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    Stephen Mo Hanan, Who Played Three Roles in ‘Cats,’ Dies at 78

    He sang arias on the streets of San Francisco, performed on Broadway and collaborated on a musical about Al Jolson, which he also starred in.Stephen Mo Hanan, a vibrant performer who sang arias and other music as a busker in San Francisco before playing Kevin Kline’s lieutenant in the acclaimed 1981 Broadway production of “The Pirates of Penzance” and three felines in the original Broadway cast of “Cats,” died on April 3 at his home in Manhattan. He was 78.Gary Widlund, his husband and only immediate survivor, said the cause was a heart attack.At his audition for “Cats,” Mr. Hanan (pronounced HAN-un) told Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer, and Trevor Nunn, the director, that he had spent several years singing and accompanying himself on a concertina at a ferry terminal at the foot of Market Street in San Francisco.“As a matter of fact, I’ve brought my concertina,” he recalled telling Mr. Nunn in an interview with The Washington Post in 1982. “He said, ‘Give me something in Italian.’ Well, I’ve never had a problem with shyness. I sang ‘Funiculi, Funicula.’”Mr. Hanan was ultimately cast in three parts: Bustopher Jones, a portly cat, and the dual role of Asparagus, an aging theater cat, who, while reminiscing, transforms (with help from an inflatable costume) into a former role, Growltiger, a tough pirate, and performs a parody of Puccini’s “Turandot.”During rehearsals, Mr. Hanan kept a detailed journal, which he published in 2002 as “A Cat’s Diary.”Mr. Hanan was cast in the original production of “Cats.” During rehearsals, he kept a detailed journal, which he later turned into a book.Smith & KrausIn an entry about the second day of rehearsal, he described an assignment from Mr. Nunn: to “pick a cartoon cat we know of, withdraw to ourselves and prepare a vignette of that cat, then return to the circle and each in turn will present.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Wants to End With a Message of Hope

    In interviews, Elisabeth Moss and other stars and creators of the groundbreaking drama discuss its impending conclusion and ongoing connection to American politics.Though it was conceived in the Obama era, “The Handmaid’s Tale” arrived on Hulu in the early months of the first Trump presidency. Eight years later, it is concluding at the dawn of the second as an enduring, if initially accidental symbol of feminist resistance.Like the 1985 Margaret Atwood novel it is based upon, “The Handmaid’s Tale” focuses on the violence inflicted on women in Gilead, a place plagued by low birthrates and environmental disasters that divides women, based on age and fertility, into Wives, Handmaids, Marthas, Aunts, Econowives and Unwomen.From the beginning, the show has invited interpretation as a running commentary on real-world gender politics — female activists nationwide wore the Handmaid’s uniform of red cloaks and stark white bonnets in protests, and “The Handmaid’s Tale” made history as the first streaming series to win the Emmy for best drama, in 2017. And its dystopian conceit of a nation claiming complete control over women’s reproductive rights became only more ominous as more U.S. state legislatures passed abortion restrictions, culminating in the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade in 2022.“The Handmaid’s Tale” debuted in 2017 and became a symbol of feminist resistance.George Kraychyk/Hulu“The Handmaid’s Tale” will end on May 27. (A spinoff series called “The Testaments” is currently in production.) The sixth and final season is focusing on the power of collective action, including unanticipated collaboration between the former enemies June Osborne (Elisabeth Moss) and Serena Joy (Yvonne Strahovski) in attempting to destroy Gilead and restore American democracy. (As a former Handmaid, June was routinely sexually assaulted by Serena’s husband, a high-ranking official.)Multiple members of the creative team talked about “The Handmaid’s Tale” in recent video interviews, including Strahovski and Moss, who is also a producer and director on the series; Bruce Miller, the creator; Warren Littlefield, a producer; and Yahlin Chang and Eric Tuchman, the Season 6 showrunners (both were writers in earlier seasons).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: In ‘Wonderful Town,’ a Party for Writers and Weirdos

