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    What’s on TV This Week: ‘Everything’s Trash’ and ‘The Rehearsal’

    New shows from the idiosyncratic comedy creators Phoebe Robinson and Nathan Fielder debut on Freeform and HBO.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 11-17. Details and times are subject to change.MondayPOV: WUHAN WUHAN (2022) 10 p.m. on PBS (check local listings). As with “Berlin, 1945,” or “Fukushima, 2011,” the title card “February, 2020, Wuhan, China,” will forever convey more than just a time and place. This feature-length documentary from Yung Chang gives a fly-on-the-wall look at the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, and at the lives of health care workers and other Chinese citizens who lived through that period.TuesdayNatasia Demetriou and Matt Berry in “What We Do in the Shadows.”Russ Martin/FXWHAT WE DO IN THE SHADOWS 10 p.m. on FX. The Spirit Halloween store of comedy shows — and its cast of eccentric vampires who live together on Staten Island — returns with a pair of Season 4 premiere episodes on Tuesday. Highlights of the new season include the opening of a vampire nightclub and the rearing of a supernatural child who emerged at the end of last season. (That’s “emerged” in the literal sense — the child came out of the chest cavity of another character.)WednesdayEVERYTHING’S TRASH 10 p.m. on Freeform. The comedy auteur Phoebe Robinson (“2 Dope Queens”) plays a fictionalized version of herself in this new series, which was inspired by Robinson’s 2018 essay collection, “Everything’s Trash, But It’s Okay.” The Phoebe of “Everything’s Trash” is a 30-something podcast host living a proudly chaotic life in Brooklyn. But she faces pressure to rein in her lifestyle when her older brother (Jordan Carlos) runs for public office.ThursdayJOCKEY (2021) 9 p.m. on Starz. Clifton Collins Jr., long a supporting player on screens big (as in “Capote”) and small (“Westworld”), got a juicy leading role in this dramatic film. He plays Jackson Silva, an aging jockey. Jackson practices out of a track in Arizona under the eye of his longtime trainer, Ruth (Molly Parker) — despite the fact that his body strains to keep up with the pace and rigor of the sport. That potent setup is agitated by the arrival of a young jockey, Gabriel (Moises Arias), whom Jackson mentors — but whose youthful presence further highlights Jackson’s age. It’s “an enjoyable old-warrior movie with a surprising sting,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times, “even if the bones and story are creaky.”FridayNathan Fielder in “The Rehearsal.”David M. Russell/HBOTHE REHEARSAL 10 p.m. on HBO. With “Nathan For You,” a docu-comedy series that ran on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2017, Nathan Fielder became a key figure in the development of what the critic Jason Zinoman, in a 2021 column in The Times, called “a quiet revolution” in comedy: A renaissance in documentary comedy whose artists also include Sacha Baron Cohen, John Wilson and Eric André. Fielder’s new show, “The Rehearsal,” is built around a novel way of blurring reality and fiction: It follows Fielder as he meets ordinary people and offers them an opportunity to rehearse for upcoming significant moments in their lives, on sets meticulously built to mirror their own realities.SaturdayThomasin McKenzie in “Last Night in Soho.”Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus Features LAST NIGHT IN SOHO (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. “I would say I’m ghost-curious,” the filmmaker Edgar Wright said in an interview with The Times last year. “I haven’t seen one but I’d really like to.” Wright, known for stylized, fast-moving films with quick cuts (see “Baby Driver” and “Shaun of the Dead”), uses his filmmaking trickery to conjure a ghostly spirit in “Last Night in Soho,” a creepy thriller that mixes the lives of two young women living in different eras. The story follows Eloise (Thomasin McKenzie), a fashion student who moves into a creaky old apartment in modern-day London. There, she begins having visions of a young singer named Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy), who occupied some of the same spaces in the 1960s — and who increasingly comes to occupy Eloise’s consciousness.EL DORADO (1966) 8:45 on Sundance TV. The actor James Caan died last week at 82. One of his earliest meaty film roles came in this Western, in which Caan plays a young man nicknamed Mississippi, who is the associate of an older gun for hire played by John Wayne. Wayne’s character, Cole Thornton, is called to help an old friend — a drunken sheriff played by Robert Mitchum — defend a family of ranchers against a group of bad guys trying to take their land. He brings Mississippi along for the ride. The critic Howard Thompson called the film “a tough, laconic and amusing Western” in his 1967 review for The Times. “This Paramount color release is worth seeing,” Thompson added, “if only for the casual, saddle-sore expertise and ribaldry” of Wayne and Mitchum, whom he referred to as “these two leathery dudes.”SundaySPACE TITANS: MUSK, BEZOS, BRANSON 9 p.m. on Science Channel. This feature-length special looks at the ongoing ambitions of the billionaires Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to commercialize space travel through their respective companies. It is built around the reporting of the journalist Christian Davenport, who covers NASA and the space industry for The Washington Post. More

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    Hank Goldberg, Betting Maven and Sports Radio Star, Dies at 82

