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    ‘La Maison’: Like ‘Succession,’ but Better Dressed (and French)

    The new Apple TV+’s new series takes the viewer inside two rival Paris fashion houses, with gorgeous people in gorgeous clothes who will do anything for power.“Does she know our favorite dish is eating each other alive?”So one family member asks another in an early scene of “La Maison,” a glossy new drama from Apple TV+, about two rival high-end, family-owned French fashion houses: Ledu and Rovel.The show, which premieres on Friday, is filled with gorgeous people living in fabulous homes, fighting, scheming, flirting, plotting and betraying one another as they attempt to gain control of — everything!Yes, like “Succession,” but with more glamorous outfits and, well, Paris.Or akin to “a Shakespearean drama,” said Lambert Wilson, who plays Vincent Ledu, the longtime designer of the Ledu house, whose fall from power is fast and devastating when an unbridled rant about Asian clients goes viral, leading to his cancellation and unwilling resignation. Enter Paloma Castel (Zita Hanrot), a young, edgy designer with ideas about waste and sustainability, who is recruited by Perle Foster (Amira Casar), Vincent’s right-hand woman and former muse. (Amping up the tension and resentment, it turns out that Paloma’s dead father was Vincent’s lover.)Zita Hanrot as Paloma Castel, a young designer who comes onto the scene after Vincent Ledu’s fall from grace.Apple TV+In the other camp, the terrifying chief executive Diane Rovel (Carole Bouquet) schemes to have her company take over Ledu, helped by Vincent’s brother, Victor (Pierre Deladonchamps), who is married to Diane’s daughter (Florence Loiret Caille).“All the characters have scar tissue,” said Casar, “they are all damaged and lonely.” Her own character, Perle, is a watchful, lonely outsider. “On the one side, there is this old aristocratic family, the Ledus, who are hanging on to craft and tradition, on the other this nouveau riche bourgeoisie, the Rovels, who will destroy to have it all,” Casar said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Late Night Thinks It’s Unlikely That Neighbors Ate Your Cat

    Before starting rumors about Haitians, please make sure your cat is actually missing, Ronnie Chieng implored on “The Daily Show.” 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.‘My Bad!’Erika Lee, a resident of Springfield, Ohio, who spread a rumor on Facebook that a Haitian neighbor had eaten a missing cat, deleted her post and expressed regret (but not before Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, made “cat-eating Haitians in Ohio” a campaign issue).“Oopsie doopsie! Sorry, I set off a race war in the middle of a presidential election,” Ronny Chieng mimicked on Thursday’s “Daily Show.” “That’s totally my bad!”Another Springfield resident, Anna Kilgore, who told the police that Haitians might have taken her cat Miss Sassy, later apologized to her Haitian neighbors after the animal turned up safe and sound.“Turned out, Miss Sassy — which is also my nickname for JD Vance — was in her basement.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Well if that isn’t the most Miss Sassy move I could possibly — [imitating Miss Sassy] ‘I’m gonna go hide in the basement to start some rumors. You know why? ‘Cause I’m sassy.’” — SETH MEYERS“By the way, if your cat goes missing, why would your first guess be someone ate it?” — SETH MEYERS“Here’s a little tip for anyone out there with a missing pet, OK? Before you accuse your Haitian neighbors of stealing them, maybe you could first try looking around your house.” — RONNY CHIENGThe Punchiest Punchlines (Rudy Rudy Rudy Edition)“At the rally, Trump did his usual rant about how New York has turned into a third-world hellhole. And to prove his point, he brought out a New York icon that has decayed beyond all recognition, Rudy Giuliani.” — RONNY CHIENG“Yeah, Rudy wasn’t actually invited — someone just said his name three times and he appeared.” — JIMMY FALLON“Rudy is so feral, I’m worried R.F.K. Jr. will put him in his trunk.” — RONNY CHIENG“He’s going to get you, and good luck trying to outrun Rudy Giuliani on three whiskeys.” — RONNY CHIENG, on Giuliani’s threat to anyone “behind” attacks on Trump: “I’m going to get you.”“That’s right, the guy who can’t differentiate a Four Seasons from a dildo store is gonna find you. You’ve been warned.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingSting performed his new song “I Wrote Your Name (Upon My Heart)” on Thursday’s “Late Show.”Also, Check This OutDemi Moore in “The Substance.”MubiIn “The Substance,” Demi Moore stars as an aging actress who discovers a deadly cure for obscurity. More