    An awkward Encores! revival of the 1953 musical celebrates the bohemian life of Greenwich Village in the years when oddballs could still afford to live there.Betty Comden was from Brooklyn, Adolph Green from the Bronx, Leonard Bernstein from Boston. All were born in the 1910s. Yet the mind’s eye first spies them huddling around a Greenwich Village piano in the early 1940s, cracking one another up while writing topical sketches for the Village Gate. They called themselves the Revuers.That off-the-cuff, show-off spirit is what they tried to capture in the warm and silly “Wonderful Town,” their 1953 musical set in and around the Village’s crooked streets and rattletrap apartments. Though nominally about the wacky New York adventures of two sisters from Ohio — based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical New Yorker stories — what it’s really selling is something the authors knew firsthand: the joy of finding the place where misfits fit and eggheads shine.But the piece is as jury-rigged as a candle in a Chianti bottle, as rickety as those Village Gate revues. Bernstein goes loco with congas and rags, just because he can; Comden and Green, less interested in character logic than in fun, let a football player rhyme “learned to read” with “André Gide.” And with a devil-may-care book by Joseph A. Fields and Jerome Chodorov, based on their earlier play “My Sister Eileen,” “Wonderful Town” is an almost random contraption, barely hanging together even when shaped by a light and loving hand. It got that treatment in Kathleen Marshall’s 2000 Encores! production, starring Donna Murphy, which transferred splendidly to Broadway in 2003.The Encores! encore that opened on Wednesday at City Center — just the third time in 31 seasons that this invaluable series has returned to a former title — does not reach any of the highs of that earlier production. Anika Noni Rose as Ruth, the older sister, and Aisha Jackson as Eileen, the younger, are well cast, and each has endearing moments. The magazine editor both women fall for is beautifully sung by Javier Muñoz. The choral work is up to the high house standards. But except when it dances, the staging, by Zhailon Levingston, is shaggy and leaden and fatally lacking in laughs.It pains me to say that because his main idea is good. Though we like to think of diversity as a one-way street, always improving, scruffy Greenwich Village welcomed a greater variety of people (and rats) in 1935, when the story is set, than it does today with its wraparound terraces. Levingston builds on the script’s comic portrait of impoverished bohemianism — its beret-topped painters, shrink-wrapped Martha Grahams and street-corner Carusos — to celebrate the racial and gender mix the authors omitted from their hymn to Christopher Street as “the place for self-expression.”But though his feel-good update is more easily accommodated than you might expect, it does not itself make “Wonderful Town” wonderful. Rose’s way with a throwaway line, and Jackson’s delightful bubbliness are too often undercut by pictorial vagueness and weird-pause pacing that leave you wondering what’s happening and whether the next thing will ever arrive. Even when the sisters dig into the haunting harmonies of Bernstein’s “Ohio” with palpable longing for an easier if emptier life, the weirder-than-usual sound design makes it seem like they’re singing about a home on Mars, not in the Midwest.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Ruth Buzzi, Purse-Wielding Gladys of ‘Laugh-In,’ Is Dead at 88

    Ruth Buzzi, whose wary spinster wielding a vicious pocketbook to fend off male advances both real and imagined was among the most memorable characters on “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In,” the TV comedy grab bag of a show of the psychedelic era, died on Thursday at her ranch near Fort Worth. She was 88.Her agent, Michael Eisenstadt, said the cause was complications of Alzheimer’s disease, which was diagnosed 10 years ago.With an elastic, expressive face and a gift, both vocal and physical, for caricature, Ms. Buzzi had a long performing career. She played myriad roles onstage in summer stock; appeared on Broadway once, with a tripartite credit (as the Good Fairy/Woman With Hat/Receptionist) in the 1966 musical “Sweet Charity”; performed in TV variety shows; showed up as a guest star in a host of sitcoms; and had minor parts in movies, including “Freaky Friday,” the 1976 identity-swap comedy, and “The Apple Dumpling Gang Rides Again,” a loopy 1979 Disney western.Nothing in her career, however, had the enduring appeal of her determinedly unappealing “Laugh-In” character Gladys Ormphby, a combination schoolmarm, delicate codgerette and battle-ax clad in a drab brown cardigan, long skirt, saggy stockings and a hairnet with a knot in the middle of her forehead.Gladys’s regular appearances on the show — an NBC prime-time fixture from 1968 to 1973 — were generally in skits involving Tyrone, the quintessential dirty old man (Arte Johnson), who would get a little too close, breathe a little too heavily and make a little too suggestive a comment, provoking Gladys to wallop him with her purse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Idina Menzel’s ‘Redwood’ to Close Following Tony Nominations Shutout

