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    Review: In ‘Textplay,’ Stoppard and Beckett Get Snarky, FWIW

    An imaginary electronic conversation between the two playwrights falls somewhere between a ❤️ and a 🤷.The game is Guess That Play and the first round is a gimme. Among the clues one player texts the other are emojis of a skull, a goblet, crossed swords and nine tombstones. The answer is obviously “Hamlet,” but the next round isn’t as easy. What to make of a glass of milk, some trees and, yes, another tombstone?If you can solve that one, you’re probably the right kind of audience for “Textplay,” a witty two-character, no-actor sketch, conducted entirely in the world’s latest lingua franca, complete with emojis, emoticons, ellipses and erasures. (The virtual NYU Skirball presentation is available on demand through Dec. 3.) On the screen of your choice, you watch as a pair of playwrights amuse themselves electronically: teasing, bickering and generally debunking their reputations, or having them debunked.That the playwrights are Samuel Beckett and Tom Stoppard (it’s Stoppard’s phone we supposedly see) makes “Textplay” a somewhat Inside Theater experience, with untethered references to the two men’s works, styles and obsessions. That the credited author, Archer Eland, is clearly a pseudonym, deepens the atmosphere of esoterica.Could Stoppard himself be Eland? Anonymity might be just the kind of publicity he prefers as an amuse-bouche for his latest real-world play, the uncharacteristically personal “Leopoldstadt,” which opens on Broadway on Oct. 2. For that matter, could Eland be Beckett, so existential he seems to exist even now, an avant-gardist more than 32 years after his death?Yet neither Stoppard nor Beckett, as scripted here, seems sure of his stature, pre- or post-mortem. They complain that some playwrights, like Pinter, got the classier adjectival ending “-esque” even as they each wound up with “-ian.” (“It’s really unfair,” Stoppard whines un-Stoppardianly.) They worry more seriously that their work came to nothing, perhaps deservedly. “All we did was tart up a hole and claim it was an abyss,” Beckett types. “And NO ONE read our novels.”In compensation, they get to preen over their “genius” hair, certainly compared with Pinter’s. Beckett praises Stoppard’s as “Messy and brilliant, like your mind.” Stoppard returns the favor: “And you have those beautiful silvery rows. Like sharks.”After live theater shut down in March 2020, and in the two and a half years since then, we’ve seen lots of experiments in digital dramaturgy. Those that succeeded did so by offering apt substitutions for in-person performance or by abjuring it completely in favor of a frankly virtual experience. In the middle ground lay boredom — and the reflex, born of so much streamed television, to watch only until another show or a snack beckoned.“Textplay” might seem to fall into that middle ground; it’s both live (you can’t pause it) and unlive (the entire “conversation” is preprogrammed). Unlike “Hamlet,” it makes little claim on your soul, and unlike “Under Milk Wood” — the answer to the clue with the glass of milk and the trees — none at all on your heart.Indeed, the playwrights haunting “Textplay” aren’t Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, or even Beckett and Stoppard. Instead, I thought of Edward Albee, for the merciless wit, and Sophocles, for the Oedipal anxiety. Cutting one’s forefathers down to size is an entertaining, if dangerous, endeavor. The cleverness of the writing comes, to some extent, at the expense of honor.Still, at about 35 minutes, “Textplay” is a snack in itself. There’s even a blink-and-you-miss-it Easter egg at the end. (I missed it.)Theater types might also derive from the stunt a little encouragement about the uses of technology. Humans now send six billion text messages a day, most of which, data scientists say, are read. If the ever-dying theater could access even a fraction of an audience as large and willing as that, it might just perk up. Beckett and Stoppard and even poor, average-haired Pinter may one day be more immortal than ever. Who needs tombstone emojis?TextplayThrough Dec. 3 at NYU Skirball, Manhattan; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 35 minutes. More

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    After 7 Years on ‘The Daily Show,’ Trevor Noah Says ‘It’s Time’ to Depart

