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    ‘Late Show’ Staff Arrested at U.S. Capitol Complex Won’t Be Prosecuted

    The Justice Department said it would not proceed with charges of unlawful entry against staff members from “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” who were arrested at a Capitol building last month.Federal prosecutors said late Monday that they would not prosecute staff members of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” who were arrested last month at the United States Capitol complex on charges of unlawful entry.When members of a production team for the CBS show were arrested on June 16, they had been filming a segment featuring Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, a cigar-chomping canine puppet that is voiced by the comedian Robert Smigel, who was among those arrested. Mr. Colbert later said on his show that they were guilty of “high jinks with intent to goof.”The arrests, in a hallway of the Longworth House Office Building, were notable in part because they occurred soon after Congress began holding televised hearings into the Jan. 6, 2021 attack, in which supporters of President Donald J. Trump violently stormed the Capitol complex.The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said in a brief statement on Monday that it would not move forward with misdemeanor charges against the nine people arrested by the Capitol Police because the case wasn’t strong enough.The crew members had been invited to enter the building on two separate occasions by congressional staff who never asked them to leave, although the Capitol Police did tell some members of the group that they were supposed to have an escort, the statement said.In order to sustain convictions on charges of unlawful entry, prosecutors would have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that “these invited guests were guilty of the crime of unlawful entry because their escort chose to leave them unattended,” it said.“We do not believe it is probable that the office would be able to obtain and sustain convictions on these charges,” the statement said, adding that the defendants would not be required to attend a court hearing scheduled for Wednesday.The statement did not say whom the production team had visited at the Longworth House Office Building. Mr. Colbert said on his show that the team had been invited to interview Democratic and Republican members of Congress about the Jan. 6 hearings.Spokespeople for the Justice Department and CBS did not immediately respond to requests for comment overnight.After the arrests last month, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson said that the “Late Show” producers had committed “insurrection.” Mr. Colbert said a few days later that such criticism amounted to a “shameful and grotesque insult” to the memory of those who died in the Jan. 6 attack.“But who knows,” he joked on his show, “maybe there was a vast conspiracy to overthrow the government of the United States with a rubber Rottweiler.”Glenn Thrush More

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    ‘Better Call Saul’ Season 6, Episode 9 Recap: Bye Bye Love

