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    ‘The Nosebleed’ Review: ‘Who Here Hates Their Father?’

    Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play is a belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own.“Who here has a father who has died?”As show-of-hands questions for an audience go, that one is pretty personal. But when an actor asked it from the stage the other evening during “The Nosebleed,” Aya Ogawa’s gentle, forthright reckoning of a play, many hands went up.Other questions for the crowd come later: “Who here loves their father?”And, at least as relevant in this emotionally complex, autobiographical show: “Who here hates their father?”At that, all four actors sharing the role of Aya — the playwright — raise their hands, in character.Directed by Ogawa at Japan Society, which presents it with the Chocolate Factory Theater, “The Nosebleed” is a grown-up play about grief and remorse, loathing and legacy. A belated processing of the loss of a parent by a daughter who now has children of her own, it is a touched-with-grace ritual of probing and purgation: about the elements of inheritance that must be passed down, the poison bits that must be expelled and the missing pieces it is too late to claim.If that all sounds grim and — what with the four Ayas — hard to follow, it is not. Impeccably structured and lucidly staged, this play has a disarming sense of welcome, and a down-to-earth ease familiar from Ogawa’s many English translations of the Japanese playwright Toshiki Okada (“Zero Cost House”), who is known for his colloquial immediacy.“The Nosebleed” also has some wackily funny, psychologically insightful scenes reenacted from the reality TV show “The Bachelorette.”“Why haven’t you talked to your dad in two years?” the bachelorette asks her date.“Is it my responsibility to reach out to him and make sure that there’s a relationship there?” her date says. “I don’t know.”In a news release about the play, Ogawa says that it “chronicles what I believe is one of the biggest failures of my life, which is that when my father died almost 15 years ago, I failed to do anything to honor him or his life because of the nature of our relationship.”“The Nosebleed,” in which she plays both her father and her bloody-nosed 5-year-old son, goes some distance toward atoning for that without sentimentalizing the past. The father she shows us is a stolid, taciturn executive who immigrated from Japan to Northern California with young Aya and her mother, and considers his financial support of them proof enough of his love.The gap between Aya and her father, then, is partly cultural. Having spent a good chunk of her childhood in the United States, she fits into it more comfortably than he did — even if entrenched idiots like the character called White Guy (Peter Lettre) can hardly believe that she doesn’t speak English with an accent.With set and costumes by Jian Jung, and lighting by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew, “The Nosebleed” is a visually uncomplicated show: a vessel for holding ghosts and regrets, and for deciding what to do with what a parent leaves behind.With the four Ayas — Drae Campbell, Haruna Lee, Saori Tsukada and Kaili Y. Turner, terrific all — and some audience participation from volunteers, the performance becomes a moving communal rite that accommodates both love and hate and locates the filial kindness for a loopily generous send-off.But what it mourns most deeply are the questions for a dead father that went unasked, and the understanding that might have been.The NosebleedThrough Oct. 10 at Japan Society, Manhattan; 212-715-1258, japansociety.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Alessandro Nivola Put His Foot Down and Won the ‘Many Saints’ Role Anyway

    When he landed his first major lead in 25 years, he sobbed. “I’d been down that road so many times, and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”The throbbing in the back of Alessandro Nivola’s head was growing more intense.It was fall 2018 when he’d auditioned for the role of Dickie Moltisanti in “The Many Saints of Newark,” the “Sopranos” prequel, and “I felt pretty sure I was onto something,” he said. Though he wasn’t sure what that something was.Then after a lunch with David Chase, creator of the series, and Alan Taylor, the film’s director, the full script arrived and the stakes shot through the roof. Dickie, it turned out, was the film’s protagonist, and Chase had been told he could cast anyone he wanted. And the word was that Chase wanted Nivola, who hadn’t carried a movie of this magnitude in his nearly 25-year film career.That’s when the throbbing kicked in. “I’d been down that road so many times,” Nivola said, “and the number of disappointments I can’t count on 10 hands.”So when a month passed without an offer — the noise in his head by now impossible to ignore — he decided to put an end to his misery. “Call them,” he instructed his agents, “and tell them that if they don’t tell me today I’m out.”Four hours later, in a downstairs bathroom at the Chateau Marmont during a layover in Los Angeles, he learned that Dickie was his. He locked himself in a stall and cried, muffled sobs of relief and release, for 10 minutes.Nivola at the wheel as Dickie Moltisanti with Michela De Rossi next to him and Michael Gandolfini behind him.Warner Bros. “You see, at some point you just have to put your foot down,” he told his people.Only, they hadn’t made the call. It was simply his lucky day.To hear Nivola, 49, tell it, good fortune has been elusive. But on a balmy September afternoon at the Mulberry Street Bar in Little Italy, he gave off the scent of a man swimming in it. Sleek in an unseasonably warm suit he’d worn to a photo shoot (his stylist had driven away with his clothes), he radiated Dickie’s debonair charisma, minus most of his menacing edge. James Gandolfini, the original Tony Soprano, glowered in a poster overhead, but Nivola looked like a boss.