    “It’s not instant. I’m not disappearing. Don’t worry. If I owe you money, I’ll still pay you,” Noah joked.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.Happy Anniversary, I’m Out of HereTrevor Noah announced his departure from “The Daily Show” on Thursday, almost seven years to the day since he took over from Jon Stewart.Noah expressed his gratitude to everyone who’d supported Comedy Central’s “crazy choice” to hire “this random African” whom “nobody knew on this side of the world.”“It’s been absolutely amazing. It’s something that I never expected. And I found myself thinking throughout the time, you know, everything we’ve gone through. The Trump presidency, the pandemic, just the journey of, you know, the more pandemic.” — TREVOR NOAH“And then I realized that after the seven years, my time is up. Yeah, but in — in the most beautiful way, honestly. I’ve loved hosting this show. It’s been one of my greatest challenges. It’s been one of my greatest joys. I’ve loved trying to figure out how to make people laugh even when the stories were particularly [expletive] on the worst days, you know? We’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together. But after seven years, I feel like it’s — it’s time.” — TREVOR NOAH“I’ve never been good at goodbyes. It’s not instant. I’m not disappearing. Don’t worry. If I owe you money, I’ll still pay you.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Frankie Lasagna Edition)“Frankie Lasagna sounds like a name you get from the Olive Garden witness protection program.” — JIMMY FALLON, on the name of the fan who missed the 61st home run ball from Aaron Judge on Wednesday night“[imitating Frankie] ‘Hey, I’m Frankie Lasagna. It’s Francis — it’s Francis Lasagna but my friends call me Frankie.’” Which is either the best name I’ve ever heard, or the worst alias in the history of the mob. ‘[imitating mobster] Hey, I’m Frankie Lasagna. These are my associates, Mikey Pizza, Sal Calzone, and his cousin, Bobby Unlimited Breadsticks.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Frankie Lasagna sounds like the name Robert De Niro checks into hotels to avoid paparazzi.” — JIMMY FALLON“Frankie Lasagna sounds like the name of Trump’s next lawyer.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn the “Tonight Show,” Robert De Niro played a game of hot hands with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday’s cold open.Also, Check This OutLea Michele (with Ramin Karimloo) lights up like a light as the new Fanny Brice on Broadway. Matthew MurphyLea Michele is stupendous as Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl.” More

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    Trevor Noah Will Leave ‘The Daily Show’