    A New Jersey fan of sports and gambling who became one of the country’s top television handicappers: What are the odds?Hank Goldberg, a prickly, bombastic and witty sports talk radio and television personality in Miami who became nationally known for handicapping horse races and N.F.L. games on ESPN, died on Monday, his 82nd birthday, at his home in Las Vegas.The cause was complications of chronic kidney disease, which required dialysis treatments and caused the amputation of his right leg below the knee last year, said his sister and only immediate survivor, Liz Goldberg.For more than 50 years, sports and gambling were inseparable spheres to Mr. Goldberg. A habitué of racetracks and casino sports books, he ghostwrote for the celebrated oddsmaker Jimmy Snyder, known as Jimmy the Greek, in the 1970s. He was an analyst for Miami Dolphins football games on radio, hosted sports talk shows on two Miami radio stations, and reported and anchored sports for a local TV station.As a major sports figure in Miami, he counted the Dolphins’ former head coach Don Shula and former quarterback Bob Griese among the friends with whom he bet on horses at Gulfstream Park in Hallandale Beach, Fla. He imbibed the privileges of celebrity, including being treated like a king at the famous Joe’s Stone Crab restaurant in Miami Beach.“I own this town,” he said while driving around Miami in archival video that was used by ESPN in a tribute to him after his death.Starting in the early 1990s, he found a broader audience as ESPN’s betting maven, dishing out his takes on favorites, underdogs and point spreads before Sunday’s N.F.L. games and the odds before Triple Crown and Breeders’ Cup horse races.ESPN reported that Mr. Goldberg had a .500 record or better in 15 of the 17 seasons that he handicapped N.F.L. games for the network.“It was the next step up from what ‘the Greek’ did,” said Mark Gross, a senior vice president of ESPN. Mr. Snyder declared which teams would win but was prohibited by the N.F.L. from discussing point spreads. Mr. Goldberg was restricted only from using team nicknames on the ESPN show “SportsCenter” but could talk about their cities.Mr. Goldberg’s outsize personality emerged most fully on radio, where he started in 1978, at WIOD-AM in Miami. His aggressive style led him to argue with callers and sometimes hang up in disgust.Joe Zagacki, one of Mr. Goldberg’s producers at WIOD, recalled in a phone interview a day when “Hank had an argument with a caller — he had one of his volcanic explosions — and I said, ‘My goodness, you just hammered that guy. You’re ‘Hammering Hank Goldberg.’”The nickname stuck. After he started at ESPN in 1993, Mr. Goldberg began banging a mallet on a studio desk to express his disagreement with a colleague or his disdain for a sports figure. He referred to himself as “Hammer.”He initially appeared on ESPN2, which was new at the time and was attempting to reach a younger audience with anchors who dressed in a casual, cool style. Not Mr. Goldberg, who was definitely not cool but brought a quirky, brassy personality to the network — although it was more congenial than his in-your-face radio demeanor.“Hank could fit into any genre; he could fit anywhere,” said Suzy Kolber, a longtime anchor and reporter at ESPN who worked with Mr. Goldberg on ESPN2 and in Florida. “Plug him into the horse-racing crowd or the ESPN2 bunch. He fit right in.”Henry Edward Goldberg was born on July 4, 1940, in Newark and grew up in South Orange, N.J. His mother, Sadie (Abben) Goldberg, was a homemaker; his father, Hy, was a sports columnist for The Newark Evening News. Hy Goldberg frequently took his wife and children to the Yankees’ spring training in Florida, where young Hank became friendly with Joe DiMaggio, who called him Henry, Ms. Goldberg said in an interview.At 17, Mr. Goldberg went to the racetrack for the first time and won $450 when he hit the daily double at Monmouth Park in New Jersey. When he brought his winnings home, he recalled, his father told him, “Oh, you’re in trouble now.” In an interview this year with The Las Vegas Review-Journal, he added, “He knew I’d never get over my love for the races.”After attending Duke University, he transferred to New York University and graduated in 1962. He started his career as an account executive for the advertising agency Benton & Bowles. He moved to Miami in 1966 and continued to work in advertising.He found work in the broadcast booth of the Orange Bowl in Miami as a spotter — helping the play-by-play announcer by identifying which player caught a pass or made a tackle — for network telecasts of the Dolphins. He developed a friendship with the NBC play-by-play announcer Curt Gowdy. and also developed relationships in the local sports world that led him to meet Mike Pearl, who wrote and produced Jimmy Snyder’s radio show and ghostwrote his syndicated column.Ms. Goldberg said that Mr. Pearl introduced her brother to Mr. Snyder and they got along well. When Mr. Pearl left for CBS Sports, where he would produce “The NFL Today,” Mr. Snyder asked Mr. Goldberg to take over the column.In 1978, he was hired as the host of a sports talk show and a commentator on Dolphins games at WIOD, replacing Larry King. In 1983, he added work as a sports reporter and anchor on the Miami TV station WTVJ. He also continued to work in advertising; from 1977 to 1992, he was an executive with the Beber Silverstein agency. Despite his success on WIOD, Mr. Goldberg was suspended several times over the years and fired in September 1992, following a dispute with the program director over the content of his show.“The biggest radio name in South Florida sports is a loudmouth who loves to drop names — often like dirt — and who upon announcing the Dolphins’ fantastic finish Monday Night didn’t know it was his own, too,” wrote Dave Hyde, a columnist for The Sun-Sentinel, a South Florida newspaper. Mr. Hyde suggested that all the station should have done was “wash out his mouth.”Mr. Goldberg was quickly hired by another local station, WQAM-AM, where he was again successful. But he left in 2007, believing he had been lowballed in contract negotiations.By then, he was well into his two-decade run at ESPN. It ended around 2014, but he returned for the “Daily Wager” show in 2019, a year after he moved to Las Vegas. He was also a prognosticator for CBS Sports HQ, a sports streaming service, and Sportsline, an online CBS sports network.Asked what motivated her brother, Ms. Goldberg gave a simple answer: “He loved the microphone.” More

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    Tony Sirico, an Eccentric Gangster on ‘The Sopranos,’ Dies at 79