“The Many Saints of Newark” has been positioned as Tony’s origin story, with Michael Gandolfini cast as the teenage version of his father’s iconic character. But the movie belongs to Dickie, an explosive, tomcatting mobster — long dead when Tony mythologized him in “The Sopranos” — who somehow managed, despite his best efforts, to twist a basically decent kid into a tormented mafia kingpin.Chase had wanted to make a respectable gangster film. “So, there’s no more Jimmy Gandolfini,” he said in an interview, “but we wanted someone who could, in his own way, be as criminally intelligent and charismatic.”Dickie is more elegant, more handsome, more stylish than Tony. “But he is carrying exactly the same set of tones,” said Taylor, the director, “which is this combination of introspection and complete blindness and rage and regret.”Nivola’s induction into the “Sopranos” family actually began with his sleazy prosecutor in “American Hustle,” which impressed Chase and made him wonder: “Who is this guy and where has he been? I have to keep him in mind.”“So I kept him in mind,” Chase said, “and when this role came up, he seemed to me to be the perfect guy for it.”Nivola ticked off the boxes: Italian American with an immigrant back story — his grandfather a Sardinian sculptor who resettled in Manhattan’s downtown bohemia during the war, his father a Harvard graduate and Brookings Institution fellow — and an innate grasp of the language.“When it came to Italian, curse words or otherwise,” Chase said, “he got the words and the tune.”And Nivola — a Boston-born Yale man who spent his grade-school years mostly in rural Vermont and high school at Phillips Exeter Academy in New Hampshire — was an eyeful. “On ‘The Sopranos,’ I never went that direction but I felt, well, we can’t blame the guy for being handsome,” Chase said. “He’s really good, and I knew he could deliver the right level of sinister.”Taking those “Sopranos” colors, Nivola painted a Jekyll and Hyde, longing to be remembered for doing something noble but dragged down by impulsive violence that horrifies even him.His interpretation was “pitch perfect, every beat of it,” starting with his audition scenes, said Taylor, who had to resist trying to get Nivola to recreate their perfection when they actually started shooting.Nivola has been bringing it since his film breakthrough in 1997 as Pollux Troy, the weirdo brother of Nicolas Cage’s terrorist in “Face/Off.” After which he essentially went undercover.“I always was drawn to roles that allowed me to hide myself and to burrow into some other kind of personality or behavior that felt like a disguise,” he said. “That’s been the blessing and the curse of my whole career up until now.”Nivola adroitly shapeshifted from one character to the next, without an obvious through line — the British frontman who beds a much older record producer in “Laurel Canyon,” the Orthodox Jew drawn into a love triangle in “Disobedience,” the lunatic sensei in “The Art of Self-Defense.”But along the way, disappointment over films that flopped or weren’t even released, and a sense of entitlement at being asked to repeatedly prove himself — hadn’t he already? — gave rise to crippling nerves and depression. Eventually he felt so uncomfortable auditioning in person that he stopped altogether.“My most successful friends are sort of relentlessly positive,” said Nivola, citing his wife, the actor and director Emily Mortimer, and his pal Ethan Hawke. “I’m trying to be more that way but it’s not my nature.”Then came David O. Russell’s “American Hustle.” And after a humbling seven-year break when he stopped auditioning but also stopped getting much-wanted roles, he showed up to compete for the job.Nivola, left, with Bradley Cooper in “American Hustle.”Francois Duhamel/Columbia PicturesNivola had begun to reassess how he wanted to work, choosing great directors over great parts. But Russell’s idiosyncratic style — writing a script and then yelling out alternate lines for the actor to say in the midst of shooting — left Nivola feeling utterly out of control. Thrillingly so.“It was a big turning point for me, where I just completely gave over to him,” he said. “And from that moment on, I really liked that feeling. I wanted to give every director that I worked with that power.”Whatever caused Nivola to hesitate or overthink before, Russell has seen that drop away in favor of “enthusiastic inventiveness,” he wrote in an email. “I think he can do almost anything — he’s fearless. He takes what I’ve written and makes it his own. We trust each other, which allows risk and a hell of a lot of fun.”“American Hustle” was also Nivola’s first film with Robert De Niro, whom he considers a mentor. “I mean, he might not describe himself that way,” he said, laughing, “but I insist.”But it was watching him in motion on “The Wizard of Lies” — De Niro as Bernie Madoff and Nivola as his son Mark — that affected the way Nivola worked more than any other experience. He began learning his dialogue early so that he could untie himself from the words. He started repeating phrases in the middle of scenes, like a reset, until he’d forgotten he was performing.“It’s almost like he’s playing music rather than saying text,” Taylor said — even if it does send the dolly crew dashing when he suddenly takes a scene back to the beginning. The director added, “Frequently what comes out of his third version is the one he was aiming for, and it really, really works.”In September, the day after “The Many Saints of Newark” premiered at the Beacon Theater, Nivola, true to form, was elated if cautious. Critics for IndieWire, CNN and others singled his performance out with phrases like “absolutely brilliant” and “riveting.”“So far, these have been the best reviews I’ve ever had for a performance,” he wrote in an email, adding, “I’m trying not to put too much or too little stock in them.”But back on Mulberry Street, Nivola had intimated that his shining moment hadn’t dropped from out of the blue — not really. “I felt, to be honest, leading up to when this opportunity came, some intangible feeling that something like this was brewing,” he said haltingly.Still, unlike Dickie, he wasn’t willing to wager on his future. “I will never think about this movie as a success,” he added, “until I’m proven otherwise.” More