    During a taping of the Comedy Central program Thursday night, he noted that it has been seven years since he replaced Jon Stewart. He will depart at a time to be determined, he said.Trevor Noah, the South African comedian who took over the hosting reins of “The Daily Show” after the departure of Jon Stewart seven years ago, announced on Thursday that he would be leaving the program.“We’ve laughed together, we’ve cried together,” Mr. Noah said during a taping of the show on Thursday that was released before the show aired. “But after seven years, I feel like it’s time.”Comedy Central said in a statement that the network had been working with Mr. Noah “for a long time to figure out how he can maintain the demanding schedule.”The network added that “with no timetable for his departure, we’re working together on next steps.”Mr. Noah, 38, said on Thursday that after presiding over the show for a turbulent seven years — writing jokes about the presidency of Donald J. Trump, the pandemic and other major news events — he had realized that there was “another part of my life that I want to carry on exploring.” He said he missed touring, going to other countries, learning other languages and “being everywhere, doing everything.”Mr. Noah did not elaborate further, but he has continued touring and releasing stand-up specials throughout his time as host.Comedy Central said that it was “excited for the next chapter” of “The Daily Show,” but it did not say who would be the next host.Mr. Noah’s announcement will come during the departure of several late-night hosts: In April, James Corden said that he would leave his 12:30 a.m. nightly show on CBS next year. Samantha Bee, an alum of “The Daily Show,” announced that her show would not return to TBS in the fall. And last year, Conan O’Brien said goodbye to his late-night show on TBS.Mr. Noah thanked the network on Thursday for believing “in this random comedian no one knew on this side of the world.”When Mr. Stewart left the program in 2015, having spent 16 years transforming the satirical program into an award-winning staple of political comedy, fans eagerly awaited an answer to the question of who would succeed one of TV’s most influential and revolutionary hosts.The announcement came as a surprise to many: Mr. Noah, a newcomer to American television who had been scouted by Mr. Stewart and his “Daily Show” staff, was getting a huge and unexpected promotion after just three appearances on the show. (The network had approached higher-profile stars like Chris Rock, Amy Poehler and Amy Schumer.)The decision to name a 31-year-old biracial comic from South Africa was intended to bring a more youthful, international perspective to “The Daily Show.”In an interview with The New York Times after the announcement, Mr. Noah spoke of being part of “a new young generation of comedians of color, in a space where our parents didn’t have a voice that was recognized.”But soon after the announcement, Mr. Noah became embroiled in a controversy over jokes he had posted years earlier on Twitter about women and Jewish people that some viewed as offensive. Mr. Noah responded to criticism at the time, saying that “to reduce my views to a handful of jokes that didn’t land is not a true reflection of my character, nor my evolution as a comedian.”The network stood behind him. Soon, Mr. Noah’s version of “The Daily Show” was off and running, with correspondents from various backgrounds bringing fresh takes to the show.He joked to The Times in 2015 that since joining the program, the “blackness has tremendously increased at the show. There’s been an epidemic of blackness.” And he recalled the advice that Mr. Stewart gave him before starting in his new role: “Make the best show that you feel needs to be made. And trust your discomfort.”During his tenure, Mr. Noah embraced his outsider perspective, commenting on America’s struggles with race, class and other facets of society that he deemed absurd, if not ripe for comedic jabbing.In 2020, he dedicated entire segments to the Black Lives Matter movement and the people protesting police brutality against Black people, saying in one video that it felt as if there was “no moment of justice.”He recalled on Thursday that he had never dreamed of becoming host.“I sort of felt like ‘Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,’” he said. “I came in for a tour of what the previous show was. And then the next thing I know, I was handed the keys.”Mr. Noah has since shown his serious side. In 2016, he published his autobiography, “Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood,” a raw chronicling of his upbringing in South Africa during and after apartheid.The son of a Xhosa mother and a Swiss-German father, Mr. Noah reminisces in the book about being “half-white, half-Black” in a country where his birth “violated any number of laws, statutes and regulations.”In May, he performed at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner, the first during the pandemic era, teasing President Biden before stopping to remark about having the freedom to do so.“I stood here tonight and I made fun of the president of the United States, and I’m going to be fine. I’m going to be fine, right?” he said, glancing at Mr. Biden. “Like, do you really understand what a blessing it is?”In 2023, Mr. Noah will tour in South Africa. He wrote on Twitter this week: “Can’t wait to come home.” More

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    Review: In Lea Michele, ‘Funny Girl’ Has Finally Found Its Fanny

