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    ‘Fourth of July’ Review: Fraught Family Dynamics From Louis C.K.

    The comedian directs, co-writes and takes a supporting role in this family dramedy. It’s not supposed to be his show, but it is anyway.Jeff, a jazz pianist, is a recovering alcoholic who is almost three years sober. But he hasn’t quite begun to reap the gifts of his new state. In spite of his contented marriage, his soul is a bag of anxiety — one that both his A.A. sponsor and his therapist seem bent on stuffing anew. As Jeff contemplates, with dread, visiting his loutish family for Fourth of July week, the bag is set to burst.The comedian Joe List, who co-wrote the script, plays Jeff with scruffy sad-sack conviction, and his real-life partner, the comedian Sarah Tollemache, is grounded and appealing as his wife, Beth. The couple have a bantering style that’s emblematic of their offscreen gigs. But neither of these talents (or, for that matter, any of the excellent supporting cast) has much to do, probably, with why you’re reading this review.The director and other writer of “Fourth of July” is Louis C.K., the comic artist who is hellbent on maintaining his career in the wake of multiple accusations of sexual misconduct. While Louis C.K. has not faced criminal charges, his actions of past years, which he eventually admitted to, were squalid, callous and harmful. Leading to what some would call a cancellation.The scandals did, in fact, torpedo the release of his 2017 feature, “I Love You, Daddy,” a tale with sexual dimensions that were sufficiently provocative as to be characterized as nose-thumbing. In any case, after complaining that the scandals had cost him millions of dollars, he returned to stand-up, successfully. His recording “Sincerely Louis C.K.” won a Grammy in 2022. And there you have it.What he’s up to with this film, it would appear, is helping out his colleague List, who seems to have put a lot of his own life into this narrative. A narrative that, for better or worse, wrings more glumness than humor from Jeff’s travails. The holiday trip to Maine — and his people’s impressive cabin on a lush mountainside — reveals a clan of possibly unsurpassable awfulness: a mother (Paula Plum) whom Jeff accurately deems “a spider,” and a pack of racist and sexist cousins and uncles who make Archie Bunker look like the Dalai Lama. When a female cousin shows up with her biracial friend, the recently widowed Naomi (Tara Pacheco) — and boy, what a hoo-hah this arrival elicits from the fam — Jeff finds one sane person to talk to. Jeff’s dad (Robert Walsh) will hardly talk at all.As a director, Louis C.K. puts several feet wrong. Casting himself as Jeff’s passive-aggressive therapist is a bad move; his performance is droll but not droll enough to make his presence more than a distraction. Then there’s the soupy Jeff-and-Beth montage when Jeff is playing the piano in the cabin one morning. And the showy green lighting with which Louis C.K. suffuses a scene preceding Jeff’s meltdown — and breaks out again to signal the fragile emotional state of Jeff’s dad. And finally, there’s the ending. The family dynamic here is so unrelentingly brutal that it’s an actual shock to see how glib the movie is in papering it over. Imagine a “Dr. Phil” producer doing a third-act rewrite of a Tracy Letts play. Without Louis C.K.’s involvement, the movie would warrant little more than a “nice try” shrug.Fourth of JulyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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    In Munich, Young Directors Offer Horrors Both Real and Fantastical

    The Radikal Jung festival transports theatergoers to Russia’s 2014 invasion of eastern Ukraine and an American high school in the Middle Ages.MUNICH — At the end of a recent performance of “Bad Roads” here, the play’s Ukrainian director, Tamara Trunova, thanked the audience for staying for the entire 180-minute production, a harrowing succession of vignettes set in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine, which Russia invaded in 2014, eight years before it undertook a larger war against Ukraine.“It’s much easier to drink a glass of wine than it is to watch our play,” Trunova said from the stage of the Münchner Volkstheater, where “Bad Roads” opened this year’s Radikal Jung (Radical Young) festival, an annual showcase of productions by up-and-coming directors.The two previously scheduled installments of Radikal Jung were canceled because of the pandemic. This year’s edition, which kicked off on June 26 and runs through this Saturday, is the first to be held in the Volkstheater’s brand-new home, a luxurious performing arts complex in a former slaughterhouse.The festival is traditionally focused on theater from the German-speaking world, but this year’s lineup of 11 plays was unusually international. The widened geographical perspective seemed to acknowledge the artistic affinities between the work of young German theater makers and their counterparts in Greece, London and Paris. All but one of their productions were of recently written