    A familiar face in Woody Allen movies, he became widely known for his portrayal of Paulie Walnuts on the hit HBO series.Tony Sirico, the actor best known for playing the eccentric gangster Paulie Walnuts on the hit HBO series “The Sopranos,” died on Friday in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was 79.His death, in an assisted living facility, was confirmed by Bob McGowan, his manager. No cause was given.Paulie Walnuts — that was Paul Gualtieri’s nickname because he once hijacked a truck full of nuts (he was expecting television sets) — was one of the mob boss Tony Soprano’s most loyal, oversensitive and reckless men. Paulie was the kind of guy who would participate in an intervention for a drug addict and, when it was his turn to speak, punch the guy in the face. He loved his mother (although he found out she was really his aunt), and she loved him because he wrote the checks to keep her in an expensive nursing home.Paulie wore track suits, slept with hookers, was phobic about germs, hated cats and watched television in a chair covered with plastic. He hated being stuck with an almost $900 restaurant check but could appreciate a tasty ketchup packet on a cold night in the Pine Barrens when there was nothing else to eat.When the “Sopranos” cast appeared in a group shot on the cover of Rolling Stone in 2001, Paulie stood with a baseball bat casually slung over his right shoulder. No hairdresser on the “Sopranos” set was allowed to touch Mr. Sirico’s hair — dark and luxuriant, with two silver “wings” on either side. He blow-dried and sprayed it himself.Mr. Sirico’s face was also familiar, in quick glimpses, to fans of Woody Allen films. He appeared in several of them, beginning with “Bullets Over Broadway” (1994), in which he played the right-hand man of a powerful gangster turned theater producer. He was a boxing trainer in “Mighty Aphrodite” (1995), an escaped convict in “Everyone Says I Love You” (1996), a matter-of-fact jailhouse cop in “Deconstructing Harry” (1997) and a gun-toting gangster on Coney Island in “Wonder Wheel” (2017).Gennaro Anthony Sirico Jr. was born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1942, the son of Jerry Sirico, a stevedore, and Marie (Cappelluzzo) Sirico. Junior, as he was called, remembered that he first got into trouble when he stole nickels from a newsstand. He attended Midwood High School but did not graduate, his brother Robert Sirico said.“I grew up in Bensonhurst, where there were a lot of mob-type people,” he told the publication Cigar Aficionado in 2001. “I watched them all the time, watched the way they walked, the cars they drove, the way they approached each other. There was an air about them that was very intriguing, especially to a kid.”He worked in construction for a while but soon yielded to temptation. “I started running with the wrong type of guys, and I found myself doing a lot of bad things,” he said in James Toback’s 1989 documentary, “The Big Bang.” Bad things like armed robbery, extortion, coercion and felony weapons possession.While serving 20 months of a four-year sentence at Sing Sing, the maximum-security prison in Ossining, N.Y., he saw a troupe of actors, all ex-convicts, who had made a stop there to perform for the inmates. “When I watched them, I said to myself, ‘I can do that,’” he told The Daily News of New York in 1999.Mr. Sirico was an uncredited extra in “The Godfather: Part II” (1974) and made his official film debut in “Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell” (1977), directed by Larry Buchanan, a self-proclaimed”cinema schlockmeister.” He followed that with more than a decade of small television and movie roles, capped by his part as the flashy mobster Tony Stacks in “Goodfellas” (1990).Mr. Sirico filming a scene from “The Sopranos” with James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, in Kearny, N.J., in 2007.Mike Derer/Associated PressHis first advocate among directors was Mr. Toback, who put him in a crime drama, “Fingers” (1978), with Harvey Keitel; a romantic drama, “Love & Money” (1981), starring Ray Sharkey and Klaus Kinski; and a comic drama, “The Pick-Up Artist” (1987), with Molly Ringwald and Robert Downey Jr., as well as featuring him in his 1989 documentary.Before “The Sopranos,” he was a police officer in “Dead Presidents” (1995), a suburban mobster in “Cop Land” (1997) and a Gambino crime family capo in the TV movie “Gotti” (1996).Once “The Sopranos” hit the air in 1999, it became enormously and widely popular. Mr. Sirico soon knew he was very famous.“If I’m with five other Paulies,” he told The New York Times in 2007, imagining a fairly unlikely situation, “and somebody yells, ‘Hey, Paulie,’ I know it’s for me.”After “The Sopranos” ended in 2007, he often worked with his co-stars.He played Bert, to Steve Schirripa’s Ernie, in a “Sesame Street” Christmas special (2008), and went on to appear with Steven Van Zandt in the series “Lilyhammer” (2013-14), with Michael Rispoli in “Friends and Romans” (2014) and with Vincent Pastore and others in the film “Sarah Q” (2018).He also voiced a street-smart dog named Vinny in several episodes of the animated series “Family Guy.”He appeared in a crime drama, “Respect the Jux,” this year. Mr. Sirico married and divorced early. In addition to his brother Robert, he is survived by two children, Joanne Sirico Bello and Richard Sirico; a sister, Carol Pannunzio; another brother, Carmine; and several grandchildren. He brought at least one admirable lesson from the mob world to “The Sopranos”: He insisted that his character never be portrayed as a rat, someone who would snitch on his crime family. He was also reluctant to have his character kill a woman — Paulie smothered an older nursing home resident with a pillow when she interrupted his theft of her life savings — but he was pleasantly surprised that people in the old neighborhood didn’t seem to think less of him after the episode was shown.Early on, however, it sometimes slipped his mind that he had rejected the dark side.“I was this 30-year-old ex-con villain sitting in a class filled with fresh-faced, serious drama students,” Mr. Sirico recalled in the Daily News interview. The teacher “leaned over to me after I did a scene and whispered, ‘Tony, leave the gun home.’ After so many years of packing a gun, I didn’t even realize I had it with me.”Vimal Patel More

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    At BroadwayCon, Hillary Clinton Celebrates Women in the Theater

