Eliana Willis

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    in Television

    Jon Stewart Extends ‘Daily Show’ Run Through 2025

    Stewart, who returned to the show in February as a host on Monday nights, originally planned to work through the presidential election.Jon Stewart is sticking around. After nearly nine months with Stewart back at the desk of “The Daily Show,” Comedy Central announced on Monday that he would continue to host the show on Monday nights through 2025.Stewart, who regularly won Emmys while hosting the Comedy Central show full-time from 1999 to 2015, was originally expected to host through the 2024 presidential election.“I’ve truly enjoyed being back working with the incredible team at ‘The Daily Show’ and Comedy Central,” Stewart, 61, said in a statement. “I was really hoping they’d allow me to do every other Monday, but I’ll just have to suck it up.”In addition to continuing his hosting duties one night a week, Stewart will also continue to serve as an executive producer.“Jon’s incisive intellect and sharp wit make him one of the most important voices in political and cultural commentary today,” Chris McCarthy, a senior executive at Paramount, Comedy Central’s parent company, said in the statement. “His ability to cut through the noise and deliver cleareyed insights is exactly what we need.”In September, “The Daily Show” won an Emmy for best talk series. “You have made an old man very happy,” Stewart said in the acceptance speech. “It has really made my Mondays.”A rotating lineup of hosts — including Desi Lydic, Ronny Chieng, Michael Kosta and Jordan Klepper — will continue to anchor the rest of the week. “The Daily Show” has been without a permanent host since Trevor Noah stepped down in late 2022. More

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    Broadway Is Singing Louis Armstrong’s Songs. Here Are 6 Classics.

    When Christopher Renshaw was growing up in England in the 1950s and ’60s, everybody knew about Louis Armstrong. “He was an icon for me as a child,” he said. “He was just there — he’s smiling, he’s funny.”But when Renshaw — whose directing credits include the 1996 Broadway production of “The King and I” and “Taboo,” which he conceived with Boy George — was approached about creating an Armstrong musical, he quickly learned that the musician was far more than just the affable, popular entertainer he saw on television.Armstrong’s story sprawls across five decades, numerous musical and social upheavals, and his own creative breakthroughs from the revolutionary 1920s recordings with his Hot Five band to worldwide celebrity with the ’60s pop smashes “Hello, Dolly!” and “What a Wonderful World.”That story is now being told on Broadway in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical,” which is in previews at Studio 54, following a 2021 premiere in Miami and runs in New Orleans and Chicago. For the show’s creative team, exploring the offstage struggles and tensions of this cultural and musical titan was as important as illustrating his pioneering, radical work as a trumpeter and singer.“Louis Armstrong was a real Black man,” James Monroe Iglehart, who is portraying Armstrong and is one of the directors, said, noting the ways Armstrong’s image was cleaned up and deracinated for Hollywood and television. “We worked really hard to show that side of him, the good and the bad.”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 Mysterious ‘Ketamine Queen’ at the Center of the Matthew Perry Case

    One year after Mr. Perry’s death, Jasveen Sangha is in jail awaiting trial on charges that she sold him the ketamine that killed him.A few weeks after Matthew Perry was discovered floating facedown in a hot tub, the woman who prosecutors say supplied the ketamine that killed the actor was indulging in afternoon tea at a five-star hotel in Japan and taking mirror selfies while modeling a kimono. Several months later, she posted highlights from a trip to Mexico, where she enjoyed caviar at the airport, sitting poolside at the beach and admiring a drink within a coconut.The woman, Jasveen Sangha, liked to share images of a glamorous life on social media, of herself rubbing elbows with celebrities and traveling around the world to Spain, China and Dubai.But her home was a midrise building for the aspiring upper class in North Hollywood, an unglamorous space in an unremarkable part of town. It was there, prosecutors say, that Ms. Sangha manufactured, stored and distributed illegal drugs for at least five years, including those connected to the deaths of Mr. Perry and another man.When the authorities raided Ms. Sangha’s fourth-floor apartment in March, they said they found cocaine, 79 vials of ketamine and three pounds of orange pills containing methamphetamine. Prosecutors emphasized in court documents that customers knew her as the “Ketamine Queen.” Ms. Sangha in a photo taken from her Instagram account.“Given the volume of drugs defendant sold, there are likely more victims,” they wrote in court documents.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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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grotesquerie’ and Halloween Movies