    The Broadway musical will play its final performance at the Nederlander Theater on May 18.“Redwood,” a musical starring Idina Menzel, will end its Broadway run on May 18, an unexpectedly early closing announced just 24 hours after the show failed to garner any Tony Awards nominations.The show’s producers, Eva Price, Caroline Kaplan and Loudmouth Media, which is Menzel’s production company, announced the closing on Friday morning, acknowledging in a statement that “we had of course hoped for a longer run.” It had been scheduled to run at least until Aug. 17.“Redwood” was among 13 Tony-eligible shows that did not receive any nominations on Thursday. And although it had started off well at the box office, the show faced a worrisome decline in weekly grosses last month. It is the first production to decide to close following the Tony announcements, but it is not likely to be the last — several musicals are exhibiting signs of weakness at the box office at a very competitive and challenging time for Broadway shows, when it has become increasingly difficult for shows to become profitable because the costs of producing have risen.“Redwood” is a passion project for Menzel and her main collaborator, Tina Landau, who conceived the show with the actress and then wrote the book and directed the production. Kate Diaz wrote the music and collaborated with Landau on the lyrics. It had an initial production last year at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.The musical is about a New York City gallerist, who, grieving the death of her son, drives cross-country and winds up in a redwood forest, seeking some kind of solace while tree-sitting. The set features enormous LED screens that are used to depict the landscape, and Menzel and several of her co-stars perform part of the show while climbing a large prop tree.The show was named a Critic’s Pick by Jesse Green of The New York Times, who wrote, “You have to admire the guts it takes to have put a deeply serious show about trauma and resilience on Broadway right now.” But other critics were less impressed; the reviews were mostly mixed to negative.The producers said that, during the production’s run, the show helped raise more than $2 million for charities, much of it in support of redwood forests.“Redwood” began previews at the Nederlander Theater on Jan. 24 and opened Feb. 13. At the time of its closing, it will have had 127 performances. It was capitalized for up to $16 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission; that money has not been recouped. More

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    As Jane Austen’s Sister, Keeley Hawes Keeps a Controlled Burn

    Being cast in the mini-series “Miss Austen” began Keeley Hawes’s first venture into the Jane Austen-verse. Hawes has a résumé thick with period pieces but, perhaps surprisingly, she had never done a screen adaptation of Austen’s work — a veritable cottage industry in Britain since the late 1930s.“Of course, my husband played Mr. Darcy, so I feel like we’ve been in that world,” Hawes said, referring to the “Succession” star Matthew Macfadyen, who appeared in the 2005 film version of the classic Regency-era novel “Pride and Prejudice.”“I was delighted to join in the Austen world, and especially to do it like this because it’s not one that has been done,” she continued. “But it feels like part of the canon.”Indeed, Hawes is sneaking in through a side door: In the four-part “Miss Austen,” which premieres on Sunday as part of the PBS series “Masterpiece,” she plays a fictionalized version of Cassandra, Jane’s older sister and a somewhat controversial figure because she burned most of the writer’s letters.Like the historical novel by Gill Hornby on which it is based, the show, adapted by Andrea Gibb, speculates on what led Cassandra to her fateful act and features some very Austen-like romantic subplots. A key development cleverly brings together a friend of Cassandra’s played by Rose Leslie and Jane’s posthumous novel “Persuasion.”Based on a fictionalized account of Cassandra Austen’s life, “Miss Austen,” led by Keeley Hawes, speculates on what led Cassandra to burn her sister Jane’s letters.Robert Viglasky/MasterpieceWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘God Is in the Details’: Embracing Boredom in Art and Life