    The former secretary of state moderated a discussion on Friday afternoon about successes and barriers for women working in the theater.“There’s a lot to worry about right now in our country and the world,” Hillary Clinton, the former secretary of state, told a packed room of about 500 people gathered at the grand ballroom at the Manhattan Center on Friday afternoon. “And I think we need theater and the arts more than ever.”Clinton was speaking at the seventh BroadwayCon — an annual haven for the most passionate theater fans — where she was moderating a panel celebrating women on Broadway. It was the first in-person edition of the three-day event, which continues through Sunday, since 2020. (The 2021 edition was virtual.)The event allows musical theater aficionados — many of them costumed as favorite characters like Elphaba from “Wicked” and Anne Boleyn from “Six” — to meet and take photographs with the stars of their favorite shows.Clinton led an hourlong panel titled “Here’s to the Ladies,” a riff on a Stephen Sondheim lyric from the song “The Ladies Who Lunch” from the musical “Company.” Participants included the actresses Vanessa Williams (who stars as the first lady in “POTUS: Or, Behind Every Great Dumbass Are Seven Women Trying to Keep Him Alive”), Julie White (who plays the White House chief of staff in “POTUS”), Donna Murphy (the veteran stage actress who has recently appeared in the television series “The Gilded Age” and “Inventing Anna”) and LaChanze (“Trouble in Mind”).Clinton, a noted theater fan, recently saw “POTUS” and said she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” Michael Loccisano/Getty ImagesThere was a burst of applause and a 20-second standing ovation after Clinton entered the room, taking a seat in a plush white chair backed by a glowing, Hollywood-style BroadwayCon sign. Clinton, a noted theater fan, said she had attended performances of “Plaza Suite” and “POTUS” in the past week, and that she was “looking forward to seeing a lot more shows in the weeks to come.” (She received a round of applause at “POTUS” on Wednesday night after the scene in which Lilli Cooper, who plays a White House reporter, reviews the accomplishments of the first lady, played by Williams, and asks, “Why aren’t you president?”)Then Clinton had LaChanze and Williams discuss their work with the nonprofit Black Theater United; the group, formed over six months of Zoom meetings during the pandemic, aims to combat racism in the theater community.“There’s so much you can be proud of,” Clinton told them, “with the changes and awareness and consciousness and most effectively in actually hiring and retaining and recruiting more diversity.”The discussion then turned to the women’s experiences of motherhood, including balancing life and work. White extended the conversation beyond the stage, noting that women who have careers have to sort out child care, relying on family when none is available. “It’s an ongoing problem,” she said, joking that she thought one of the two nursing mothers in “POTUS” — one of whom appears onstage — “actually pumped during her audition.”White and Williams also discussed what it was like to work with a mostly female creative team for “POTUS,” which was written by Selina Fillinger and directed by Susan Stroman.From left, LaChanze, Murphy, Clinton, Williams and Julie White spoke about inclusion, motherhood and more during their panel on Friday.Michael Loccisano/Getty Images“It’s a sense of ease — you walk into a room and there’s all females,” Williams said. “You can relax, and be funny, and ask questions, and probe, and know that there is no judgment because you’re a woman.”White added: “There was no right or wrong. There was none of that subtle patriarchy that’s always kind of there, like, ‘Get it right, lady’ — in other words, what my vision is” of what’s right.Clinton spoke to her own experience as an up-and-coming lawyer navigating the workaholic environment of Washington, sharing a story of an older male lawyer telling her to leave her door closed when she went out to dinner so everyone would think she was still working.“I said, ‘But don’t they eat?’” she said. “He said, ‘No, no, you don’t understand, it’s all perception. When you get back from dinner, walk around the office and loudly announce to people, “What are you all doing? Anything I can do to help?” Even if you’ve been at dinner for two hours, they’ll think you’re back. They think you never left.’”“My God,” Clinton said to applause. “That is exhausting — just get your work done, and then go home!”White noted that she had become more comfortable advocating for herself as she’d progressed in her career. When she was young, she said, “You’re always looking at the director like, ‘I hope he likes me,’” she said. “Then you grow up and evolve and you become more interested in what you want to tell.”She said she had become notorious for not taking notes from directors “because the power is in me, the creation is in me,” adding, “I’ve become really irritating now!”Clinton concluded the event by asking each of the women what they hadn’t yet done that they wanted to do.“Besides the show where you and I solve crimes?” White asked. “I want to play the president of the United States.”“Well, I can give you lots of notes on that,” Clinton said.“You know I won’t take them!” White responded to applause.Elexa Bancroft, a 35-year-old artist from Atlanta, attended the panel on a break from selling her mixed-media art at the marketplace downstairs. “I needed that female empowerment in my life so badly,” she said. “Being a young female entrepreneur myself and trying to get my art out into the world and seeing how far those women have come in their jobs, it’s really inspiring.”Other events set for the weekend include “When Broadway Was Black: Celebrating the Black Artists Who Rewrote the Rules of the Great White Way”; a presentation by the author and cultural historian Caseen Gaines on Saturday afternoon that celebrates the centennial of the 1921 musical comedy “Shuffle Along,” one of the first successful all-Black Broadway musicals; and “Dreaming the Queer Future: TGNC Representation and Playwrights in the American Theater,” a discussion on Sunday morning that includes the Tony-nominated actress L Morgan Lee of “A Strange Loop” and the playwright Roger Q. Mason and focuses on trans and gender nonconforming representation in theater.“It definitely feels more inclusive this year,” Bancroft said. More

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    Larry Storch, Comic Actor Best Known for ‘F Troop,’ Dies at 99