    Kim and Gus make some difficult decisions of the heart. Mike goes on a mission of mercy.Season 6, Episode 9: ‘Fun and Games’Let’s break with tradition and start at the end of this whipsawing episode, which delivers two quick jolts in its closing minutes.The first is Kim’s decision to quit both the law and her marriage. Her rationale? That together she and Jimmy are a hazard, both to themselves and to others. A newlywed who is not as rash might have considered less drastic solutions — maybe a week in Bali, a bit of therapy. But Kim is nothing if not unpredictable, and there have been many moments in this show when you are certain she’s going to break up with Jimmy only to then see her give him a smooch. What we saw here was the same thing in reverse.If Kim were presenting a legal argument, we would say it started logically enough — hey, these two do produce some toxic chemistry — but got wacky by the end. She says that she withheld the news from Jimmy that Lalo was alive because she knew what would happen — that Jimmy would protect her, hide with her and end the plot against Howard. And were that to happen, “We’d break up,” as she puts it.Why? “Because I was having too much fun!” she shouts.Whoa. The implication here is that the scam was so unnervingly delightful, and harmful to others, that she must quit her co-conspirator, like an alcoholic who keeps crashing the car and swears off booze. That’s a guess. It’s difficult to fathom the inner life of someone who says, “I love you, too, but so what?”Let’s leave aside, for a moment, Jimmy’s reaction and focus on a connected question: What will Mike think? Kim has been given instructions to deliver an Academy Award-worthy performance in a real-life documentary called “Nothing to See Here” in the aftermath of Howard’s murder. And now she has left her job and Jimmy. That will raise exactly the sort of questions Mike didn’t want. This is a problem.The Return of ‘Better Call Saul’The “Breaking Bad” prequel is ending this year.A Refresher: Need to catch up? Here’s where things left off after the first seven episodes of the show’s final season, which aired this spring.Bob Odenkirk: After receiving a fifth Emmy nomination in July, the star discussed bringing some measure of self-awareness to the character of Saul for his final bow.Stealing the Show: Kim Wexler’s long slide toward perdition has become arguably the narrative keystone of the series, thanks to Rhea Seehorn’s performance.Writing the Perfect Con: We asked the show’s writers to break down a pivotal scene in the ​​transformation of Jimmy McGill into Saul Goodman.On to the second jolt. Right after the breakup argument, the episode jumps forward in time to Saul Goodman’s louche and extravagant life, which is filled with Xanax, prostitutes and Roman-influenced, self-mythologizing décor and art, all of it in the comically opulent house that we saw in the opening episode of this season.Is the sudden end of this relationship with Kim supposed to explain this transformation? Lots of people have their hearts broken. Some evolve. Very few emerge with entirely different personalities. Perhaps we’re to believe that Saul was hiding inside Jimmy and emerged courtesy of the trauma of Kim’s departure. Granted, Kim’s farewell is quite a trauma. It’s just hard to believe that it steered a slightly crooked, often endearing and largehearted man into total depravity.That said, we know that in the future, Saul will hastily exit Albuquerque when he gains infamy in “Breaking Bad” and emerge with as a nebbish named Gene Takavic, managing a Cinnabon in Omaha. The writers have already signaled that this character can shift in shape.The less confounding part of this episode comes near the beginning. Gus has been summoned to the south-of-the-border home of Don Eladio, where Don Hector accuses him of killing Lalo and plotting to usurp the cartel. Unruffled, Gus answers this potentially fatal allegation by declaring it too preposterous to dignify with words. Then Eladio and his underling Bolsa make Gus’s case on his behalf, and in doing so demonstrate how well Fring has covered his tracks, with an assist from Lalo, who left behind a burned corpse with matching teeth.Hector is left to ring his bell in