    The “Glee” star is stupendous in the role Barbra Streisand made famous, turning the 1964 musical into something better than we know it to be.Though it can be a great vehicle, “Funny Girl” has rarely been a great ride. Even its first-rate Jule Styne songs — “I’m the Greatest Star,” “People” and “Don’t Rain on My Parade” among them — are problematic. Not only are the lyrics, by Bob Merrill, often inane (“I’ll light up like a light”?) but the challenge of the vocal writing that made Barbra Streisand a star in 1964 makes casting anyone else now a nightmare.And let’s not get started on the book, by Isobel Lennart, which in telling the (mostly fictional) story of the early-20th-century comic Fanny Brice, and her disastrous love affair with the gambler Nick Arnstein, seems to have been assembled from a warehouse of used musical-comedy parts. They do not work well together, however well they work individually.The revival that opened in April at the August Wilson Theater — its first on Broadway — only made matters worse. Harvey Fierstein’s meddling with the confusing book confused it further by giving Nick (Ramin Karimloo) more to do; nobody cares what Nick does. And Fanny, whom we do care about, was just too much of a reach for Beanie Feldstein, offering a pleasant performance in a role that shouldn’t be. “Without a stupendous Fanny to thrill and distract,” I wrote at the time, “the musical’s manifold faults become painfully evident.”Lea Michele, who took over the role on Sept. 6, turns out to be that stupendous Fanny. Yes, she even lights up like a light. Both vulnerable and invulnerable, kooky and ardent, she makes the show worth watching again.She can’t make it good, though. Michael Mayer’s production is still garish and pushy, pandering for audience overreaction. A confetti cannon tries to put an exclamation point on a dud dance. Many of the minor players overplay. The lighting by Kevin Adams would make a rat clap, and the unusually ugly set by David Zinn seems weaponized against intimacy. It looks like a missile silo.But at least “Funny Girl” now has a missile: a performer who from her first words (“Hello, Gorgeous”) shoots straight to her target and hits it.It has been a tortuous path to this obviously right and seemingly predestined casting, with decades of false starts involving Lauren Ambrose, Debbie Gibson, Sheridan Smith and others. Feldstein was just another in the long list of misfires; after she ditched the show in a cloud of apparent acrimony — a cloud everyone denied — her standby, Julie Benko, took over.Benko, who is still the Thursday night Fanny, sings the role very well, so you never worry, as you did with Feldstein, that she might not make it through the songs. Then too, Benko gets closer to the dark heart of the comedy, backfilling its shtick with something like anger. Still, good as she is, her voice and the rest of her performance don’t yet match; she even has a different accent when acting the role than when singing it.Like Barbra Streisand, Michele brings added depth to her performance. When Michele sings “People,” our critic writes, it’s not a bald statement but a genuine inquiry.Matthew MurphyMichele matches throughout. Her voice, an exceptional instrument, is not an ornament but a tool, and she knows how to use it. That in itself is no surprise; she seems to have been trying out for the role since 2009. Over the course of her six seasons as Rachel Berry on “Glee,” she sang most of Fanny’s numbers with exceedingly high polish, if sometimes a powerful whiff of Streisand karaoke. (Rachel’s middle name was Barbra.)Onstage, though, the Barbraisms are less in evidence. A few are unavoidable, Streisand having in essence rewritten, and improved, some of Styne’s vocal lines. And in general, anyone hoping to make a success of “Funny Girl” has to follow the originator’s template, because it was created for her — you might almost say “on” her, like a couture gown. The songs work (and the scenes nearly do) when a performer can access a manic desperation to succeed, not caring how she comes off or what she loses in the process. Let’s just say that Michele, like her idol, has that access.What surprised me in “Funny Girl” is that she can also access much more. You need not understand the details of vocal placement to understand that a performer able to belt all of “People” without worrying about switching registers has plenty of bandwidth left over to worry about more important things. When Michele sings the song, it’s not a bald statement but a genuine inquiry: Can Fanny be successful in both love, which means a lot to her, and work, which means more?And at the end, when life has delivered its unhappy answer, Michele isn’t playing at sadness. A hot mess of tears, she takes her time recovering sufficiently to move into the finale, a reprise of “Don’t Rain on My Parade.” It’s a mark of her shaping of the role that she sings it quite differently than she did at the end of Act I, when Fanny is reaching outward to grab the life she wants. Now she’s reaching inward to rescue herself from emotional disaster — a point Michele makes with typical vocal daredevilry in the song’s final heart-stopping phrase.Unfortunately, you may not hear it. Despite the amped-up vocals, the amped-up audience is often even louder than Michele. (On Tuesday, one of her several mid-show standing ovations was actually mid-song.) You can’t blame fans for their excitement, and at least there’s something worth being excited about here. But it seems to me that the production is reaping the dubious reward of its constant goading and prodding. You can see Michele having to calculate on the fly how and when to resume, or whether to blast right through, unheeded.Tovah Feldshuh, left, replacing Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother, brings grit to the role.Matthew MurphyIn a way, she’s almost too serious for the show; comedy, at any rate, isn’t her (or its) best suit. That’s a problem when the title is “Funny Girl.” Still, when Michele is given a good situation to play, as when Nick seduces her in a restaurant, she gets good laughs. Other times, as in an embarrassing in-joke added post-Feldstein, coyly referring to a song sung on roller skates in the 1968 movie, she looks lost, even as the audience yuks on cue.I hope she’ll keep burrowing into the role and not give in to the general hysteria. She certainly has allies in that fight: Karimloo, especially as the broken man Nick becomes at the end, does some lovely, quiet work, and Tovah Feldshuh, having replaced the zany Jane Lynch as Fanny’s mother, is so gritty and salty she could turn ice into slush. In the smaller role of Florenz Ziegfeld, Peter Francis James remains a model of dignified restraint.Charismatic performers make the thing they’re performing disappear. In effect, they replace it; their voice becomes its voice, their skin its story. That Michele makes “Funny Girl” seem better than we know it to be is the wonderful but possibly irreproducible product of the mutual need between an old-fashioned talent on the way up and an old-fashioned musical on the way down. It’s a need like that of lovers, and you know what the song says about them: Despite all evidence, they’re the luckiest people in the world.Funny GirlAt the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan; funnygirlonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes. More