    His well-honed comic timing, and the mimicry skills he had developed in nightclubs, served him well on one of the sillier sitcoms of the 1960s.Larry Storch, who played a memorable television oddball on the 1960s sitcom “F Troop” and for years carried a secret in his personal life that was odd in an entirely different way, died on Friday at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. He was 99.His stepdaughter, June Cross, confirmed the death.Mr. Storch had a long career as a nightclub comic and as a character actor on the stage and the big and small screens. But his other work was dwarfed by the impression he made during the two-season run of “F Troop” on ABC, from 1965 to 1967.The show was a slapstick comedy about an outpost called Fort Courage in Indian country just after the Civil War, and Mr. Storch played Cpl. Randolph Agarn, one of the bigger misfits in a unit full of them. Agarn and his business partner, Sgt. Morgan O’Rourke, played by Forrest Tucker, were constantly hatching moneymaking schemes, most of them involving the local Indian tribe, the Hekawis.O’Rourke was the brains of the partnership; Agarn provided the idiocy, and Mr. Storch’s well-honed comic timing served him deliciously in the role. So did the mimicry skills he had honed in nightclubs, where his act included all sorts of impersonations: In various “F Troop” episodes he played not only Agarn but also assorted Agarn relatives, who somehow found their way to the fort from far-off locales. “I had cousins who came from Moscow, Mexico, Montreal,” Mr. Storch recalled in a 2009 interview. “F Troop” wasn’t on long. But, like many sitcoms in that era of limited television choices, it burned itself into the minds of those who watched it, perhaps in part because it trafficked in the kinds of stereotypes — especially those hard-drinking, firewater-brewing Indians — that would soon disappear from television.Mr. Storch, in a 2007 interview with The Asbury Park Press, credited Mr. Tucker with securing him the role of Agarn.“I was supposed to be the sergeant,” Mr. Storch said, “but when they saw Forrest Tucker dressed in a cavalry suit — he looked like a polar bear — they said, ‘That’s going to be it.’ And Forrest Tucker said: ‘Wait a minute. I’m going to need a corporal around here, and I think he and I would have good chemistry.’” The “he” was Mr. Storch.When not clowning around on the stage or screen, Mr. Storch was party to an unusual secret at home. Before he and his wife, Norma Greve, were married in 1961, she had had a biracial daughter, Ms. Cross, with a Black performer named Jimmy Cross. Mother and child left Mr. Cross soon after June’s birth in 1954, but since the girl was dark-complexioned enough that she could not pass as white, she and her mother began encountering racism. When June was 4, Norma asked friends, a middle-class Black couple in Atlantic City, N.J., to raise her.Later, when the Storches were married and living in Hollywood, June would come to visit, and they would explain to friends that she was an abused child of former neighbors and that they had adopted her, but that she lived most of the year with Black friends.“In those days, people were encrusted in prejudice,” Mr. Storch explained to People magazine in a 1996 interview. “We saw no reason to rock the boat.”June Cross later became a television producer and then a professor at Columbia University. In 1996 she told her story in “Secret Daughter,” a documentary broadcast on PBS, which won an Emmy Award. The personal story of Mr. Storch and his wife has another wrinkle as well. In 1948, years before they were married, they had a daughter, whom they put up for adoption. After Ms. Cross’s documentary came out, the Storches and that daughter, Candace Herman, were reunited.After “F Troop,” Mr. Storch found steady work on other TV shows. He played a reporter who impersonates a priest in a 1969 episode of “The Flying Nun,” with Sally Field.ABC Photo Archives/Disney via Getty ImagesLawrence Samuel Storch was born on Jan. 8, 1923, in Manhattan. His father, Alfred, is described in several biographical listings as a real estate agent, though in a 1983 interview with The Washington Post Mr. Storch said he was a cabdriver. His mother, Sally (Kupperman) Storch, was a telephone operator who later had a jewelry store and ran a rooming house.Ms. Cross, in a telephone interview, said that as a child Mr. Storch would pick up voices and accents from the rooming house guests (Orson Welles, he always said, was one) that served him well later as a