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    Pat Robertson Ends His Long Run as Host of ‘The 700 Club’

    Mr. Robertson, the evangelical leader who started the show in the 1960s to help save the Christian Broadcasting Network, said his son would take over as host of the program.The evangelical leader Pat Robertson said on Friday that he was stepping down as host of the “The 700 Club” after more than 50 years at the helm of a program that channeled Christian conservatism into millions of American homes and turned him into a household name.“It’s been a great run,” Mr. Robertson said on the show, adding that his son Gordon Robertson would take over as host.Mr. Robertson, 91, made the announcement at the end of the broadcast on Friday, the 60th anniversary of the Christian Broadcasting Network, which Mr. Robertson started in a small station in Portsmouth, Va., in 1961.“The 700 Club” grew out of a series of telethons that Mr. Robertson began hosting in 1963 to rescue the network from financial troubles. At the time, Mr. Robertson said he was unable to pay for a suite of offices the network had added to the station.“I was praying on my knees with the staff,” Mr. Robertson said on Friday. “I needed $200,000, and I was praying and praying for the money.”It was then that Mr. Robertson said Jesus appeared to him with a “vision for the world.”“Our job was to reach the world, not just pay the bills,” he said.The network began holding telethons, asking for 700 viewers to pledge $10 a month to the station. The efforts inspired the “700 Club” name.The show transformed evangelical broadcasting, moving it away from scripted sermons and recordings of tent revivals and turning it into a cozy talk-show format where Mr. Robertson discussed topics such as nutrition, relationships, marriage and politics, said John C. Green, a professor emeritus of political science at the University of Akron.Mr. Robertson greeting supporters outside a union hall in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, in 1988 during his campaign for president.Jim Wilson/The New York TimesEvangelical Christians have long used stories of wayward people saved through the teachings of Jesus as a way to spread the Gospel and gain followers. Mr. Robertson’s show featured “very vivid presentations of these testimonials,” which engaged audiences, Dr. Green said.“It was through the success of ‘The 700 Club’ that he was able to have a real impact on politics,” he said.Mr. Robertson interviewed President Ronald Reagan; Shimon Peres, the former prime minister of Israel; and other world leaders. In 1988, he ran as a Republican candidate for president and made strong second-place finishes during the primary, performances that underscored the organizing potential of evangelical Christians.Through the show, Mr. Robertson “helped cement that alliance between conservative Christians and the Republican Party,” Dr. Green said.The show also gave Mr. Robertson a regular platform to vilify gay people and Muslims. He often quoted Bible verses in a soft, gentle voice to justify remarks that infuriated Arab Americans and gay rights organizations.In 2002, he described Islam as a violent religion that wanted to “dominate and then, if need be, destroy.”In 2013, a viewer sent a letter to the show asking how Facebook users should respond when they see a picture of two men kissing. Mr. Robertson said, “I would punch ‘vomit,’ not ‘like.’”He dismissed feminism as “a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.”He once told the story of an “awful-looking” woman who complained to her minister that her husband had begun drinking heavily. Mr. Robertson said the minister told her that it was likely because she had gained weight and neglected her hair.“We need to cultivate romance, darling,” Mr. Robertson said. He blamed natural disasters and terrorism on moral and spiritual failings. In 2012, after deadly tornadoes pounded the South and Midwest, Mr. Robertson said that God would have intervened if “enough people were praying.”He also made comments that surprised both his followers and critics.Gordon Robertson, chief executive of the Christian Broadcasting Network and son of the founder Pat Robertson, in 2018. He will take over as host of “The 700 Club.”Steve Helber/Associated PressIn 2011, Mr. Robertson said that a man whose wife had Alzheimer’s disease should be able to divorce her and find a new partner. The next year, he called for the legalization of marijuana, saying that the “war on drugs just hasn’t succeeded.”“I believe in working with the hearts of people, and not locking them up,” he said.During Friday’s broadcast, the show steered clear of Mr. Robertson’s divisive comments.Instead, it showed clips of Mr. Robertson embracing diversity — the program named the Rev. Ben Kinchlow, a Black minister, as Mr. Robertson’s co-host in 1975, a time when there were few Black television hosts. Another clip showed Mr. Robertson asking President Donald J. Trump if the women in his cabinet would earn the same as men.Mr. Robertson said he told his son to expect him to return to the show from time to time.“In case I get a revelation from the Lord, I’m going to call you” and participate in the show, he said. “I’ll come in as a commentator, as a senior commentator, from time to time.” More

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    Matt Amodio Beats James Holzhauer’s Streak on ‘Jeopardy!’