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    In Paris Plays, What It Would Be Like if Shakespeare Was Female

    Several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with the most famous English playwright. How would the plays be tackled if a woman’s name were attached to them?PARIS — When the hero of Shakespeare’s play “Coriolanus” likened himself to a “lonely dragon” in the early 1600s, the adjective “lonely” was still a new addition to the English language. Based on surviving records, “Coriolanus” was probably only the second time it appeared in print. The first? In “Antonius,” a 1592 translation of a French play by Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke.This tiny, almost insignificant detail is one of many listed in “Sweet Swan of Avon: Did a Woman Write Shakespeare?,” a 2006 book by the scholar Robin P. Williams — and now brought to the stage by the director Aurore Evain. In both, Williams and Evain argue that the little-known Sidney, an extraordinarily well-educated and high-achieving noblewoman, could have penned Shakespeare’s canon.It is a relatively new answer to the “authorship question,” as the long-running debate about the identity of the writer is known. While most Shakespeare scholars still believe that William Shakespeare, the man from Stratford-upon-Avon, was the main author of the works published under his name, suspicion that someone used him as a cover arose in the late 18th century.His humble origins and apparent lack of advanced education are factors, because the author of the plays appeared to be versed in a number of languages as well as in aristocratic habits. Additionally, no complete original manuscript by his hand is known to have been found.Bard worship is such in theater worldwide that it’s easy to put any doubts down to gaps in Shakespeare-era historical records. Going into Evain’s “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare,” an absorbing staged conference presented at the Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois, in the suburbs of Paris, I expected little more than a pleasantly quirky intellectual exercise.Yet over the course of two hours, with just two lecterns and a few projections, Evain, who is also a theater historian, presented such a wide range of circumstantial evidence drawn from Williams’s “Sweet Swan of Avon” — as well as potential rebuttals, with vivid help from the actress Fanny Zeller — that I started questioning my own beliefs.Fanny Zeller in “Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare.”Charline FauveauHere are a few assertions they offer. “Lonely” is one of several dozen words Sidney introduced into the English language that Shakespeare later used. She provided patronage to Pembroke’s Men, one of the early companies to perform plays that were later attributed to Shakespeare. Sidney’s extensive library included many of Shakespeare’s sources, and she was familiar with pursuits as varied as falconry, alchemy and cooking, whose vocabulary Shakespeare drew on.Shakespeare’s First Folio, published about seven years after his death, is dedicated to Sidney’s sons, William Herbert and Philip Herbert.After the performance, other audience members flocked to Evain, expressing their shock at how reasonable Sidney’s authorship suddenly sounded to them. Over the years, speculation has centered mostly on a handful of men, namely Edward de Vere, the Earl of Oxford, Christopher Marlowe and Francis Bacon.Yet, as Evain put it convincingly onstage, unlike many other contenders, Sidney had a very good reason to hide her identity: She was a woman. While Sidney ran an influential literary salon, the Wilton Circle, and published translations and original verse, it would have been considered improper at the turn of the 17th century for her to show plays of her own, let alone works with occasionally bawdy language and violent themes.And what if a woman had actually written Shakespeare’s works? Beyond the whodunit — and neither Williams nor Evain claims to have definitely solved it — the implications are fascinating, because