    The Netflix show “Adolescence” and asks audiences to be OK with slower moments and small talk. Is that possible in 2025?The Netflix drama “Adolescence” requires its audience to linger — to sink into the mundane.Each of its four hourlong episodes was shot in one continuous take, allowing its harrowing story — centered on a 13-year-old boy accused of killing a classmate — to unfold in real time. As the visual point of view shifts, its audience is invited to eavesdrop on interactions that are extraneous to the plot, as characters loiter in hallways and cars, and make small talk with strangers.“Adolescence” is unusual because, as a character study without a propulsive plot, it requires its audience be OK with being in the moment. It stands in contrast to most modern television shows, which are increasingly geared toward a smartphone-addicted viewership of people who scroll while watching (think fast-moving shows like “Reacher”).It also stands in contrast to how we live our lives, with shortening attention spans, increasing isolation and an inability to sit still. “Adolescence” challenges us to be OK with small talk and boredom, even if our impulse is to disappear into our screens.“We’re becoming conditioned for these fast filtered interactions that involve constant stimulation,” said Fallon Goodman, the director of the Emotion and Resilience Laboratory at George Washington University. “So the consequences of that are shorter attention spans, making us more impatient with the natural flow of an in-person interaction.”Early in the fourth and final episode of “Adolescence,” Eddie (Stephen Graham, also a creator of the series), drives to a hardware store with his wife, Manda (Christine Tremarco), and daughter, Lisa (Amelie Pease), to buy paint. The ride lasts eight minutes — an eternity in television time. Viewers ride along, too, watching as the family tries to maintain the illusion of normality, even as the couple’s young son, Jamie (Owen Cooper), is sitting in jail. As Eddie puts it, they are “solving the problem of today.” They discuss their love of the band a-ha and how Eddie and Manda met, and they make plans to celebrate Eddie’s birthday.The sequence does not affect the central story line in a meaningful way, and one can imagine a less ambitious show condensing this scene, focused strictly on character work, to a minute or two, or cutting it entirely. But from the passenger seat, viewers learn Eddie and Manda are in therapy and observe the heaviness under which the family is living, despite their smiles as “Take On Me” plays in the background.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Late Night Watches ‘Signalgate’ Claim a Victim, Sort of

    Mike Waltz, who added a journalist to a Signal group chat about plans to bomb Yemen, is out as national security adviser, but his career isn’t over.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.Not the Last WaltzOn Thursday, Mike Waltz — famous for inadvertently adding a journalist to a Signal chat group where officials discussed plans to attack Yemen — was removed from his post as President Trump’s national security adviser. But Trump soon announced that he would nominate Waltz to be the ambassador to the United Nations.“The news was first reported when he accidentally texted it to Lester Holt,” Seth Meyers said on “Late Night.”“So finally — finally — a member of the Trump administration faces lasting consequences that lasted three and a half hours.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“What a strong message that is: ‘We can’t trust you to keep our secrets. But go cavort freely with representatives from every country in the world.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Well, he’s not fired, but he was removed from the group chat.” — JIMMY FALLON“It was a tough decision, and as with anything this sensitive, the first person to find out was Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“So, that guy, the one who claimed strangers’ numbers can get sucked into your phone, will now be Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations if he gets confirmed, which means he’ll spend a lot less time at the White House, where his portfolio seemed to consist of two things: leaking war plans on group chats and, much like his phone, sucking up to Donald Trump.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Return to Office Edition)“Apparently, Elon Musk is stepping away from his work at the White House so he can focus on running Tesla. He was like, ‘Hm, what’s better: this dumpster fire or this dumpster fire?’” — JIMMY FALLON“Elon is dialing back his DOGE duties to focus on his own disaster of a company.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingQuinta Brunson, the creator and star of “Abbott Elementary,” crashed Thursday’s “Tonight Show” to promote her gig hosting “Saturday Night Live” this weekend.Also, Check This OutGeorge Clooney in “Good Night, and Good Luck.” He was among the screen stars who got Tony nominations for their work on Broadway this season.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAudra McDonald, George Clooney, and Sarah Snook, stars of both stage and screen, received Tony nominations on Thursday. More