Defended R. Kelly and Bill Cosby

    Jennifer Bonjean has become known for her aggressive approach as she has defended men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.Jennifer Bonjean, a defense lawyer who has the words “not guilty” tattooed on her right arm, called one woman who accused R. Kelly of sexual abuse a “pathological liar.” She accused another of extortion. She tried to pick their accounts apart, and attacked prosecutors for stripping her client, the former R&B star, of “every single bit of humanity that he has.”Ms. Bonjean, who was Mr. Kelly’s lead lawyer during the criminal trial in Chicago that ended with his conviction last week, has become known for her aggressive tactics in representing men accused of sexual misconduct in several of the highest profile cases of the #MeToo era.She helped Bill Cosby get his sexual assault conviction overturned last year, which led to his being freed from prison. She has also represented Keith Raniere, once the leader of the Nxivm sex cult, as he appealed his conviction on sex trafficking and other charges, for which he was sentenced to 120 years in prison.“Everyone’s entitled to a vigorous defense,” Ms. Bonjean, 52, said in an interview last week shortly before Mr. Kelly’s conviction on sex crimes involving minors was announced.Her theatrical, knock-down-drag-out style is hardly atypical in the world of criminal defense, but it has attracted attention at a time when #MeToo-era cases are reaching trial, as she has urged jurors to be skeptical of women who have testified, often through tears, about being sexually abused.“We are in an era of ‘believe women’ and I agree, but not in the courtroom,” Ms. Bonjean said during closing arguments in the Kelly case. “We don’t just believe women or believe anything. We scrutinize. There’s no place for mob-like thinking in a courtroom.”That perspective and her relentless cross-examination of accusers, which typically involves drilling them on any inconsistencies in their accounts and questioning their motives, has drawn criticism from those who say it could scare abused women from coming forward.Ms. Bonjean accompanied Bill Cosby when he returned to his home in Pennsylvania last year after she worked to overturn his conviction, and he was freed from prison.Mark Makela/ReutersLili Bernard, who has sued Mr. Cosby and accused him of drugging and sexually assaulting her in 1990, said she was upset by Ms. Bonjean’s behavior earlier this year where she defended Mr. Cosby in a civil case brought by a woman who said he had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager. Ms. Bernard, who attended the trial in California, called the lawyer’s cross-examination of that woman, Judy Huth, and other accusers “victim blaming and victim shaming.”Originally from Valparaiso, Ind., Ms. Bonjean (pronounced bon-JEEN) is a classically trained opera singer who earned a master’s degree in music and once worked at a rape crisis center in Chicago, advocating for victims of sexual violence — a stint, she said, that some might now see “as ironic.”That job led her to study at Loyola University Chicago’s law school with the intention of becoming a prosecutor, but she ended up going into defense work after gravitating toward “underdog” clients. As a lawyer who views prosecutorial overstep as her driving force, she gained prominence by focusing on so-called wrongful conviction cases.Russell Ainsworth, a staff attorney at the Exoneration Project at the University of Chicago Law School, has worked with Ms. Bonjean on civil rights cases for a decade and said that typically, he plays the “straight guy,” while she “comes out swinging.”“If I needed a lawyer to go to the mat for me, that’s the lawyer I would choose,” he said.Her approach was on display earlier this year in the civil suit brought by Ms. Huth, who accused Mr. Cosby of sexually assaulting her at the Playboy Mansion in 1975, when she was 16.During Ms. Bonjean’s cross-examination of Ms. Huth, she challenged her on why it had taken her decades to come forward with her accusation. At one point she suggested that Ms. Huth had kept quiet about the trip to the mansion, not because she had buried painful memories, but because she was uncomfortable telling people that she had gone there with Mr. Cosby because he is Black. Ms. Huth strongly denied that.During the trial, Ms. Bonjean turned her attention to Ms. Bernard, and accused her in court of speaking with a juror during a break. She argued for a mistrial. (The judge denied Ms. Bonjean’s request.)“In that little moment that she tried to falsely accuse me, I felt the wrath of her, the depths she would go to,” Ms. Bernard said in an interview.Ms. Bonjean, whose firm is based in New York, said that she considers herself a feminist, insisting that the label is not inconsistent with her work as a defense lawyer for accused men. Her responsibility, she explained, is to exercise every legal lever at her disposal for her client, noting, “that will not always be consistent with sensitivity to a victim’s feelings.”And she contends that if she were a male lawyer, people wouldn’t think twice about her approach, simply chalking it up to a lawyer doing his job.“I’m supposed to be some type of ambassador — a vagina ambassador,” she said, “Seriously, I get a lot of those questions, like somehow I am traitorous to women by taking on these cases.”During Mr. Kelly’s Chicago case, Ms. Bonjean was boldly combative at every turn. She fought to keep as much of the video footage away from the jury as possible, maintained a steady stream of objections and sometimes kept the fight for her client going on Twitter.At one point, prosecutors complained to the judge about a tweet she posted in which she accused them of playing dirty tricks. Ms. Bonjean offered to refrain from tweeting about the court proceedings, she said, and the judge agreed. A few days later, Ms. Bonjean posted: “I’m not allowed to tweet but I think I can retweet,” sharing someone else’s tweet that quoted her from the trial, calling one of the government’s key witnesses “a liar, a thief and an extortionist.”“I had to find what worked for me,” Ms. Bonjean said of her approach. “My aggressive style — some people call it fiery, some people call it, whatever words you want to use to describe it, that was the way that I could be effective.”Debra S. Katz, a lawyer who has represented high-profile sexual misconduct accusers, said that defense tactics seeking to shred a woman’s credibility or impugn her character run the risk of failing with a jury, citing Harvey Weinstein’s conviction in New York, during which she represented one of the women accusing the producer of sexual assault.“Everybody deserves a defense, but to attack women in this way is, in my view, absolutely unconscionable,” Ms. Katz said.Ms. Bonjean’s highest profile success has been her role in appealing Mr. Cosby’s sexual assault conviction. She and her co-counsels persuaded the Pennsylvania Supreme Court that prosecutors violated Mr. Cosby’s rights by reneging on an apparent promise not to charge him on allegations that he drugged and sexually assaulted Andrea Constand in 2004.Mr. Cosby’s more recent civil trial ended with a jury finding against him that awarded Ms. Huth $500,000 in damages.In Mr. Kelly’s recent case, he was found guilty of some of the most serious charges, including of coercing minors into sexual activity and producing child sexual abuse videos. He was acquitted on several other charges, including that he had sought to obstruct an earlier investigation.In both cases, Ms. Bonjean has pledged to mount a vigorous appeal.Robert Chiarito contributed reporting from Chicago. More