very few women were afforded the opportunity to have careers as playwrights until far later.As several Paris theaters geared up to open their seasons with Shakespeare, I started wondering how differently the plays would be tackled if they had a woman’s name attached to them.Let’s say the Comédie-Française, France’s prestigious theater company, was presenting Sidney’s “King Lear,” in lieu of Shakespeare’s. That would certainly have turned the German director Thomas Ostermeier’s interpretation on its head: In a playbill essay, Ostermeier wrote that Shakespeare’s work was “part of a 1,000-year-old culture that ties the representation of power to the masculine,” and suggested that he had tried to go “against” Shakespeare to give the female characters greater “legitimacy.” (What this means remains to be seen: Press performances of “King Lear” were delayed because of Covid-19 protocols.)What of Sidney as the author of lonely “Coriolanus”? The idea felt comical at the Théâtre de la Bastille, which is playing host to a tacky, histrionic production by François Orsoni. This “Coriolanus” couldn’t have telegraphed more crudely its laddish credentials. As the Roman leader at the heart of the play, Alban Guyon, dressed in either leather pants or a tracksuit with a gold chain, swaggers and shouts to exhausting effect.From left, Alban Guyon, Estelle Meyer and Thomas Landbo in “Coriolanus,” directed by François Orsoni at the Théâtre de la Bastille.Vincent BérengerThe two main female characters, Volumnia and Virgilia, are combined and played by Estelle Meyer with over-the-top, vampy energy. Pascal Tagnati goes for Johnny Depp-adjacent levels of parody as a pirate version of the Volscian leader Aufidius, and the entire play takes place under “CorioLand” signs that read like advertisements for racing cars.Would this staging have seen the light of day if “Coriolanus” was known to be the work of Sidney? It’s doubtful, but then again, many would most likely also have trouble believing that this grim and bloody historical play was penned by a woman.One prolific 19th-century French writer knew the benefits of publishing under a male-sounding pseudonym: George Sand, born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin. While she wrote multiple plays, they are rarely performed today. Instead, this season, the director Laurent Delvert opted to adapt one of her novels, “Gabriel,” for another of the Comédie-Française’s stages, the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.While Delvert’s dark, pared-down production is workaday, with electronic sound effects that feel more like tics, it is a very welcome reintroduction to Sand. Gabriel de Bramante, her central character here, is a woman who was raised secretly as a man for reasons of inheritance; her grandfather can’t bear the idea of his title going to what he sees as a less deserving branch of the family.From left, Yoann Gasiorowski, Elisa Erka and Claire de La Rüe du Can in “Gabriel,” directed by Laurent Delvert at the Comédie-Française’s Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier.Vincent PontetClaire de La Rüe du Can brings delightful artlessness and honesty to the character of Gabriel, who learns of the deception when she comes of age. As she sets out to make things right with her relatives, she falls in love and starts living part-time as a woman, only to fall victim to a man’s irrational jealousy.Sand’s style is exactingly clear as she weighs the ways in which gender norms shape the experience of love and moral dilemmas — something Shakespeare wasn’t too bad at, either. We may never know what some women truly achieved when they couldn’t express their talents fully, but Sidney and Sand, no longer lonely in their pursuits, make for gratifying stage company.Mary Sidney, Alias Shakespeare. Directed by Aurore Evain. Théâtre de l’Épée de Bois.Coriolanus. Directed by François Orsoni. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 7.Gabriel. Directed by Laurent Delvert. Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier, through Oct. 30. More