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    ‘Forbidden Broadway’ Review: Let Them Somewhat Entertain You

    From its perch way Off Broadway, the long-running satire slings its affectionate arrows at Patti, Audra and the rest.At its best, topical satire, which is what the “Forbidden Broadway” franchise has been slinging for 42 years, is both timely and well targeted. The timeliness means that audience members know the material being ribbed; the targeting makes sure they know why.Admittedly, timeliness is a vague concept when your subject is Broadway, where the targets recur at regular intervals. It’s thus not a big problem that many of the songs in the show’s latest edition — which opened on Thursday at Theater 555 in the far west reaches of Hell’s Kitchen — send up musicals and performers that Gerard Alessandrini, who created, writes and directs the series, has sent up before.But the targeting in this outing, subtitled “Merrily We Stole a Song” in a nod to the flood of Sondheim revivals, including “Merrily We Roll Along,” is too often hazy. The opening number, repurposing “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” from “Guys and Dolls” as “Sit Down, You’re Blocking the Aisle,” feels like a title that went looking for a topic. (It’s about rude patrons.) A segment about the upcoming “Gypsy” revival posits the unlikely idea that Audra McDonald is haunted by the ghosts of previous Roses. (“Merman’s gotta let go!”) Having to admit that Lincoln Center’s revival of “South Pacific” was terrific (even if its “Camelot” was “horrific”) turns a Tchaikovsky-themed takedown of that institution into a shrug.To be sure, those numbers, and most of the others, are performed well by the four-person company, if rarely as well as they would be if performed by the people they are parodying. That’s a built-in problem when satire has little to satirize; if the worst snipe you can take at McDonald is that she’s a glorious soprano and Merman wasn’t, you’re not going to be able to throw much shade.Punching wild is also a problem here. Instead of using relevant songs to make his points, Alessandrini sometimes conscripts baffling outliers into service. A takeoff called “Great Gatsby for Dummies,” featuring a wicked Jeremy Jordan impersonation by Danny Hayward, is paired with the irrelevant song “Good Morning” from a 1939 movie. And a running gag in which Doc Brown and Marty McFly visit Broadway past and future, with a young Sondheim strangely in tow, is so in the weeds it has ticks. (It does, however, offer a glimpse of the 23rd century’s Ozempic Theater.)Punches perfectly thrown at the ripest subjects provide the evening’s better moments, even if some of the low blows are mere sideswipes. Of Ariana DeBose’s recent award show hosting, Alessandrini writes: “A girl like that/Could kill the Tonys.” Chris Collins-Pisano does a deadly Ben Platt channeling Liza at the Palace in his recent run there: “Everybody loves charisma/So nobody loves me.” And a rewrite of “The Ladies Who Lunch” provides Jenny Lee Stern, a longtime “Forbidden Broadway” standout, with the opportunity for a pithy comment on Patti LuPone’s extreme mannerisms in the 2021 “Company” revival: “I’ll sink to that.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Anna Delvey’s Ankle Monitor Shines on Dancing With the Stars

    The former fake heiress let her tracking device steal the show in her “Dancing With the Stars” debut. To survive another week, she may need to show some emotion.The ankle monitor finally had its moment to shine.In the opening seconds of Anna Delvey’s debut on “Dancing With the Stars” on Tuesday night, the cameras pulled in tight on the tracking device strapped to her ankle. Normally a staid black box, the monitor had clearly been through the show’s wardrobe department and was encrusted with a rainbow mix of crystals that perfectly matched Ms. Delvey’s fringed dress.Ms. Delvey, of course, is the former fake heiress whose legal name is Anna Sorokin. She served almost four years in prison after being convicted of stealing more than $200,000 from multiple businesses, and was then arrested by U.S. immigration authorities for overstaying her visa and put on house arrest (hence the ankle monitor).She is also the latest in a long line of contestants on the dance show who were seemingly picked for the controversy they were likely to inspire.The focus on Ms. Delvey’s ankle monitor helped her lackluster performance stand out on social media among more ambitious routines from contestants like the actress Chandler Kinney and the former N.B.A. star Dwight Howard (even if her dancing placed her in the bottom-third of the pack).But if Ms. Delvey was happy about having been allowed to travel to Los Angeles for the show, you wouldn’t know it from her cha-cha.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘A Very Royal Scandal’ Is a Juicy British Drama