comedian.Mr. Storch left high school during the Depression when he found that he could make a few dollars doing impressions in the city’s clubs and acting as M.C. for vaudeville shows. He served in the Navy during World War II. By the time television came along, he was a well-established comic in the city and had used his mimicry skills to gain a foothold in radio.He first came to the attention of television audiences in 1951 as a guest host of “Cavalcade of Stars,” and in 1953 CBS picked him to host the summer replacement show that filled Jackie Gleason’s Saturday night slot. A string of television appearances followed, including a recurring role on “Car 54, Where Are You?” Mr. Storch was also the voice of the TV version of Koko the Clown in scores of cartoon shorts, and teamed with his friend Don Adams as one of the voices in the 1963 cartoon series “Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales.”Then came “F Troop,” which brought Mr. Storch an Emmy nomination in 1967. He worked steadily in television through the 1980s, doing guest spots on “The Flying Nun,” “The Love Boat,” “Love, American Style” and numerous other shows. In 1975 he reunited with Mr. Tucker in a live-action children’s show called “The Ghost Busters,” in which the two men played detectives who searched for spooks. (The show was unrelated to the later “Ghostbusters” movies.)One of Mr. Storch’s Navy friends was a fellow sailor named Bernard Schwartz, who became better known as Tony Curtis and gave Mr. Storch roles in several of his films, including “40 Pounds of Trouble” (1962), “Sex and the Single Girl” (1964) and “The Great Race” (1965).Mr. Curtis and Mr. Storch teamed up again years later, in 2002, in a stage musical version of “Some Like It Hot,” the 1959 Billy Wilder movie that had starred Mr. Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. (The show drew upon the 1972 Broadway musical “Sugar” and added new material.) Mr. Curtis played not his original role, a musician on the run from gangsters who joins a band disguised as a woman, but the millionaire Osgood Fielding; Mr. Storch played the band manager, Bienstock.That show, which toured the country, never made Broadway, but Mr. Storch had a half-dozen Broadway appearances to his credit, beginning with “The Littlest Revue,” a 1956 show that also starred Joel Grey. In 1958 he appeared in the play “Who Was That Lady I Saw You With?,” and he had roles in revivals of “Porgy and Bess” (1983), “Arsenic and Old Lace” (1986), “Annie Get Your Gun” (2000) and “Sly Fox” (2004). His other films included Blake Edwards’s “S.O.B.” and the disaster movie “Airport 1975.” His vocal talents turned up in numerous cartoons as well as in McDonald’s commercials (“the most money I ever made,” he said in 2009).Mr. Storch’s wife died in 2003. His brother, Jay, an actor who used the name Jay Lawrence, died in 1987. In addition to Ms. Cross and Ms. Herman, he is survived by a stepson, Lary May, the author of several books on film and popular culture; five grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Mr. Storch at a birthday party for Jerry Lee Lewis at B.B. King Blues Club and Gril in Manhattan in 2017. He continued to make public appearances late in life.Derek Storm/Everett CollectionMr. Storch was still making public appearances late in life. In June 2014 he served as mayor for a day of Fort Lee., N.J., a town where he had once performed. That September he appeared at the Comedy Store in Los Angeles and was honored with a star on the Palm Springs Walk of Stars.In 2016 he was honored by Passaic, N.J., the city the fictitious Corporal Agarn called home. Mayor Alex Blanco said at the ceremony that Passaic had been mentioned all over the world because of “F Troop”; Mr. Storch said that he had never been there before, but that he had chosen Passaic for his character’s hometown because “it sounded tough.”In his later years Mr. Storch maintained an active Facebook page and posted videos on TikTok. He also put in appearances at Wild West City, a western-themed attraction in Stanhope, N.J. In July 2021, at 98, for what was billed as his final public appearance, he toured the site in a sporty red sedan, hamming it up for onlookers.Mr. Storch could sometimes be seen playing the saxophone, a lifelong hobby, in Central Park. Another signature activity, even late in life, was standing on his head. “It helps your breathing,” he explained in 2002 to a reporter for The Detroit News, while standing on his head. “The blood goes to your brain, whatever brain you have.” More