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    Midori Francis Is Among the New Class of ‘Grey’s Anatomy’

    A star of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” talks about queer and Asian representation on network TV.Name: Midori FrancisAge: 28Hometown: Rumson, N.J.Now Lives: In a two-bedroom apartment on the West Side of Los Angeles, which she moved into last summer.Claim to Fame: Ms. Francis is a queer Asian American actress who starred in “The Sex Lives of College Girls” on HBO and “Dash & Lily,” a young adult series on Netflix. Being vocal about representation has not dimmed her career. Next month, she’ll join the cast of “Grey’s Anatomy” for its 19th season on ABC, where she plays Mika, one of Grey-Sloan Memorial’s newest residents. “Network TV is a whole other beast,” she said. “Millions of people will be watching.”Ms. Francis, far right, in a scene from “Grey’s Anatomy.” ABCBig Break: After graduating from Rutgers University in 2014, Ms. Francis pursued theater acting, earning Obie and Drama Desk nods in Off Broadway productions of “The Wolves” and “Usual Girls.” She then started landing guest roles in major films and TV shows. In 2019, she was offered her first lead role, opposite Austin Abrams, in “Dash & Lily.” The acclaimed series was canceled after one season, but Ms. Francis was cast in “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” where she plays Alicia, a queer activist on campus. Her character has resonated with the show’s L.G.B.T.Q. viewers. “I’ve received some really beautiful messages from young people about feeling seen and represented,” she said.Latest Project: Earlier this year, Ms. Francis got word from her agent that “Grey’s Anatomy” was casting its next class of interns. A longtime fan of the show (she rarely missed an episode during middle school), she immediately asked to audition. “When you’ve seen these people on TV for so long, you think of them as their characters. “So when Meredith Grey is showing you the O.R., it has a certain weight. You fall in line.”On “The Sex Lives of College Girls,” Ms. Francis plays Alicia, a queer activist that resonated with the show’s L.G.B.T.Q. viewers. HBONext Thing: In addition to Season 2 of “Sex Lives,” she is starring in her first feature film, “Unseen,” a thriller set to be released next year, in which she plays a visually impaired woman trying to escape her murderous ex-boyfriend in the woods. She relished doing many of her own stunts. “I was jumping in freezing water, climbing through the mud, literally scaling walls, and I loved it,” she said. “I could not have been more in my element.”Being Seen: As one of the few queer Asian actresses on network TV, Ms. Francis knows how much her presence matters. “I cannot represent everyone, of course,” she said. “I can only hope and fight to play fully fleshed-out characters who are just as messy, joyful, hurt, silly and complex as all human beings actually are.” More

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    Late Night Reacts to Trump ‘Nearly Firing’ Ivanka and Jared

    “That would be an awful way to find out they’d lost their jobs as … handbag blondeface? Haunted scarecrow? His-and-hers towel racks?” Stephen Colbert joked.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.‘You’re Fired!’New reports of Maggie Haberman’s Donald Trump tell-all, “Confidence Man,” detail that the former president once “nearly fired” his daughter Ivanka and her husband, Jared Kushner.“That would be an awful way to find out they’d lost their jobs as … handbag blondeface? Haunted scarecrow? His-and-hers towel racks?” Stephen Colbert joked on Wednesday. “I don’t know what they did.”“In the end, the ex-president did what he’d done his whole life: He avoided his children. He never fired them, and as we all know, Jared went on to achieve Middle East peace.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“He was going to fire them over Twitter, but his chief of staff, John Kelly, was able to stop him from doing it by waving a KFC drumstick in front of him and tossing it across the room.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Meanwhile, Eric and Don Jr. were like, ‘Wait a minute, he follows you guys on Twitter?’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Punchiest Punchlines (Music History Edition)“Last night at a concert in D.C., Lizzo played a never-used crystal flute that once belonged to President James Madison. No one had played it in 200 years, so it was ‘about damn time.’” — JIMMY FALLON, referencing Lizzo’s single “About Damn Time”“Yeah. That’s a really cool way to bring attention to American history. Yeah, because now students will know that James Madison was that guy who did a collab with Lizzo, you know?” — TREVOR NOAH“It was an amazing moment — even better than that time Guy Fieri ate chicken wings with George Washington’s wooden teeth.” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingIdina Menzel addressed rumors regarding “Frozen 3” while on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe Yeah Yeah Yeahs will perform on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutMatthew Broderick in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.” Paramount Pictures, via Associated PressStream “Schitt’s Creek,” “8 Mile” and “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” before they leave Netflix in October. More

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    Rita Gardner, an Original ‘Fantasticks’ Star, Is Dead at 87