    The Yale Ph.D. student, who is studying computer science, has won 33 games in a row, making him No. 2 on the game show’s hall of fame roster for longest streaks.Two years ago, one “Jeopardy!” contestant, James Holzhauer, captured the imaginations of game-show fans who watched nightly to see his lightning-fast buzzer reflexes and risky bets.Holzhauer’s 32-game run put his face (with his trademark strained smile) all over the “Jeopardy!” hall of fame. But on Friday, another contestant, Matt Amodio, a Ph.D. student at Yale, won his 33rd game, smashing through Holzhauer’s streak and taking his place as No. 2 in the record book for most games won in a row. The first spot is held by Ken Jennings, who won 74 games and ultimately became a consulting producer on the show.Amodio’s victory brought him to $1.27 million in total winnings, and he has a long way to go to beat Holzhauer’s $2.46 million. With such an extraordinary total, Holzhauer was poised during his 33rd episode to possibly surpass Jennings’s record of $2.52 million won during the regular season, but he was bested by Emma Boettcher, a librarian who wrote her master’s paper on “Jeopardy!”The fanfare around Amodio — some on social media are calling it the “Amodio Rodeo”— is perhaps a relief to the people behind the game show, who have been struggling to find a replacement for Alex Trebek, the beloved host who died last year. The show’s former executive producer, Mike Richards, was announced as the new host, then swiftly stepped down after The Ringer reported on offensive comments he had made on a podcast he created several years ago. The actress Mayim Bialik and Jennings are hosting episodes until the end of the year.“Jeopardy!” superfans are also rejoicing at the shift in focus from behind-the-scenes drama to what’s actually playing out onstage.Andy Saunders, who runs the website The Jeopardy! Fan, said Amodio and Holzhauer have similar approaches to the game: In the first round, they both start by tackling all of the $1,000 clues, then try to find the Daily Double, to double their winnings and gain a significant lead over the other competitors. Where the two diverge, Saunders said, is in the next round, where Holzhauer tended to inflate his score by betting large sums on the Daily Double clues.“Where James might bet $13,000 or $14,000, Matt is betting $5,000 or $6,000,” he said in an interview. “And that’s pretty much the difference in their scores.”Saunders thinks that Holzhauer’s aggressive strategy comes from a higher level of confidence that he is going to give the correct response. Based on Saunders’s statistics, Holzhauer tended to get three or four more correct answers than Amodio does each episode, providing more of a foundation for that confidence. The willingness to bet big could also have come from Holzhauer’s background as a sports bettor, where he grew comfortable putting down large sums of money on games.That difference in strategy makes it unlikely that Amodio, who is studying computer science, will start to best Holzhauer in the category of single-game winnings, which Holzhauer completely dominates.However, if Amodio keeps up his dominance, he has a chance at beating Jennings’s 74-game streak from 2004 and setting a record for all-time winnings in regular-season play.Amodio tends to be humble about comparisons to the “Jeopardy!” all-stars, saying in a news release that it was “surreal” to be beside Jennings in the hall of fame and, on Twitter, writing that Holzhauer is better than him “in literally every way.”Amodio’s star turn, only two years after Holzhauer rose to fame, has raised the question: Is “Jeopardy!” getting easier, or are players just getting better?Saunders, who tracks the results of every game, thinks it’s that players are getting better. He said he doesn’t see substantial changes in the content of the clues but, instead, thinks that contestants have taken note of Holzhauer’s winning strategy and are taking advantage of a vast internet archive of past “Jeopardy!” clues to prepare.As for Jennings’s record, Amodio still has to double his streak, then win nine more games, to beat it.“Let’s look at that in another month,” Saunders said. “Then maybe Ken should start to get worried.” More

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    George Ferencz, Innovative Theater Director, Dies at 74

    He directed works by Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and others at La MaMa and similar theaters known for experimentation.George Ferencz, a director who was a fixture at theaters known for experimental work like La MaMa E.T.C. in Manhattan, died on Sept. 14 in Brooklyn. He was 74.His family said the cause was cardiac arrest.Mr. Ferencz (pronounced FAIR-ents) directed pieces by unknowns as well as name writers like Sam Shepard, Amiri Baraka and Mac Wellman. One specialty was giving startling new interpretations to previously staged works, both classic and contemporary. Another was infusing productions with music in unusual ways; he collaborated a number of times with the jazz drummer Max Roach.Mr. Ferencz first drew attention in the New York theater world as a founder and co-artistic director of the Impossible Ragtime Theater, known as I.R.T., which presented a wide range of productions in small spaces beginning in the mid-1970s. His 1976 staging of “The Hairy Ape,” a 1922 Eugene O’Neill play, gave that work a visceral immediacy.