    This taut and serious Amazon series chronicles the time when Prince Andrew was interviewed on TV about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.Ruth Wilson, left, and Michael Sheen in a scene from “A Very Royal Scandal.”Christopher Raphael/Blueprint, via Sony“A Very Royal Scandal,” available now on Amazon Prime Video, tells — retells — the story of when the BBC journalist Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew on television in 2019 about his relationship to Jeffrey Epstein. The very first thing he says in the interview is that “there is no good time to talk about Mr. Epstein and all things associated.” Welp …The mini-series is tightly focused — its three episodes cover the period just before the interview, the interview itself and the immediate aftermath, with a few key flashbacks — but the show exists in a hall of mirrors of real-world scandals and media. “Royal” lives in the shadow of the crown, and in the shadow of “The Crown,” and is part of a prestige-laundering industry that refashions tabloid ignominy and wretchedness into cool-toned, highbrow drama. And it follows the movie “Scoop,” starring Gillian Anderson and Rufus Sewell, which premiered in April and is about the same interview.Michael Sheen stars as Prince Andrew, depicted here as stuffy and frustrated, unappreciated by his brother and devoted to his mother, neither of whom we see. His daughters adore him, as does his ex-wife, but he insists that the happiest time in his life was fighting in the Falklands War. Royal staffers whisper that he is so insulated from the world that he’s incapable of understanding it.Ruth Wilson plays Maitlis (herself an executive producer of the mini-series), a harried mom devoted to Velcro rollers and late night Google sessions. Wilson drops her voice to more closely resemble Maitlis’s, but it’s so unconvincing that it makes the fictionalized Maitlis seem phony, as if she were stealing a move from the Elizabeth Holmes playbook.The show plays out as a slow-motion car crash, a what-not-to-do case study for media relations — or perhaps a what-to-do guide for interviewing the terminally hubristic. Anyone who watches the full interview could rightly wonder, “How could you be so stupid to sit for an interview like this and say things like that?” “Royal” does a thorough, energetic, juicy-but-serious job of answering.And yet, the show can’t escape its own admission that there are much bigger questions one could ask about rape, misogyny, money, secrecy and power. Maitlis has a pat monologue about the injustice of it all, but the call is coming from inside the mini-series. More

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    ‘The Rings of Power’ Season 2, Episode 6 Recap: Go Fish

    Miriel tests the waters. Sauron tests everyone’s sanity.Season 2, Episode 6: ‘Where Is He?’By the end of this week’s episode of “The Rings of Power,” Adar’s Orc army is fully besieging Eregion, beginning a battle that will play out in the next episode. But before the show shifts into military mode for a while, the show’s creators, J.D. Payne and Patrick McKay (along with this episode’s credited writer, Justin Doble, and director, Sanaa Hamri), reset the stage across Middle-earth and far away in Numenor, to make sure we know exactly where all the players are, as Season 2 enters its endgame.The result is an unusually busy hour for this series. Every major character makes an appearance, in scenes that run a bit shorter than usual. This is a welcome change of pace from last week’s sometimes interminable conversations, which kept circling topics long after they had been exhausted. Granted, some of this episode’s segments — like most anything involving the Durin family or Annatar — do hit familiar beats, dredging up those old arguments for another round. But there is some forward progress here, even if everyone is now racing headlong into various bloody melees.Here are five takeaways and observations from Episode 6:The Valar decidesIn a startling turnaround, the Numenor sequences in this episode are responsible for one of the most thrilling moments of the season — although, typical of the Numenorians, we have to get a few speeches out of the way first.The matter before the island’s leadership is whether Elendil will apologize for the crime of sedition, bend the knee to Pharazon and be spared a death sentence. When he refuses to comply fully, Miriel comes to her loyal subject’s aid, claiming an ancient legal right to face the judgment of the Valar in his place. This requires Miriel to wade into the surrounding seas and wait for an enormous underwater beast — “the sea worm” — to swim up to her, at which point this slimy thing will either swallow her up or deem her worthy.The buildup to the big plunge takes a while. But the payoff is sublime, in a terrifying sequence of the sea worm yanking Miriel into the deep, staring her down, surrounding her with giant tendrils and then letting her live. The assembled crowd — with the exception of the new king’s partisans — erupts into jubilant shouts, dubbing her “queen of the sea.” Pharazon tries to recover from this setback by scrambling into his chambers to consult the palantir.What does he see? A dark, fiery future. And a face familiar to us: Sauron’s.Going battyI don’t want to dwell too much on what goes down in Khazad-dum this week, because frankly the dwarf story line has fallen into a deep, deep rut. The underground sets remain amazing, and the performances by the actors — some of them sporting thick beards, no less — remain impressive. But the plot is going nowhere new. King Durin III is still being driven mad with greed by his ring and making decisions that endanger his people, while Prince Durin IV keeps arguing with Disa about how they should handle the situation. There are some strong emotional underpinnings to the father-son relationship; but those bonds have been well-established and don’t need as much screen time as they get.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    With ‘Drag Race France Live,’ France’s Drag Queens Answer Hatred With Glitter