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    ‘He Presented Another Path’: Actors and Directors on Peter Brook

    Patrick Stewart, Tarell Alvin McCraney, Tina Landau and Tim Robbins on being challenged and inspired by the legendary theater maker, who died last weekend.The actor Kathryn Hunter heard the news of the director Peter Brook’s death, last weekend at 97, in a telephone call from his longtime collaborator Marie-Hélène Estienne. Then Hunter, an Olivier Award winner who played the witches in Joel Coen’s film “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” set off across London for Shakespeare’s Globe.“I’m playing Lear, which was, of course, Peter’s great, great play,” she said the other day, describing herself as overwhelmed at his loss after many years of working with him, including in New York. “As I was cycling in, I felt and almost saw a huge great light, and I felt it was Peter’s spirit.”That sort of mystical event seems apt for Brook, who over his long, globe-trotting career attained a kind of guru status — not least through his nine-hour landmark production “The Mahabharata,” a 1985 adaptation of the Sanskrit epic, and with revered texts like his 1968 book of theater principles, “The Empty Space.”Always in print: Brook’s “The Empty Space” laid out his principles of theater. London-born and Paris-based, Brook directed nine shows on Broadway, most famously his “Marat/Sade” in 1965 and his enduringly influential “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in 1971. In recent decades in New York, he was a questing favorite at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and Theater for a New Audience.Friends and colleagues who worked with him on this side of the Atlantic, and theater makers who never met him but look reflexively to his tenets — including openness and presence in the moment — spoke by phone this week about Brook’s impact as an artist and a human being. These are edited excerpts from those interviews.Can you spot Ben Kingsley in Brook’s 1970 production of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in Stratford-upon-Avon, England? (He’s hanging top right.)Donald Cooper / Alamy Stock PhotoPatrick StewartThe actor on being cast, as a replacement, in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” in which he made his Broadway debut as Snout the tinker.One day I got off the subway. I found Peter standing alongside me, and we set off to cross the road when the lights were pedestrian lights. Peter said, “How are you?” I said, “Actually, Peter, I’m not very happy.” And he stopped dead, right in the middle of Seventh Avenue, and he turned to me and put his hand on my shoulder and said, “What is it? What’s wrong?” By then, the lights had changed, and the traffic was roaring down Seventh Avenue. He said, “No, no, tell me. I want to know.” I had to take him by the arm and almost drag him out of the way. We would have both been knocked down. What I mean is that when he turned to me and said, “What is it?,” there was no question, from the look in his eyes, that I was the only thing of importance in that moment. And that impressed me very, very much.Robert FallsThe director — who said he revisits Brook, via “The Empty Space” and films of his work, each time he stages a classic — on vivid first impressions of Brook’s artistry.I grew up in a farming community in downstate Illinois, the land of corn and soybeans. And when I was 12 years old, in 1966, I opened up America’s magazine: Life magazine. And there was this spread of “Marat/Sade” that was terrifying and gorgeous — a two-page spread of an image of beheaded aristocrats. Just a few years later, I saw “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” in its American tour. It remains to this day the most mind-blowing experience of the theatrical event, of how theater can be made: circus, magic and absolute clarity of a text, and joy, actually, and surprise — again, terror. He really did, I think, change the way we look at Shakespeare.Tina LandauThe director on what Brook has bequeathed.He really catapulted us into the modern era of how we experience space when we sit down and collaborate. And that theater is a collaborative form, and that the greatest and ultimate collaboration is between the performers and the audience.Brook, right, with the playwright Tarell Alvin McCraney.via ALL ARTSTarell Alvin McCraneyThe playwright and screenwriter on witnessing Brook “model a life as an artist” at his Paris base.He was consistently workshopping plays, and I would find time to go do them. I spent the last however many years that was, 15 years, basically being a part of this ad hoc company around the world, which many people were. I always left it feeling very full. Like I had done a retreat, almost, in theater. Sometimes I would write, sometimes I would act, sometimes I would just watch. Sometimes I would move a set piece. And we always shared a meal. No matter what, there was a break so that we could be human beings and have a meal.Peter would attract a whole room full of folk. But the room understood that there was a space for everybody here. He was showing us that that is the practice: You have to practice making room for everyone.Tim RobbinsThe actor-director on Brook as challenge and inspiration.Reading “The Empty Space” when I was in college gave me the confidence to know that the theater that I wanted to do was legitimate and important. For me, that was the bible. I actually went to Paris a couple months ago, and I was going to meet him in person and have some lunch, and he was too ill. But Peter will be alive for a long time. He presented another path.A scene from “The Mahabarata” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival in 1987.Giles Abegg, via BAM Hamm ArchivesKaren Brooks HopkinsThe former president of the Brooklyn Academy of Music on the magic dust that Brook sprinkled in 1987 by staging “The Mahabharata” there, for which BAM converted an old cinema into what is now its Harvey Theater.When you run an arts institution, you need great artists to work there. And Peter Brook made our reputation. I mean, there were others, too. But Brook, “The Mahabharata,” it just locked it in. It changed the whole Brooklyn thing, from people not coming to people knowing that this was the place to see something that would blow your mind that you wouldn’t see anywhere else.Jeffrey HorowitzThe artistic director of Theater for a New Audience, Brook’s frequent New York stage in recent years, on first pursuing him in the early 1970s.I decided to go out to Aspen, Colorado, and track down where Peter Brook was staying. I waited in the Hotel Jerome, and he came out. I said, “Mr. Brook, I wonder if I could audition for you. I’m a great admirer of your work.” Instead of dismissing me, he stopped and looked at me. Then he said, “What have you done?” I said, “Well, I’ve just graduated from drama school, so I don’t have any professional credits.” He just shook his head, gently: No. Didn’t say a word. But the troupe that he was with, I got to know some of the actors. They would invite me to rehearsals. So every time they came to New York for years, I would go to these rehearsals. And he let me watch.Gregory MosherThe director on bringing Brook and his production “Tierno Bokar” to Columbia University and Barnard College in 2005.One night, Peter was sitting on the aisle about halfway up, and right next to him was a student on his cellphone. The show started and the kid did not put away the cellphone. I just braced myself for Peter walking up the aisle where I was sitting in the back row and saying, “What is going on with the cellphones?” I didn’t let him get any momentum. I went down to him afterward and said, “It was good tonight, right? It’s so beautiful.” And he said, “Yes, the most interesting thing happened. There was a boy sitting next to me and he seemed very engaged in the play and also on his phone. And that was so interesting to me,” says Peter, “that both of those things could be true.”Michael Pennington in Arin Arbus’s 2014 production of “King Lear.”Ruby Washington/The New York TimesArin ArbusOn Brook giving her the courage to direct “King Lear,” which she did to acclaim for Theater for a New Audience in 2014.I felt very interested in the play. I also felt like, who the hell do I think I am? I was kind of paralyzed by that. We were in Paris for some reason, so I went to his apartment, and we talked for like half an hour. He was like, “What interests you about the play? What do you feel connected to?” You can talk about those plays for hours with people, and we didn’t. It was light. He was like, “Oh, well, you have to do it. There’s no way to find out the answers to the questions that you have unless you do it.” Kathryn Hunter and Marcello MagniThe actors, who are a married couple, on their yearslong collaboration with Brook.Hunter It was slow and it takes time, because what he’s looking for is not product. It was more about peeling away anything that was obstructing what is essentially you, so that you could really share something very fine and mysterious with the audience. When we’d go away and work with other people, coming back to Peter, I’d feel: I’m a very crass, crude person. I have to sensitize myself again.Our last production, and Peter’s last production, was Beckett’s “Happy Days,” in French.Magni We did a version where Willie appeared and was not hidden. Peter wanted to see the relationship between Winnie and Willie.I now resist a lot when I’m in a rehearsal room when I feel there is too much of a concept before you start to work. He allowed us a journey. With failure and with accidents and with bumps. But at the end, we would have come up with the stories. He was sending us the message: Go inside yourself. Be true. More