“The main reason one attends off-off-Broadway shows is in the one chance in a thousand of finding a production as good as the Impossible Ragtime Theater’s version of Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape,’” Glenne Currie of United Press International wrote.Mr. Ferencz scored another success soon after with a more obscure O’Neill play, “Dynamo.”“If lesser plays by great playwrights are to be seen,” Mel Gussow wrote in a review in The New York Times, “then Mr. Ferencz’s productions could serve as models.”Mr. Ferencz left the I.R.T. in 1977 but continued to direct Off Broadway and Off Off Broadway, including a mini-festival of Shepard plays at Columbia University in 1979, shortly after Mr. Shepard had won the Pulitzer Prize for “Buried Child.”Two years later Mr. Ferencz mounted a full production of one of those pieces under the title “Cowboy Mouth (in Concert).” Here he revisited “Cowboy Mouth,” which Mr. Shepard and Patti Smith had written and first performed in 1971. Mr. Ferencz’s production, with Brooks McKay and Annette Kurek in the roles originated by Mr. Shepard and Ms. Smith, imagined their back-and-forth exchanges as a rock concert.“The result,” Mr. Gussow wrote in The Times, “is a sizzling, surrealistic 70 minutes that in its own stark way comes closer to the anarchic spirit of Shepard than some elaborate productions of more complete plays.”Mr. Ferencz’s collaborations Mr. Baraka included directing his “Boy and Tarzan Appear in Clearing” at the Henry Street Settlement’s New Federal Theater in 1981.The next year Mr. Ferencz began a long association with Ellen Stewart and her influential experimental theater, La MaMa, in Lower Manhattan, directing a portion of “Money, a Jazz Opera,” composed by George Gruntz with a book by Mr. Baraka. He founded La MaMa’s Experiments reading series for experimental works in 1998 and ran it for 16 years.Mr. Ferencz in 1982 with Ellen Stewart, the founder of the experimental theater La MaMa in Lower Manhattan. They had a long artistic association. Courtesy of La MaMa ArchiveMr. Ferencz directed well beyond New York’s downtown scene, staging productions at Actors Theater of Louisville in Kentucky, the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia, San Diego Repertory Theater and numerous other venues.“I look at the theater as a hammer,” he told The Bangor Daily News in 1979, when he was guest director for a production of Donald Freed’s “Inquest” at the University of Maine, “aggressive and highly theatrical, something you can’t get by flicking on the television switch. It has got to have spectacle and shock value.”George Michael Ferencz was born on Feb. 3, 1947, in a Hungarian Catholic neighborhood of Cleveland. His father, George John Ferencz, owned an auto-parts store, and his mother, Anne (Haydu) Ferencz, was a homemaker and a former beauty queen.He studied journalism at the University of Detroit but transferred to Kent State University in Ohio, where he pursued theater, directing plays by Edward Albee, Arthur Kopit and others. He earned a bachelor’s degree in 1970 and settled in New York soon after.In 1969 he married Pam Mitchell, who became a founder of I.R.T. along with him, Ted Story and Cynthia Crane. The couple divorced in 1978, and in 1986 he married Sally Lesser, a noted costume designer he had worked with for years; they collaborated on some 65 productions.She survives him, as does their son, Jack.In addition to his La MaMa work, Mr. Ferencz was a favorite of Crystal Field, the co-founder and artistic director of Theater for the New City.“He had the political and historical understanding that is a necessity for socially relevant theater,” she said in a statement. “He was a Brechtian director whose mission was not only to engage you emotionally, but also to make you think and think hard about the world in which the story lives.”Among Mr. Ferencz’s frequent collaborators was Mr. Roach, whom he met at a party at Mr. Baraka’s house; they joined forces in 1984 for a staging of three Shepard plays performed in repertory, with Mr. Roach providing original music. Among their later efforts was a jazz-infused version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” staged at San Diego Rep in 1987.“George loves jazz and directs like that,” Mr. Roach, who died in 2007, told The San Francisco Examiner in 1987. “He kind of lets things unfold the way folks like Charlie Parker and Duke Ellington would do. He knows where he wants to go, but he gives everybody a chance to make a contribution.” More

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    Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’

    Meet the (Pop) Queens of Broadway’s ‘Six’Maya Phillips��Reporting from the Theater DistrictJane Seymour (Abby Mueller): Known as the only wife Henry truly loved, Jane is imagined as a wholesome mother and hopeless romantic, robbed of domestic bliss. (She died shortly after giving birth.) Simple Pleasures: Sundays on the couch, brunch, tea. More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to Amazon, HBO, Hulu and More in October

    Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of October’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Brian Cox as the Roy family patriarch in “Succession.”David M. Russell/HBONew to HBO Max‘The Many Saints of Newark’Starts streaming: Oct. 1This movie-length prequel to the groundbreaking cable series “The Sopranos” looks back at life in the late 1960s for a notorious family of New Jersey mobsters and their various colleagues and enemies. It’s a film about the evolving nature of organized crime and race relations, at a time when the United States was experiencing rapid social changes that some sectors — like the old-school Mafia — resisted. Written by “The Sopranos” creator David Chase and directed by Alan Taylor (one of the show’s regulars), “The Many Saints of Newark” tells a sprawling story of criminal rivalries, balancing pulpy violence with dark comedy. Chase also returns to one of his core themes, considering how parental pressure and macho pride affect the choices of a young Tony Soprano, played here by Michael Gandolfini (the son of TV’s Tony, James Gandolfini).‘Succession’ Season 3Starts streaming: Oct. 17It has been nearly two years since HBO aired the Season 2 finale of this Emmy Award-winning drama. During the long, pandemic-fueled delay, fans have been eager to find out what will happen to the mega-rich Roy family and their right-wing media empire, after the troubled son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) and his goofy cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun) went public with evidence of a messy scandal. That cliffhanger ending set up a bloody fight between Kendall and his cantankerous, megalomaniacal father, Logan (Brian Cox), with the other power-hungry Roy kids Siobhan (Sarah Snook) and Roman (Kieran Culkin) left to decide where their loyalties should lie. Expect another year of jarring twists and unsparing satire from “Succession,” one of TV’s most exhilarating shows.Also arriving:Oct. 7“15 Minutes of Shame”Oct. 11“We’re Here” Season 2Oct. 14“Aquaman: King of Atlantis”“Phoebe Robinson: Sorry, Harriet Tubman”“What Happened, Brittany Murphy?”Oct. 18“Women Is Losers”Oct. 20“Four Hours at the Capitol”Oct. 21“Reign of Superwomen”Oct. 22“Dune”Oct. 24“Curb Your Enthusiasm” Season 11“Insecure” Season 5Oct. 26“The Mopes”Oct. 28“Love Life” Season 2From left, John Cale, Sterling Morrison and Lou Reed as seen in “The Velvet Underground.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘The Velvet Underground’Starts streaming: Oct. 15It would be hard for any filmmaker to make a documentary about the influential 1960s band the Velvet Underground as inventive and mind-expanding as the group itself, but Todd Haynes sure comes close. The director behind “Velvet Goldmine” and “I’m Not There” clearly understands not just the primitivist art-rock that the singer-songwriters Lou Reed and John Cale pioneered — a sound that inspired thousands of punk, New Wave and power-pop acts in the decades that followed — but also the New York underground culture that nurtured the Velvets. Combining new interviews, vintage audio clips and hypnotic old avant-garde films from the likes of Andy Warhol and Jonas Mekas, “The Velvet Underground” captures both the brilliance and the chaos surrounding a band who documented both the ugliness and the beauty underlying the hippie era.‘Invasion’Starts streaming: Oct. 22Shot in locations around the world, this big-budget science-fiction series employs an ensemble cast to tell a story about the arrival of an Earth-threatening alien species. The show stars Sam Neill as a small-town sheriff, Shamier Anderson as a soldier stationed overseas, Shioli Kutsuna a mission-control engineer in Japan’s space program and Golshifteh Farahani and Firas Nassar as married Syrian immigrants living in New York. The “Hunters” creator David Weil and the writer-producer Simon Kinberg (best-known for his work on blockbuster superhero movies, including multiple X-Men films) collaborated on “Invasion,” which uses a fantastical, action-packed plot as a way to examine something relevant to today: how people cope with escalating crises that could wipe out life as we know it.Also arriving:Oct. 8“Acapulco”“Get Rolling With Otis”Oct. 15“Puppy Place”Oct. 29“Swagger”Rosario Dawson as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent facing down the opioid epidemic in “Dopesick.”Gene Page/HuluNew to Hulu‘Dopesick’Starts streaming: Oct. 13An all-star cast tackles the origins of the opioid crisis in this mini-series, based on the journalist Beth Macy’s 2018 nonfiction book “Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors and the Drug Company that Addicted America.” The director Barry Levinson and the writer-producer Danny Strong turn the complicated saga of how Purdue Pharma marketed the painkiller OxyContin into a focused story, mostly about the people in one small mining town: including a compassionate doctor (Michael Keaton) and an addict (Kaitlyn Dever). Michael Stuhlbarg (as a former Purdue leader, Richard Sackler), Rosario Dawson (as a Drug Enforcement Administration agent) and Peter Sarsgaard (as a crusading lawyer trying to expose the insidious effects of a community-wide addiction) add their own strong personalities.Also arriving:Oct. 7“Baker’s Dozen”Oct. 8“Jacinta”Oct. 12“Champaign ILL”Oct. 14“Censor”Oct. 21“The Evil Next Door”“The Next Thing You Eat” Season 1Oct. 22“Gaia”Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy in “Muppets Haunted Mansion.”Mitch