    FX airs the finale of Ryan Murphy’s latest show. And various channels celebrate the spooky frights and delights of the holiday.For those who still enjoy a cable subscription, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, Oct. 28-Nov. 3 Details and times are subject to change.MondaySMILE (2022) 8 p.m. on MTV. If you plan to catch “Smile 2” in theaters, it might be good to refresh your memory with the original. This film follows Dr. Rose Cotter (Sosie Bacon) and her patient (Caitlin Stasey), who believes she is being followed by an evil entity that forces people to smile. Leave it to a psychological thriller to make something that is usually joyful into something terrifying.A still from “American Dad.”Courtesy of Fox.AMERICAN DAD 10 p.m. on TBS. This show, which began in 2005, is back with guest stars such as Kevin Bacon, Michael Imperioli and Leslie Jones. The story will focus on the fictional town of Langley Falls and its boardwalk reopening.TuesdayCITIZEN NATION 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). This documentary series shadows teenagers across the United States who are taking part in a civics competition. The cameras follows the Gen Zers as they make their way through regional and state competitions in the form of congressional hearings, with the ultimate goal of a championship win in Washington.WednesdayGROTESQUERIE 10 p.m. on FX. For the last month, the majority of my TikTok page has consisted of edits of Nicholas Alexander Chavez in two different Ryan Murphy shows — either as Lyle Menendez in “Monsters” on Netflix or as Father Charlie Mayhew in “Grotesquerie.,” and it’s easy to see why. The twisty series follows Lois Tryon (Niecy Nash), a detective, as she works with Megan Duval (Micaela Diamond), a nun and journalist, to solve the horrible crimes happening in the community.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: ‘We Live in Cairo’ Falls Short of Being Revolutionary

    Egyptians stand up to their government in a play that excels in its design but rings hollow when its subtext and character development are scrutinized.Building a new world is just as difficult, maybe even more so, as tearing down an old one. Just ask the Arab Spring revolutionaries of “We Live in Cairo,” whose solidarity fractures after they get what they were fighting for.The brothers Daniel and Patrick Lazour’s show, which opened on Sunday at New York Theater Workshop, is divided into a before and after, with intermission sitting neatly in the middle: The leadup to the violent protests of January and February 2011, which prompted the resignation of the autocratic Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, followed by the buildup of bitterness and strife. But while passions supposedly run high, the temperature of this new musical — which at best and at worst feels like “Rent” on the barricades — almost never rises above tepid.Like Mark Cohen, the aspiring filmmaker in “Rent,” Layla (Nadina Hassan), a photographer, takes on the responsibility of documenting the action, in this case the resistance of a handful of young Cairenes fighting government oppression.Layla meets them through her boyfriend, Amir (Ali Louis Bourzgui, the lead in the recent revival of “The Who’s Tommy”). The group’s firebrand, Fadwa (Rotana Tarabzouni), who comes from an activist family, landed in jail for criticizing Mubarak on Facebook. Its levelheaded pillar is Amir’s brother, Hany (Michael Khalid Karadsheh), who wants to attend law school in New York, and its party-loving jester is Fadwa’s wealthy cousin, Karim (John El-Jor), an artist who spray-paints caricatures of the country’s leaders.Those murals connect to some of the brightest elements of Taibi Magar’s production — the physical ones. Tilly Grimes’s set, with carpets in red tones and a place for the band at the back of the stage, has a lived-in quality that suggests the warmth of the friends’ relationship as well as the feeling of relative safety that prevails at their hangout. David Bengali’s video design does the heavy lifting when the outside world intrudes, and includes illustrations by the Egyptian artist Ganzeer that represent Karim’s work alongside projected news images, some of them appropriately brutal. (Raphael Mishler designed the papier-mâché head of Mubarak that Karim wears when we meet him.)Unfortunately, design alone does not a musical make, and piddly details like book and score must be taken into account. There is no questioning the Lazours’ passion for the project, which has been in the works for a decade and premiered at American Repertory Theater, in Massachusetts, in 2019 — the album “Flap My Wings (Songs from We Live in Cairo)” was recorded remotely with various singers the following year. But the characters are never convincingly defined, except for Fadwa, who also benefits from Tarabzouni’s fiery performance.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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    Mimi Hines, a Replacement Star in ‘Funny Girl,’ Dies at 91