    In 1960 she originated the lone female role in an Off Broadway show that became part of theater history thanks to a record-setting run.Rita Gardner, who in a long cabaret and theater career earned an enduring place in stage history in 1960, when she originated the role of Luisa in the musical “The Fantasticks,” the longest-running musical in theatrical history, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 87.Claire-Frances Sullivan, her personal assistant and caretaker, said the cause was leukemia.Ms. Gardner was in her mid-20s and not particularly well known when she responded to an audition notice for “The Fantasticks,” a romantic fable with a book and lyrics by Tom Jones and music by Harvey Schmidt. She had called Lore Noto, the show’s producer, before attending the audition, and he told her that though the creative team already had another actress in mind for the part, she should audition anyway.“I didn’t know Tom or Harvey or anybody,” she said in an interview for the book “The Amazing Story of ‘The Fantasticks’” (1991), by Donald C. Farber and Robert Viagas. “I came in, essentially, off the street. They didn’t know me either.”She sang the song she had once used to win an “Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts” contest, “Over the Rainbow.” Mr. Schmidt heard a quality he liked.“With a lot of singers you can tell when they go from head to chest voice; it’s two different voices,” he said in an interview for the same book. “With Rita it was all one voice. Rita was like a pop singer, yet she could do these obbligato things, and it didn’t seem strange.”She got the part of Luisa (also sometimes called simply “the Girl”), the only female role in the piece. The show, whose signature number, “Try to Remember,” became a standard, opened in May 1960 at the Sullivan Street Playhouse in Greenwich Village. Tickets were $3.75.In The Daily News, Charles McHarry pronounced the show “recommended without reservation.” But in The New York Times, Brooks Atkinson, while having kind words for the actors, thought the story lost steam. “Although it is ungrateful to say so,” he wrote, “two acts are one too many.”In a 2000 interview with The Associated Press, Ms. Gardner recalled that keeping the show open was touch and go until that August, when the production took time off amid the New York City summer and played in East Hampton, N.Y., for a week.“All the posh people saw it and told their friends,” she said. “Audiences started to grow.”Ms. Gardner with the other members of the original cast of “The Fantasticks,” including, top row center, Jerry Orbach.PhotofestThe show ran for 42 years, closing in 2002 after more than 17,000 performances, and then reopened in 2006 and ran until 2017. Ms. Gardner stayed only until the end of 1960. (Jerry Orbach, who was also in the original cast, left at about the same time.) But she was with the show long enough to record the original cast album.In a 2001 interview with The Bradenton Herald of Florida, Ms. Gardner recalled that, about 10 years earlier, she had attended a production of “The Fantasticks” for the first time as an audience member.“I didn’t know I had been in something so good,” she said.She was in Bradenton performing a revue she had assembled called “Try to Remember: A Look at Off Broadway,” in which she sang songs from “The Fantasticks” and other shows and told stories. A few months earlier she had staged the show at the Sullivan Street Playhouse, the same theater where she had originated the “Fantasticks” role 40 years earlier. There, her performance started at 10 p.m. — because “The Fantasticks” was still running in the theater’s main evening slot.Rita Schier was born on Oct. 23, 1934, in Brooklyn to Nathan and Tillie (Hack) Schier. She studied opera and dance and sang in a close-harmony group called the Honeybees; in the late 1950s she appeared in a revue called “Nightcap,” which featured songs by the then unknown Jerry Herman. In 1957 she married the playwright Herb Gardner, who would become known for “A Thousand Clowns.” Their marriage ended in divorce, as did her marriage to Peter Cereghetti. At her death she was married to Robert Sevra, who is her only immediate survivor.Ms. Gardner left “The Fantasticks” to appear in a movie called “One Plus One” (1961), and she had small parts in other movies over the years. She also appeared on television, including in several episodes of “Law & Order,” the show that helped make Mr. Orbach an instantly recognizable star. She appeared on Broadway in “A Family Affair” (1962) as well as in the 1963 revival of “Pal Joey,” among other shows.She performed frequently on the cabaret circuit, where she employed not only her fine singing voice but also her droll sense of humor. In her show “Try to Remember,” she talked about life beyond Broadway’s bright lights.“Off Broadway is not just a location, it’s a definition,” she said. “The Actors Equity definition is a theater that has less than 300 seats, but my definition growing up Off Broadway was a little different. It was a theater that had less than 300 seats, most of them broken.” More