frantic, fruitless protest. Point to Gus, who seems to derive much of the meaning in his life by tormenting his foe. The scene ends with a moment that explains why. Fring stares at the pool, the same place where years ago, Hector shot and killed Max Arciniega, the love of Gus’s life. At that moment, Gus was lying next to Max, close enough to watch blood gush into the pool.Gus is haunted by that memory, and when he returns to his home in Albuquerque, we watch him regain his life, his happiness and his routine. But there are limits. When he visits what appears to be his favorite restaurant, he has a long conversation with a waiter and oenophile named David (Reed Diamond), who dazzles Gus with his good looks and tales of vineyard hopping through Europe as a young man. Nobody has ever spoken to Gus for so long, and through David’s entire monologue, Gus seems pleasantly rapt. This is smitten Gus, a side of the man we’ve never seen.Instead of asking for a date, which is what happens in the rom-com version of this interlude, Gus quickly leaves while the waiter is retrieving an even rarer bottle of wine. Fring has either decided he can’t get hurt again or concluded that love isn’t for a man in his position. It’s a weakness he can’t afford because to enemies, loved ones are easy targets. They end up dead, or sent on suicide missions to kill other people, like Kim in the previous episode.The finest part of this strangely long scene — six minutes! — comes at the end, when there’s a lingering tight shot of Gus’s face and we see him segue from relaxed and joyful to tense and withdrawn. Without a word of dialogue, you can see him come to a firm decision. He must keep his monastic, loveless life.Mike uses some of his post-clean-up downtime to visit Manuel Varga (Juan Carlos Cantu) and explain that his son, Nacho, is dead. (He does this because he has been taught about the agony of not knowing the fate of a loved one by Anita, his grief counseling buddy from Season 3, whose husband vanished in the New Mexico wilderness years earlier, a source of wrenching sorrow for her.) On the plus side, he says, Nacho’s killers will soon come to justice. Mr. Varga corrects Mike. It won’t be justice. It will be revenge, he says.In a cast of characters who are corrupt and wicked in various shades of gray, this humble upholsterer is here to remind viewers what uncompromising goodness actually looks like. To him, even a guy like Mike, who has an acute sense of fairness, is just another hoodlum.Odds and EndsSaul Goodman has finally turned up in the flesh, albeit for just a few minutes. Kind of nervy — naming a show for character who debuts in the ninth episode of the sixth season.What’s with the tip that Gus left at that restaurant? Obviously, $201 is generous for a glass of wine. But why the added $1? Did he think $200 just isn’t quite enough?Jimmy’s line, “What’s done can be undone,” is a nod to Macbeth, and a famous utterance by a Lady Macbeth — the original female gangster — who rues her role in murdering King Duncan of Scotland. “What’s done,” she says, “cannot be undone.”Lady Macbeth is an apt and interesting model for Kim. She sort of pushes her husband into the plot against the king, much as Kim pushes Jimmy to trap Howard. And Lady Macbeth has seriously strong scheming chops, just like Kim. Consider her psychological assault on Howard’s widow, Cheryl (Sandrine Holt) at Howard’s wake. First, she conjures a memory of seeing Howard “snorting something” off his desk at the office. When Cheryl begins to believe that her husband just might have had a drug problem, Kim comforts Cheryl and implies that everyone else might be wrong.“You were his wife,” she says. “You knew him better than anyone.”Well played, madam. Keep in mind that there’s often a price for such wicked manipulations. Lady Macbeth goes insane and then commits suicide. Kim has an easier time of it, at least so far. She leaves the work and the man she loves.Four episodes left, and a lot of story to tell. The future of Gene Takavic. The fate of Kim. There are engineers and a crew to hire, a super lab to build. Walter White and Jesse Pinkman are due any minute.Please leave thoughts — and any theories about Gus’s tipping habits — in the comments section. More