    She was best known as half of a comedy team with her husband, Phil Ford, until her hall-filling voice earned her raves in a role made famous by Barbra Streisand.Mimi Hines, a powerful singer and live-wire comedian who etched her name in Broadway lore as the replacement for Barbra Streisand in the original production of “Funny Girl,” died on Oct. 21 at her home in Las Vegas. She was 91.Her death was confirmed by her lawyer and friend Mark Sendroff.A “mischievous sprite,” as The New York Times once called her, the diminutive Ms. Hines brought an outsize energy to her work, whether she was dishing out one-liners in nightclubs as half of a comedy-and-song duo, Ford & Hines, with her husband, Phil Ford, or delivering showstopping numbers to packed houses on Broadway.During her peak in the 1950s and ’60s, journalists often noted her elfin quality and her distinctive facial features — cleft chin, deep dimples and wide, toothy grin — which she was not shy about using as a comic prop.When Mike Wallace interviewed her and Mr. Ford in 1961, he informed her that a newspaper writer had recently described her as “two buck teeth and a carload of talent.”“That’s not true,” she responded. “My whole mouth is buck.”Ms. Hines and Mr. Ford got their first big break in 1958 on “The Tonight Show,” which at the time was hosted by Jack Paar. It was the first of several “Tonight” appearances they would make over the years. Her rendition of the song “Till There Was You” from “The Music Man” moved Mr. Paar to tears.“It was a magic night on TV,” Ms. Hines said in a 1963 interview with The Prince Herald Daily Tribune of Saskatchewan. “They say 12 million people saw it.” They also appeared on several episodes of “The Ed Sullivan Show,” as well as on many other variety and talk shows.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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    ‘Hysteria!,’ ‘Stranger Things’ and the Satanic Panic That Never Goes Away

    Five years ago, the television writer Matthew Scott Kane sold “Hysteria!,” a scripted drama that takes place in the late 1980s. The series was inspired in part by the tumult of misinformation he found online and in the media of the late 2010s. Shows like these take time to make, and Kane worried the idea would pass its best-by date.“I kept thinking, man, I don’t know if this is going to feel relevant,” he said in a recent interview.“Hysteria!” which premiered on Peacock on Oct. 18, is set in a small Michigan town in the grip of the so-called satanic panic of the 1980s and early 1990s, an episode of mass hysteria which imagined that a cross-country network of satanic cults was engaged in ritual abuse, animal sacrifice and infanticide. In the pilot, a high school football star is discovered dead. Suspicion turns to several of his classmates, members of a heavy metal band that exploits satanic imagery.The aesthetics of “Hysteria!” — the wallpaper, the jeans, the popular music — are distinctly ’80s. But the impulse to displace social anxieties onto perceived groups of outsiders is as American as apple pie. (Are those apples poisoned? Do they have razor blades inside?) And in a culture of heightened political rhetoric and pervasive misinformation, as apparent now as it was five years ago, the distance between the satanic panic and current conspiracy theories — QAnon, say, or the supposed grooming of children by queer people — is a short one, barely the length of a suburban lawn.Recent works of fiction — “Hysteria!”; the novel “Rainbow Black”; the fourth season of “Stranger Things”; the film “Late Night With the Devil” — all treat the satanic panic as a discrete historical event. But they also suggest how the panic’s concerns resonate in the present. As it turns out, Americans are still panicking. We may always be panicking.“Hysteria!,” a new Peacock show set during the satanic panic, features an attempted exorcism. Mark Hill/PeacockWe 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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    ‘Attack on Titan’ Shows that Anime and Broadway Could Be a Good Match

    “Attack on Titan: The Musical” showed what a crossover between two seemingly different types of fans could look like.There are a few things that New York theatergoers can always expect to see on Broadway stages: some Disney, some Sondheim, some Hollywood stars. One may not expect to see the Colossal Titan.What is the Colossal Titan? That would be a giant, skinless humanoid creature, all red tendons and exposed ligaments, that has a taste for humans. This is basic knowledge, of course, for the legions of fans of “Attack on Titan,” the internationally popular Japanese manga that takes place in a dystopian world where people live in a penned-in society hidden behind towering walls.About 2,000 of those fans, many dressed as their favorite characters, filled New York City Center to see “Attack on Titan: The Musical” on the first night of its recent run earlier this month. This particular brand of manga-based onstage entertainment, and the fans who enjoy it, may at first seem like a novelty, but that’s only true in America — and perhaps only for the moment. In Japan, anime plays and musicals are omnipresent.Three sold-out performances later, it was easy to think that maybe the center of a Venn diagram between anime fandom and theater fandom is not as tiny or unusual a space as it may at first seem. Broadway presently banks on pop culture, already established intellectual properties and the fans who invest in them; the success of this performance of “Titan” made it possible to see a future in which anime doesn’t once again get mis-characterized as niche, or separate from mainstream culture, but rather as part of it.In other words, who’s to say that in a few years, anime won’t be another standard sight on Broadway?For now, it’s still uncommon to see what unfolded onstage earlier this month. Each time a titan appeared, it was a spectacle. Some materialized on a digital backdrop, crushing buildings and people below. Others were massive puppets, requiring a small battalion of coordinated handlers. And then there was the Colossal Titan, rendered with an inflatable head and arms.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