Haaseth/DisneyNew to Disney+‘Muppets Haunted Mansion’Starts streaming: Oct. 8The Muppets’ first Halloween special leans on a classic horror-comedy plot, as the Great Gonzo and Pepe the King Prawn explore a ghost-infested house and deal with its baffling secret passageways and untrustworthy human hosts (played by Will Arnett, Taraji P. Henson and Darren Criss, among others). In just under an hour, the Muppets and their guests deliver a rapid-fire assortment of songs and puns, along with some Halloween-themed parodies of “The Muppet Show” itself — plus plenty of references to the original Disneyland attraction that gives this special its name. “Muppets Haunted Mansion” is geared toward longtime Muppets fans, but it should also appeal to anyone who loves old-fashioned gothic horror stories.Also arriving:Oct. 1“LEGO Star Wars Terrifying Tales”Oct. 6“Among the Stars”Oct. 13“Just Beyond”New to Amazon‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’ Season 1Starts streaming: Oct. 15Back in 1997, Lois Duncan’s 1973 young adult novel “I Know What You Did Last Summer” inspired a hit slasher film, which itself spawned multiple sequels. Now the book has become a TV series, which updates the original’s premise to the age of social media. Once again the story is about a circle of self-involved high school friends who have to grow up in a hurry when a mysterious killer starts a campaign of revenge against them after a fatal hit-and-run accident. But the themes this time out are more up-to-the-minute, dealing with the disconnect between how some young people present themselves online and the troubles in their personal lives. It’s a thriller where the threat of public embarrassment is as scary as any murderer.‘Fairfax’ Season 1Starts streaming: Oct. 29Fans of “Bojack Horseman” and Adult Swim cartoons will recognize the sensibility of this adult animated series about a handful of Los Angeles teenagers who behave like “extremely online” mini-adults, obsessed with hard-to-find fashions and exclusive experiences. Skyler Gisondo, Kiersey Clemons, Peter Kim and Jaboukie Young-White voice the kids, whose problems include the commonplace (like desperately wanting to buy a kitschy limited edition T-shirt) and the strange (like finding an underground fighting pit beneath a hip boutique). “Fairfax” — named for the Los Angeles avenue — is part slice-of-life comedy, part absurdist satire of Gen Z consumerism, spoofing the next wave of wannabe influencers.Also arriving:Oct. 1“All or Nothing: Toronto Maple Leafs”“My Name Is Pauli Murray”“Welcome to the Blumhouse” Season 2Oct. 8“Justin Bieber: Our World” More

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    in Theater

    He Speaks Theater’s Language (and Many Others, Too)

    Tiago Rodrigues, the newly appointed director of the Avignon Festival, will make his American debut, in English, with a work he has also performed in French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.LISBON — Theater knows no language barriers for the Portuguese actor and director Tiago Rodrigues. At the Brooklyn Academy of Music, where he will make his American debut on Oct. 12, he will perform “By Heart,” a solo show with audience participation, in English.Since it was created in 2013, he has also staged it around Europe in the three other languages he speaks: French, Portuguese and Spanish. And because the premise of “By Heart” is that Rodrigues, 44, brings 10 audience members onstage to teach them a Shakespeare sonnet, he has also learned the poem in Greek and Russian, for shows in Thessaloniki, Greece; Moscow; and St. Petersburg, Russia.Midway through a recent interview at the Lisbon playhouse he has directed since 2015, the grand-looking Teatro Nacional D. Maria II, he recalled the first four lines of the sonnet — No. 30, which begins, “When to the sessions of sweet silent thought” — in Russian, with obvious delight.“I really love to see what happens to a play when you did it in one language, and then you do it in another,” he said. “I always ask someone from the country to help out. I’ve visited a lot of embassies in Portugal.”Rodrigues, center, performing “By Heart” in 2013 at O Espaço do Tempo performing arts center, in Montemor-o-Novo, Portugal.Magda BizarroOne embassy has recently been less amenable. In September, the United States Embassy in Lisbon denied Rodrigues a visa to perform at BAM, advising instead that he “travel to a country outside Europe to apply for a visa to enter the U.S.,” Rodrigues said in an email on Wednesday. So he will go to Canada before traveling to New York, pushing the “By Heart” premiere back by a week: The show will now run from Oct. 12 through Oct. 17.At least American theatergoers will still get a glimpse of the work that has made Rodrigues a widely appreciated figure on Europe’s stages — and led to his appointment as the next director of the Avignon Festival, one of the continent’s biggest theater events, starting with the 2023 edition.Over the past two decades, Rodrigues’s output has spanned multiple genres, including classic dramas like Shakespeare’s “Antony and Cleopatra” and Chekhov’s “The Cherry Orchard” and less formal and more personal works like “By Heart,” which is a loving tribute to his grandmother Candida. A voracious reader, she tried to learn a favorite book in its entirety when she found herself going blind at the end of her life.