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    An ‘Impossible Dream’ Comes True, Again, for Marylouise Burke in ‘Epiphany’

    The 81-year-old actress stars as an eccentric dinner party host. When she was a teenager, though, wanting to act was a secret she didn’t dare tell.The staircase in Brian Watkins’s play “Epiphany,” at Lincoln Center Theater, goes up and up. Tall and imposing, it’s the kind of centerpiece to a set that makes you wonder, when you arrive for a performance, who is going to be climbing and descending it.The actor Marylouise Burke, for one, spends considerable time dashing up and down those steps, which she knew from the script would be in the show. So when her agent got a call asking her to play the lead role of Morkan, the warmly eccentric host of a dinner party fueled by existential desperation and touched with spiritual longing, she asked him to inquire: Was it going to be “a normal staircase or a crazy staircase?”Not that she wasn’t tempted by the part, with which she had felt immediately simpatico since performing it in a prepandemic reading. But Burke, who is 81, diminutive and a longtime favorite of the playwright David Lindsay-Abaire, shattered both wrists and her left kneecap two years ago when she tripped on a pothole in front of the West Village building where she has lived in a studio apartment since 1977.And sometimes, she said the other afternoon, sitting a bit shyly for an interview in the theater’s glass-walled lobby, “you have a designer who decides that the floor is going to be absurd because the script is absurd or something like that. I just knew I needed it to be even steps going up. You know, they can’t all be different heights, or tilted.”Burke, seated at center left, with her fellow castmates at the dinner party table in the Lincoln Center Theater production of “Epiphany.”Jeremy DanielIn John Lee Beatty’s design, they are neither. Burke is on perfectly solid ground, which leaves her free to do the destabilizing. That is something of a specialty of hers: luring an audience in with a portrayal that on its surface is so instantly fascinating that we never think to expect that there’s more underneath. And there is always, always more underneath — comic, tragic or very possibly both.To Tyne Rafaeli, the director of “Epiphany,” Burke’s “particular brand of humor” and “ability to mask a simmering fragility” made her the ideal match for Morkan, a character who draws even new acquaintances toward her and elicits from them the impulse to help her.“Marylouise is that,” Rafaeli said. “She has that effect on other artists. People who are around Marylouise, they want to collaborate with her. They want to lean toward her. She just has that kind of energetic pull. So the line between her and the character is very thin, obviously.”Morkan is for Burke a rare starring part. Another was Kimberly, the teenager with the rapid-aging disease in Lindsay-Abaire’s “Kimberly Akimbo,” a role she originated in 2001, long before the play morphed into a musical. A character actor, Burke has been performing on New York stages since she arrived in the city in 1973, when she was 32 and eager “to have more opportunities to act for free,” she said, kidding but not. “It never occurred to me that I would ever in my whole life get paid to act.”Burke with John Gallagher Jr. in David Lindsay-Abaire’s 2001 play “Kimberly Akimbo” at City Center’s Stage I.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesIt was another eight years before she got her Actors’ Equity card, in a tiny part in an Off Broadway production of Heinrich von Kleist’s “The Broken Pitcher,” starring Larry Pine. By now she has amassed nearly 50 years of New York theater credits — many in the strange downtown productions she loves, among them the title role in the Mabou Mines-Trick Saddle show “Imagining the Imaginary Invalid,” at La MaMa in 2016.Her screen credits include movies like “Sideways,” in which she played the sprightly broken mother to Paul Giamatti’s middle-aged wreck, and television series like Netflix’s “Ozark,” in which she had a darkly delightful, Season 3 arc as the marriage therapist to Laura Linney and Jason Bateman’s extremely crimey central couple.“I actually knew probably from the time I was 13 or 14 that I wanted to act,” Burke said from behind a white KN95 mask that engulfed her lower face. “But it seemed like such an impossible dream. And I never admitted that to anybody.”She spent her childhood in Steelton, Pa., a Bethlehem Steel company town where her father owned a grocery store and her mother was a homemaker with comic timing that Burke inherited. The town was proud of its high school football team, and she played fight songs on clarinet in the school band at their games. But she didn’t know anyone who acted.Her adolescence coincided with the cookie-cutter conservative age of Dwight D. Eisenhower, and her family’s expectation — “once they found out that I was smart” — was that she would become a teacher. Off at college, though, in what she called “a major rebellion,” she swiftly changed her major from education to English, with a philosophy minor, and started acting in school plays.“I just always felt better when I was in a play,” she said, wrapping her arms protectively around her body, making herself even smaller. “I just always felt more who I was.”Hang on, what is that arm-wrapping gesture about? Burke hesitated, considered. Then: “I’d like to be nice to that girl back there,” she said, meaning her young self, the one with the “incongruous dream.”Burke at Lincoln Center. When it comes to acting in his new play “Epiphany,” the playwright Brian Watkins said her “level of specificity is just a gift to a writer.”Celeste Sloman for The New York TimesAfter college she earned a master’s degree in English literature, and discovered as a teaching assistant that she hated getting up in front of a class to speak. Floundering after a brief marriage in her mid-20s, she found herself living with a sympathetic aunt in suburban Philadelphia, holding down day jobs and taking classes at night at the nearby Hedgerow Theater Company.For years after she moved to New York, office jobs — copy editing, proofreading, word processing — kept her afloat. When “Kimberly Akimbo” opened Off Broadway in 2003, she said, five of her ex-bosses came to see it with their wives.She first worked with Lindsay-Abaire on his play “A Devil Inside” at Soho Rep in 1997; his “Fuddy Meers,” two years later at Manhattan Theater Club, was a career turning point, because casting directors started to notice her.When Watkins asked Lindsay-Abaire about casting Burke for “Epiphany,” Lindsay-Abaire thought it would make perfect sense. While their plays are very different, he said, “there is that dual tone of funny grief that runs under both of our works.”He told Watkins of Burke’s extraordinary devotion to playwrights, which Watkins marveled at nonetheless when she questioned him closely on the pronunciation he intended for the exclamation “Agh,” which appears repeatedly in her lines.“That level of specificity is just a gift to a writer,” he said.Even more strikingly, Burke was fighting through brain fog and physical fatigue to learn her lines, having had Covid just before rehearsals started.But Morkan is in her bones now — and Burke does, as Lindsay-Abaire said, come “bounding down those stairs like she was a 14-year-old.”At a time when, she said, theater is still “not the same” as it was prepandemic, she feels grateful for Lincoln Center Theater’s caution about Covid protocols, and grateful that its audience is masked. She is also happy to be back onstage, alongside eight fellow actors, telling her character’s story.“It’s very precious to be going out there,” she said. “Going out there together.” More

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    ‘Heart’ Review: First a Starter Marriage, Then Real Love