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    Kenward Elmslie, Poet and Librettist, Dies at 93

    He collaborated on operas with Jack Beeson and Ned Rorem and published numerous poetry books. Late in life, he was victimized by theft.Kenward Elmslie, who wrote poetry, opera librettos and stage musicals, and who late in life made headlines when his chauffeur bilked him out of millions of dollars and several valuable artworks, including one by Andy Warhol, died on June 29 at his home in the West Village. He was 93.The poet Ron Padgett, a friend since the 1960s, confirmed the death but did not specify a cause. Mr. Elmslie had been dealing with dementia for many years.Mr. Elmslie, a grandson of the newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer, became interested in musical theater while in high school, and in 1952 he met and became a lover of John Latouche, a lyricist who worked with Leonard Bernstein, Duke Ellington and others and had numerous Broadway credits. Mr. Elmslie is said to have helped Mr. Latouche on some of his projects, generally uncredited.After Mr. Latouche’s death in 1956, Mr. Elmslie continued to live in the house they had shared in Vermont, alternating between there and Manhattan. And he began to have success himself as a lyricist and librettist.He provided the libretto for the Jack Beeson opera “The Sweet Bye and Bye,” which was first performed by the Juilliard Opera Theater in New York in 1957. In 1965 he worked with Mr. Beeson again, on “Lizzie Borden,” an embellished version of the famed ax-murder case, which premiered that year at City Center in New York. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.“The performers, the composer, the librettist, the designer and the director shared the bows at the end,” Howard Klein wrote in his review in The New York Times. “Many bravos were heard.”Ellen Faull and Richard Krause in a scene from the Jack Beeson opera “Lizzie Borden,” for which Mr. Elmslie wrote the libretto. It was probably Mr. Elmslie’s biggest success in opera.NET Opera, via PhotofestMr. Elmslie’s other opera credits included the libretto for Ned Rorem’s “Miss Julie” (1965). He also dabbled in songwriting — his “Love-Wise,” written with Marvin Fisher, was recorded by Nat King Cole in 1959 — and in theater, even accumulating a Broadway credit as book writer and lyricist for “The Grass Harp,” a musical based on a Truman Capote novel that opened in 1971 but, unloved by critics, closed days later.W.C. Bamberger, in the introduction to “Routine Disruptions,” a 1998 collection of Mr. Elmslie’s poems and lyrics, wrote that it was during lulls in his opera and lyric-writing work that Mr. Elmslie began trying his hand at poetry. He was plugged into the New York art and literary scene and had befriended Barbara Guest, John Ashbery and other poets. His first collection, “Pavilions,” appeared in 1961, followed by more than a dozen others, including “Motor Disturbance” (1971) and “Tropicalism” (1975).In the 1970s, as editor of Z Press and its annual Z Magazine, Mr. Elmslie published many of the poets he admired. His own work defied categorization. There was plenty of wit, as in “Touche’s Salon,” which shamelessly dropped names to evoke a 1950s gathering at Mr. Latouche’s penthouse:Meet Jack Kerouac. Humpy and available.His novel On The Road is unreadable. And unsalable.John Cage is sober, Tennessee loaded.Better not ask how his last flop show did.But his more serious poetry could be ambitious, as well as dense. Mr. Ashbery once said that it was like the notes of “a mad scientist who has swallowed the wrong potion in his lab and is desperately trying to get his calculations on paper before everything closes in.”Mr. Elmslie came to combine his various hats — librettist, songwriter, poet — both in his books, some of which were collaborations with visual artists, and in his poetry readings, which might find him in costume delivering a song in addition to reading his verses. Susan Rosenbaum, reviewing his 2000 book, “Blast From the Past: Stories, Poems, Song Lyrics & Remembrances,” in Jacket magazine, noted that the printed page didn’t do justice to his wide-ranging interests.“For an artist as multitalented as Elmslie, the book is a limiting format: One wants to see and hear his musical works in performance, to visit the galleries where his visual collaborations are displayed,” she wrote. “But the very ability to elicit this desire — to reveal poetry’s affinities with song, theater and visual art — is a measure of the talent of this unique poet.”Kenward Gray Elmslie was born on April 27, 1929, in Manhattan. His father, William, met Constance Pulitzer, Joseph Pulitzer’s youngest daughter, when he was working as a tutor for another of the Pulitzer children. They married in 1913.Kenward grew up in Colorado Springs and Washington, D.C., and graduated from Harvard University in 1950 with an English degree. In New York in the 1950s and ’60s, he mixed easily with an artsy crowd. A 1965 article in The Times about a trendy party in the Bowery had him among the guests, with Warhol, the photographers Diane Arbus and Richard Avedon, the pioneering electronic composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and others, all gathered to hear a reading by William S. Burroughs.The year before that party, Warhol had given Mr. Elmslie one of his Heinz ketchup box sculptures, a classic example of Warholian Pop Art. More than four decades later, in 2009, the work was stolen, along with other valuable items and several million dollars. “Pulitzer kin hit in pop art scam,” the headline in The Daily News read.In 2010, James Biear, who had been Mr. Elmslie’s chauffeur and caretaker, was indicted in the thefts. News accounts at the time said he took advantage of Mr. Elmslie’s dementia, which was already in its early stages. In 2012 Mr. Biear was sentenced to 10 years in prison.In 1963 Mr. Elmslie began a long relationship with Joe Brainard, an artist and writer with whom he also collaborated on various projects. Mr. Brainard died in 1994. Mr. Elmslie is survived by a half sister, Alexandra Whitelock. More

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    Cabaret Champion Michael Feinstein Teams With Café Carlyle

    The performer and entrepreneur is ending his partnership with 54 Below and will perform his first-ever shows at the Upper East Side venue in October.One of cabaret’s most famous champions is about to forge a new collaboration with one of its most storied venues, and end his association with another.On Oct. 11-22, Michael Feinstein will perform a series of shows marking a new relationship with Café Carlyle, the Upper East Side room renowned for its association with Bobby Short. Since opening in 1955, the Carlyle has hosted generations of cabaret fixtures and aspirants, from Eartha Kitt and Elaine Stritch to the “American Idol” hopeful Katharine McPhee and the designer Isaac Mizrahi.The new arrangement will mark the end of Feinstein’s creative partnership with 54 Below, which celebrated its 10th anniversary in June. Feinstein, a historian and archivist as well as a performer and entrepreneur, had joined forces with the younger venue, which bills itself as “Broadway’s living room,” in 2015; Feinstein’s/54 Below was the recipient of an honor as part of the Tony Awards last month. Before that, he was affiliated with another hotel not far from the Carlyle; Feinstein’s at the Regency closed in 2013.“I’m excited for 54 Below and their future and for my future and the future of my brand,” Feinstein told The Times. “I’ve been thinking about a move for two years now. I’ve accomplished everything I had envisioned with Feinstein’s/54 Below and I felt like it was time to make a change. How do you top a Tony Honors? You do it by joining forces with Café Carlyle, the most prestigious nightclub in the world. I couldn’t be more thrilled.”Feinstein’s October shows will be his first ever at the Carlyle; he is expected to perform more engagements there in the future.In a joint statement, the 54 Below partners Richard Frankel, Tom Viertel and Steven Baruch said, “We’ve enjoyed our six-year relationship with Michael and wish him well at the Café Carlyle. We decided several months ago that we would be returning to our original name of 54 Below and shared that information with him and his management. We look forward to what the next 10 years hold for 54 Below and bringing to Broadway’s living room more brilliant new artists and legendary performers.”Café Carlyle will not adjust its name. In a statement, Marlene Poynder, the managing director of the Carlyle Hotel, said the venue is looking forward to “adding the Feinstein name to the Café Carlyle legacy.” More