“The moment I say her name onstage, it’s a way of perpetuating her presence, somehow, and to share this invisible connection that literature creates,” Rodrigues said.What Rodrigues’s productions have in common is a Pan-European, multilingual outlook and a loose, collaborative directing style. His wife, Magda Bizarro, has been a frequent collaborator from the start of his career, and will oversee international programming in Avignon.Artists who have worked with Rodrigues describe him as gentle to a fault. Océane Cairaty, who played the role of Varya in “The Cherry Orchard” at Avignon in July, said that he “completely trusts the actors — he believes we also have our vision of the play and the role, and he welcomes it.” (In an interview in Lisbon, Bizarro explained with a laugh that it doesn’t mean Rodrigues doesn’t have an end point in mind: “Tiago hears everyone, but if he has an idea about a text, he keeps it until the end.”)Rodrigues’s approach stems in part from political principles, he said. A child of the young Portuguese democracy, he was born in Lisbon three years after the “Carnation Revolution” in 1974 that abolished the country’s military dictatorship. His father was an antifascist activist who spent several years in exile in France in the late 1960s, and later worked as a journalist.“I never want to work with someone and, when we disagree, play the authority card because it’s my job,” Rodrigues said.Ana Brigida for The New York Times“Democracy for me is a big thing. I try to work the way I try to live,” Rodrigues said. “I never want to work with someone and, when we disagree, play the authority card because it’s my job. If I ever do it, I hope I’m brave enough to say sorry.”“Knowing him has been one of the privileges of my theater life,” Jean-Marie Hordé, the director of the Théâtre de la Bastille in Paris, where Rodrigues has presented many of his works, said in a phone interview. “His talents are manifold, and he is an extremely honest man.”Rodrigues himself took an unusual path to the stage. When he applied to the Lisbon Theater and Film School as a teenager, he was rejected — “I was the first of the non-admitted, the best of the refused,” he recalled — yet ultimately, he got in after someone dropped out. “I did one year, and by the end, they were sorry they had called me,” he said. “They said I was just not talented. I’m not sure they were wrong. I probably grew much, much better, just to prove them wrong.”The school advised him to focus his talents elsewhere. Instead, Rodrigues enrolled in every workshop he could find after the school year, including one with the Belgian company tg STAN. By the end of the summer, tg STAN, a director-less collective that Rodrigues described as “my school of theater,” offered him a role in an upcoming production.“It was really love at first sight with them,” he said, adding that when he turned to directing, he was heavily influenced by the collective’s philosophy. “The idea of a creation is shared by all, collectively, and is based upon the freedom of the actor onstage.”To keep working with tg STAN, Rodrigues pretended he could speak French to land a role in “Les Antigones,” a production that premiered in Toulouse, France, in 2001. “I said in English that my French was great, and they never doubted me,” he said.His now excellent French will no doubt improve further when he moves to Avignon, in southern France, full time this winter. In Lisbon, Rodrigues leaves behind a rejuvenated Teatro Nacional — Portugal’s “symbolic temple of theater,” as he puts it.“When I came in 2015, it was perceived as a bit old-fashioned,” Rodrigues said. “Sometimes it didn’t allow for the great work being done here to be perceived as great work.”A production of “By Heart” at the Teatro in June 2020, shortly after the theater reopened following a coronavirus lockdown.Filipe FerreiraUnder his leadership, the theater introduced outreach programs aimed at residents of central Lisbon who had never been to the Teatro Nacional. The resident ensemble, at that point downsized to only a handful of actors because of funding cuts, was supplemented by young performers on fixed contracts.While bringing in new blood, Rodrigues also honored the theater’s long-serving staff members. “Sopro,” a work he created in 2017, is based around four decades of backstage anecdotes from the theater’s prompter, Cristina Vidal. She whispers her stories to actors onstage, who relay them to the audience.“He took a sleeping beauty, and woke it up,” said Hordé of Rodrigues’s tenure in Lisbon.The Avignon Festival — in another country, and language — will present new challenges, but Rodrigues said he would apply the same convictions there. It might also mean “doing less” than the current, sprawling event, he added.The vast scale of the job might mean he has to do less, too: Avignon will most likely keep Rodrigues too busy for many stage appearances of his own. “When I started directing and writing more and more, I understood that acting is the hardest job for me,” Rodrigues said. “I’m exhausted by it.”Yet eight years after the “By Heart” premiere, he said he hadn’t tired of sharing Shakespeare’s sonnet around the world. “Every performance, 10 new people come onstage,” Rodrigues added. “And it’s a totally new adventure.” More