    In her new autobiographical solo play, the actress Jade Anouka recounts the joys and fears of falling for a woman after her marriage to a man ends.At 24, the actress and writer Jade Anouka got married. Had it been a movie, the first dance would have been set ominously to the theme from “Jaws.” Before the wedding, Anouka dismissed the fact that her fiancé had bought her a ring that did not fit. At 28, she got divorced.That relationship sounds like it had its share of drama — “he’s visited by the Beast,” Anouka says of her then-husband — but she evokes it only in passing in her new autobiographical solo play, “Heart,” which is presented by Audible at the Minetta Lane Theater in Manhattan. The brief marriage was only a preamble to what really matters: Anouka then fell in love with a woman. It was easy at first, even though she had never been in a lesbian relationship. Then it was hard. Then it was easy, or easier, again.The director Ola Ince’s production can be oddly heavy-handed at times, as when Anouka must climb up and down a very tall chair, perhaps meant to symbolize her being thrown back into romantic infancy, or love as a precarious balancing act. Mostly it is distracting. Jen Schriever’s expressive lighting design, on the other hand, does an incredible amount of effective work.Anouka occupies the stage with confident grace, despite the heavy-handed production.Trévon JamesIn truth, Anouka needs little, occupying the stage with confident grace as she toggles between naturalistic storytelling and a more rhythmic and poetic spoken-word flow.Obviously her love life’s unexpected turn has been a paradigm shift for her. But at this point, the coming-out tale is a well-trodden genre. Over the past decades, checkpoints have emerged, and obligatory scenes have surfaced, so venturing onto this familiar terrain in 2022 is tricky.“Heart” feels disconcertingly generic at times: Anouka, perhaps in an attempt to make the show feel more “universal,” tends to prefer bromides like “love is love” over the details that would have grounded the play.This starts with her job as an actress. She relates how she couldn’t bring herself to be open about her new relationship with a woman, fearing that it might impact her career. “I wanna stay working, and not just in gay roles,” she tells herself. “I don’t wanna be seen as different.”Putting aside the fact that nowadays stars as big as Kristen Stewart and Tessa Thompson can be openly queer and get cast as Princess Diana and Valkyrie in high-profile films, the complex relationship between an actor and an audience’s gaze deserves more scrutiny than Anouka gives it here.Oddly, this casually charismatic, effortlessly charming performer does not even reflect on her past roles that have scrambled gender expectations, like the powerful witch queen Ruta Skadi in the series “His Dark Materials.” Of her starring in Phyllida Lloyd’s hit Shakespeare trilogy, which was set in a women’s prison, Anouka simply says she lands “a good job, a dream role in a company I already love.” She accompanies those words with some brief shadowboxing, a reference to her Hotspur in “Henry IV.”Information about Anouka’s family is not forthcoming, either, which is especially frustrating since she demonstrates a quicksilver ability to bring her parents to life in a couple of brief scenes — in a classic move, for instance, her mother brings out the Bible when told of the new affair.As for the love interest, she remains frustratingly devoid of identifying details, as if she were in a witness protection program. Those who would like to know more are better off heading to YouTube to watch “Her & Her,” a lovely short film Anouka made on a smartphone in 2020, for the BBC’s Culture in Quarantine project. It is anchored in all the quotidian minutiae we so miss in the play.HeartThrough Aug. 14 at the Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; hearttheplay.com. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. More

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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Grown-ish’ and ‘The Old Man’