    Answering hatred with glitter is a time-honored drag tradition that France’s answer to “RuPaul’s Drag Race” is keeping alive in a new stage spectacle.The Paris Olympics may be over, but the event is still on the minds of many in the city — and not just sports aficionados. On Tuesday, the audience at “Drag Race France Live,” a stage version of France’s “RuPaul’s Drag Race” equivalent, erupted in cheers at the mere mention of the Games’ opening ceremony.The host of both shows, the drag queen Nicky Doll, made jokes about her own appearance in the outsize display on the Seine river, which was directed by Thomas Jolly. Then she hinted at the international backlash to the tableau she took part in, which some people read as a mockery of the biblical Last Supper — or even a display of Satanism.“If I’m a Satanist, I sold my soul for waterproof products,” Nicky Doll told the crowd, referring to the downpour of rain that marred the show in July.For French drag, the Olympics’ opening ceremony came at a pivotal moment.France was relatively late to embracing American-style drag: While the country has a long cabaret tradition, it used to favor “transformiste” drag performers, who impersonate real-life artists instead of creating a character of their own. “Drag Race France,” the TV show, didn’t premiere until 2022. (“RuPaul’s Drag Race” first aired in 2009.) Yet the French show’s winners, and Nicky Doll, quickly became mainstream figures. The inclusion of drag queens in the opening ceremony pointed to their newfound prominence within French culture.Yet what could have been a moment of cultural consecration soon turned sour. Shortly after the broadcast in July, a number of conservative figures in France and abroad took aim at the scene featuring drag queens. In it, the queens gathered around a table surrounding the DJ and activist Barbara Butch, who wore a halo-like headdress. While Jolly denied that the tableau was inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s “The Last Supper,” describing it instead as “a grand pagan festival,” he was nonetheless accused of insulting Christianity and received death threats.Nicky Doll performing in Cannes, France, in May. The Olympics opening ceremony, which she took part in, drew ire from right-wing activists and some Christians.Jerome Dominé/Abaca/Sipa USA, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Aaron Sorkin Thinks Life Still Imitates ‘The West Wing’

    When it premiered on NBC on Sept. 22, 1999, “The West Wing” contained elements of both what great television had been and what great television would become.It had the strict structure, self-contained episodes and PG-13 language of esteemed network contemporaries like “NYPD Blue” and “ER.” (John Wells was an executive producer of both “ER” and “The West Wing.”)But the show’s sophisticated content, idiosyncratic sensibility and season-long story lines anticipated the prestige-television boom of cable and eventually streaming. It was a ratings hit and won the Emmy for outstanding drama series four times, one of only five programs to do so. (The others: “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law,” “Mad Men” and “Game of Thrones.”)Twenty-five years later, “The West Wing” is a cultural touchstone: dissected by podcasts, parodied for its trademark style, still viewed regularly on Max — more than 212 million viewing hours’ worth since 2020, according to Nielsen. Several cast members were feted at the Emmy Awards last Sunday, and on Friday, the first lady, Jill Biden, will honor the series at the real White House.“It is particularly gratifying that a whole new generation of people, thanks to streaming, are watching the show,” Aaron Sorkin, the show’s creator, said in an interview last week. Sorkin wrote or co-wrote nearly every episode of the first four seasons and then left the series, which continued for three more seasons without him and ended in 2006.Although it took place in an alternative universe, “The West Wing” initially resembled the late Clinton era in Washington (minus the sex scandal). Played by Martin Sheen, President Josiah Bartlet — economist, Nobel laureate and descendant of a delegate sent to the Continental Congress in 1776 — strove to balance progressive principles with the realities of governing, all while combating the small-government conservatism of the Republicans who controlled Congress.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More