    One show, on Freeform, begins its fifth season while the other, on FX, wraps up its first.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, July 18-24. Details and times are subject to change.Monday2022 MLB HOME RUN DERBY 8 p.m. on ESPN. As part of Major League Baseball’s All-Star Week, which includes its All-Star Game and the M.L.B. draft, it will be hosting its annual Home Run Derby. For the past two years Pete Alonso has been the winner of this event and the $1 million cash prize that goes along with it. With Alonso competing again this year, he is the one to beat.SID AND NANCY (1986) 10 p.m. on TCM. This movie, which centers on the Sex Pistols, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, tells a fictionalized tale of the breakdown of the relationship between Sid (Gary Oldman) and Nancy (Chloe Webb). Though the film is somewhat of a love story, the couple’s actual relationship ended in 1978 when Spungen died at age 20 and Vicious died months later of an overdose while awaiting trial for her murder. The New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote in her 1986 review of the film that “what it does best is to generate odd, unexpected images that epitomize the characters’ affectlessness and rage.”TuesdayFrom left: Nick Jonas, Shakira and Liza Koshy in “Dancing With Myself.”Fernando Decillis/NBCDANCING WITH MYSELF 10 p.m. on NBC. This show featuring viral dancing challenges, a live studio audience and the celebrity judges Nick Jonas, Shakira and Liza Koshy is wrapping up its first season this week. Each episode features 12 contestants who learn short dances, often similar to TikTok dances, and then the live audience members vote for their favorites. “This is a show that is for everyone,” Shakira told The Times for an article in June. “It’s about celebrating the love of dance and personal stories among all people, not just professionals.”Wednesday2022 ESPY AWARDS 8 p.m. on ABC. The ESPY awards are going to be held on Wednesday night in Los Angeles. Steph Curry is stepping into the host role and he is up for three awards. (He has previously won two: Best Male Athlete in 2015 and Best N.B.A. Player in 2021.) The ESPYs announced the nominees in late June and the public voting period ended on Sunday. Other nominees include Tom Brady, Aaron Rodgers and Katie Ledecky.GROWN-ISH 10 p.m. on Freeform. “Grown-ish” is coming back for a fifth season this week, with familiar faces, new faces and minus some characters. Season 4 of the show ended with a high school graduation which was a farewell to six characters: Ana, Nomi, Jazz, Luca, Sky and Vivek. Yara Shahidi (Zoey), Trevor Jackson (Aaron) and Diggy Simmons (Doug) are all returning to the show as their characters move from high school to college. Six new cast members — Matthew Sato, Tara Raani, Justine Skye, Amelie Zilber, Ceyair Wright and Slick Woods — are joining the show. This season will have an eight-episode run.ThursdayPrince during his Purple Rain Tour.Nancy Bundt/PBSPRINCE AND THE REVOLUTION: THE PURPLE RAIN TOUR 8:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). On March 30, 1985, at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, N.Y., Prince took the stage. Though it was previously available in 2017, the video recording of the concert has been remastered. The PBS broadcast of the show features performances of “Delirious,” “1999,” “Little Red Corvette,” and an 18-minute version of “Purple Rain.”THE OLD MAN 10 p.m. on FX. “The Old Man,” based on the novel by Thomas Perry of the same name, is wrapping up its first season this week. The show, which stars Jeff Bridges (Dan Chase), John Lithgow (Harold Harper) and Amy Brenneman (Zoe), follows a man who left the C.I.A. and has since been living off the grid. “The seriousness of the show’s approach to Chase, and Bridges’s excellence in the role, are what set ‘The Old Man’ apart,” Mike Hale wrote in his review for the Times, “but it’s also (through Week 4) a well-above-average if unusually pensive and introspective spy thriller.” The completion of this season has been a long time coming — the show first paused production at the start of the pandemic and then again when Bridges began chemotherapy for lymphoma and contracted the coronavirus while undergoing treatment.FridayKILLER’S KISS (1955) 8 p.m. on TCM. After his feature film debut “Fear and Desire” in 1953, Stanley Kubrick followed it up with this film noir. After a budding romance begins to form between Davey Gordon (Jamie Smith) and Gloria Price (Irene Kane), Gordon must search the city for Price after her evil boss kidnaps her. “Using Times Square and even the subway as his backdrop, Mr. Kubrick worked in an uncharacteristically naturalistic style despite the genre material, with mixed but still fascinating results,” the New York Times critic Janet Maslin wrote in her 1994 review of the film.SaturdaySUPERSTAR RACING EXPERIENCE 8 p.m. on CBS. This show, which aired its first season last summer, is finishing up a second season this Saturday. Every Saturday since mid-June, CBS has aired one race of the six-race, short-track racing series. The season began this year at the Five Flags Speedway in Pensacola, Fla., and finishes up Saturday at the Sharon Speedway in Hartford, Ohio. For the season finale, Dave Blaney, alongside his son Ryan Blaney, will represent Sharon Speedway.SundayJACKASS SHARK WEEK 2.0 9 p.m. on Discovery. Shark Week is back this Sunday and it will kick off with a collaboration with the cast of “Jackass,” for a second year in a row. Last year, the cast members performed stunts with the sharks that led to the guest star Sean McInerney, a.k.a. Poopies, getting bitten by a shark and rushed to the hospital. This year, McInerney is heading back into the shark-infested waters, alongside Chris Pontius, Wee Man, Jasper Dolphin, Dark Shark and Zach Holmes to overcome his fear of sharks. More

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    Billy Crystal’s ‘Mr. Saturday Night’ Will End Its Broadway Run

    The stage musical, adapted from a 1992 film, will close Labor Day weekend after five months at the Nederlander Theater.“Mr. Saturday Night,” Billy Crystal’s musical about an aging comedian trying to reboot his career, will end its Broadway run on Labor Day weekend.The production, which, like many during this challenging time on Broadway, has been facing soft sales at the box office, began previews March 29 and opened April 27 at the Nederlander Theater. The production announced Sunday evening that its final performance will take place on Sept. 4; at the time of its closing, it is expected to have had 28 previews and 116 regular performances.The musical is about a fictional comedian, Buddy Young Jr., whom Crystal has been portraying off and on for decades, first for sketches in HBO specials and on “Saturday Night Live,” and then in a 1992 Hollywood movie. The musical, like the film, was written by Crystal, Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel; it features music by Jason Robert Brown and lyrics by Amanda Green, and is directed by John Rando.Crystal, 74, once again stars as Young, who is a septuagenarian insult comic, employing jokes honed in the Jewish resorts of the so-called Borscht Belt in the mid-20th-century Catskills, trying to reclaim his relevance in a world that has moved on. Crystal had previously succeeded on Broadway with a solo show, “700 Sundays,” that first opened in 2004.“Crystal is utterly in his element performing live,” wrote the critic Laura Collins-Hughes in a review of “Mr. Saturday Night” for The New York Times. “If you are a fan of his, or simply someone who has missed that kind of symbiosis between actor and audience, it’s a pleasure to watch.”The show was nominated for five Tony Awards, including for best musical, book and score as well as for the performances by Crystal and Shoshana Bean, who plays his daughter, but won none. Crystal and Bean both tested positive for the coronavirus in May, and a few performances were canceled; similar health challenges have plagued many shows in recent months.The show has generally been staged just seven times a week — one fewer than the industry standard of eight — and its box office grosses have been middling, and dropping this summer. During the week that ended July 10 — the most recent for which data is available — the show grossed $542,696 for a six-performance week, playing to houses that were 61 percent full, according to the Broadway League.The musical, with James L. Nederlander as lead producer, was capitalized for $10 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. That money has not been recouped.Crystal is turning from Broadway back to television — he plans next to star in an Apple+ series, “Before,” which he will also executive produce. More

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    Review: In ‘Between the Lines,’ Romance Is Thwarted by Reality

    A new Off Broadway musical, based on the best-selling young adult novel by Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer, is uneven but sweet, our critic writes.What a tricky business adaptations are. A musical based on a novel can never be the same as its source material, and it isn’t meant to be. But throw out too many of the original elements and you leave an audience wondering how you lost your way.Case in point: “Between the Lines,” the new Off Broadway musical based on the best-selling young adult novel of the same name, about a teenage romance thwarted by stubborn reality. The novel’s heroine, Delilah, lives in the same world we do, while Oliver, the boy she loves, is a fairy-tale prince trapped inside a book, forced to perform a princess-rescuing adventure each time a reader opens it.He and the other characters spend their lives on perpetual standby, waiting to be called to speak their lines. They are actors, in other words, and everything that happens in Oliver’s world when the book is shut is essentially a backstage drama. But that theatrical setup, so vital to Jodi Picoult and Samantha van Leer’s 2012 novel, gets hardly a glance in the musical, directed by Jeff Calhoun (“Newsies”) at the Tony Kiser Theater.The musical rebalances the story to center Delilah and her troubles. She’s a little older here — 17, not 15 — so her sudden interest in a children’s book is even more peculiar, but then again, she’s lonely. At school, she’s the friendless new kid; at home, she argues with her overwhelmed mother and misses her father, who left them and has a new family. It’s no wonder that her strongest impulse is to lose herself in fantasy.When Oliver starts speaking to her, she thinks she’s imagining it, but he swiftly becomes the ideal boyfriend — if only she could figure out how to bring him into her world.With a book by Timothy Allen McDonald and an innocuous score by Elyssa Samsel and Kate Anderson, “Between the Lines” has significant assets in Arielle Jacobs, who brings a savvy-sweet appeal to Delilah, and Jake David Smith, who makes Oliver a comically good-hearted naïf.“I had a fight with my mom,” Delilah tells him one night, the fairy tale open to the only page where he’s alone and can speak freely. “She loses it every time I mention my dad.”“Ah!” Oliver says, all sympathy. “Was he taken by a dragon?”These two are adorable, and so is Frump (Will Burton), Oliver’s floppy-haired best friend — a human transformed by a curse into a dog, which does not help his chances with the princess he adores, Seraphima (cleverly played at the performance I saw by an understudy, Aubrey Matalon). Also winning: Wren Rivera as Jules, who in the novel is Delilah’s closest friend but here is a fellow outcast she’s only just met.From left, Vicki Lewis, Wren Rivera and Jerusha Cavazos in “Between the Lines.”Richard Termine for The New York TimesThese characters leave you wanting more of them, while the musical spends time on the fractured relationship between Delilah and her mother, Grace (Julia Murney), who is made to look unaccountably drab when all she needs to look is tired. (Costumes are by Gregg Barnes; wigs, hair and makeup are by J. Jared Janas.) Too much oxygen is also given to the popular kids at Delilah’s school, in what feels like an attempt to lure theater’s “Mean Girls” demographic.Jules, who is nonbinary here, isn’t permitted simply to be a cool person the way they might be in life. Instead, the show uses the character as an occasion for teachable moments about what it means to be nonbinary. It’s well intended but demeaning.The musical makes a big deal of Delilah rejecting the fairy-tale notion of happily ever after in favor of shaping a more deeply fulfilling life. But the script forces antediluvian clichés on some of the grown-up female characters. Ms. Winx (Vicki Lewis), the school librarian, is a tragic spinster, warning Delilah not to end up in the same situation; Mrs. Brown (Lewis), the chemistry teacher, “has more plastic in her than the ocean” and is evidently sleeping with the principal. When Queen Maureen (Murney), Oliver’s fairy-tale mother, and the Lady in Waiting (Lewis) trade insults, they go like this: “Spinster.” “Wench.” “Lush.”The musical does nail its very sweet ending, which is different from the ending of the novel. The show also gives Frump, the dog, a darling tap dance (choreography is by Paul McGill), and has fun with its book-lined set (by Tobin Ost).But one of the show’s most enchanting visual effects — tableaus of Oliver and other fairy-tale characters upstage, as if illustrated on the page — has an unfortunate flaw: Faintly behind the scrim, we can see the actors clambering into and out of position. It doesn’t seem deliberate, just distracting. (Lighting is by Jason Lyons; projections are by Caite Hevner.)For Delilah and Oliver to be together, it seems, they need to change the story he’s in so that they can follow their own narrative. “Between the Lines,” then, is an empowerment musical about using the agency you have to shape the existence you want.This show’s creators certainly have used their own agency to rewrite a story. Alas, for them and the audience, the results are decidedly mixed.Between the LinesThrough Oct. 2 at the Tony Kiser Theater, Manhattan; betweenthelinesmusical.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes. More

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    Jak Knight, Known for ‘Big Mouth’ Netflix Series, Dies at 28

    Mr. Knight, who was a stand-up comedian, died on Thursday in Los Angeles, his family said.Jak Knight, a stand-up comedian, writer and actor known for his role on the animated Netflix series “Big Mouth,” died on Thursday in Los Angeles. He was 28.His family on Saturday confirmed his death in a statement that did not provide a cause of death.Mr. Knight had recently finished filming as an actor in the movie “First Time Female Director,” written and directed by Chelsea Peretti.Starting in March, Mr. Knight starred with Chris Redd, Sam Jay and Langston Kerman in the Peacock series “Bust Down,” which he also helped to create. He was also an executive producer on the HBO talk show “Pause with Sam Jay” and was nominated this year for a Writers Guild of America award for his work on the show.From 2017-21, he was a writer and producer for the hit animated sitcom “Big Mouth” and voiced the character Devon. Mr. Knight worked as a writer for the ABC comedy “Black-ish” from 2019-20. His 30-minute Netflix stand-up special aired in 2018 as part of “The Comedy Lineup” series.He was named a 2014 Comedy Central Comic to Watch, a 2015 New Face at the Montreal Just for Laughs Festival and an L.A. Comic to Watch by TimeOut in 2018.He opened for various stand-up comedians, including Dave Chappelle, Joel McHale, Eric Andre, Moshe Kasher and Hannibal Buress.Details about his surviving relatives were not immediately available.As news of his death spread, tributes to Mr. Knight appeared on social media.The comedian James Adomian said on Twitter that whenever he was performing with Mr. Knight, he knew it would be a “wildly funny night.”“He was winning big, all of it well deserved, so witty and memorable every moment on stage and off,” he wrote. More