dramas, which seemed to reflect a desire to tell new stories that specifically address contemporary concerns. Many of today’s burning issues — including the pandemic, debates around gender and sexuality, the ubiquity of pop culture and social media, life during wartime and climate change — surfaced in Radikal Jung’s varied crop of productions.In a strong lineup that also featured an innovative digital reworking of Goethe’s “The Sorrows of Young Werther” and a brilliantly acted one-woman show about Britney Spears, “Bad Roads” stood out — and not just for its torn-from-the-headlines immediacy.The Ukrainian writer Natalya Vorozhbit based the play, subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War,” largely on reports she gathered while traveling across combat zones in eastern Ukraine. An earlier version of “Bad Roads” was staged, in English, at the Royal Court Theater in London in 2017; Trunova’s production premiered at the Left Bank Theater in Kyiv in 2019. (A film version directed by Vorozhbit was Ukraine’s official entry in the 2022 Academy Awards.)On a stage dominated by a giant fence, a dozen actors vividly conjure Vorozhbit’s nightmarish tales. Hallucinogenic and frequently absurd, they alternate between the barbarically cruel and the banally quotidian. In the opening narrative, a journalist on a fact-finding mission in the Donbas needs to list her identifying body marks, such as moles and tattoos, on an application before entering the region, in case she is killed while on assignment.A scene from Natalya Vorozhbit’s “Bad Roads,” directed by Tamara Trunova at the Munich Volkstheater.Spyros RenntAnother moment in “Bad Roads,” which is subtitled “Six Stories About Love and War.”Spyros RenntThe reporter, who in initiating us into the war zone seems to be a stand-in for the playwright, recites a lengthy monologue that combines the prosaic and the poetic. She tells us about the suffering she finds as well as the conflicted sexual attraction she feels toward the soldier who leads her around. “You aren’t just some ripped Brad Pitt look-alike,” she says. “You really have killed another person.”This introductory story sets up the moral ambiguities of the tales that follow, in which ordinary people, robbed of their lives by a senseless conflict, are driven to extremes.The production is relentlessly dark and savage, even if it’s shot through with morbid humor, such as the moment when a medic who is transporting her lover’s corpse propositions the soldier who has accompanied her on the mission: “A body without a head in a body bag just doesn’t turn me on.”It was sometimes difficult, at least for this non-Russian- and non-Ukrainian-speaking viewer, to tell who was on which side. (The performance had German surtitles). The disorienting atmosphere brought to mind Sergei Loznitsa’s extraordinary film “Donbass,” another anthology of surreal episodes about the 2014 conflict. At the same time, Vorozhbit’s sensitivity to her characters’ psychologies — and her desire to understand the perspective even of violent perpetrators — make “Bad Roads” a deeply human work about the compromises, cunning and sheer blind luck that surviving in an inhuman time requires.It was almost a relief to leave the real-life horrors of “Bad Roads” behind for the immersive dystopia of “Gymnasium,” a “high school opera” written and directed by Bonn Park with music by Ben Roessler. The only Volkstheater production at Radikal Jung, it is quite possibly the loopiest and most entertaining German production that premiered last year. Set in a kooky mash-up of the late Middle Ages and the 1990s, the show is a campy, riotous sendup of films like “Carrie,” “Heathers” and “Clueless” that gleefully pokes fun at American high school myths.The stock characters and plot devices of teen comedies transposed to the eccentric setting provide Park and Roessler plenty of fuel for skewering our off-kilter world. Tribalism, feudalism and superstition are among the medieval codes that are resurgent in the “post-truth” digital age. With scrappily sung musical numbers and eye-poppingly colorful sets and costumes, “Gymnasium” comments on trolling, viral rumors and climate change skepticism with a gentle satirical touch.The hand-drawn sets, the low-budget special effects — including an active volcano that looms over the school — and the rough and spirited playing of the Orchestra Academy of the Munich Philharmonic (credited as the Orchestra of Cheerleaders) help make “Gymnasium” the senior play you wish your school had been awesome enough — or your classmates talented enough — to put on.While “Gymnasium” constructed its sui generis world from history and pop culture references, “We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, plunged its audience into a largely digital theatrical universe to probe the hopes, anxieties and confusions of Gen Z.First presented as part of an online theater festival put on by the Onassis Foundation-Stegi in Athens, this impossible-to-categorize show is a social media vaudeville where four fearless young performers bare their souls (and a lot of skin) while screaming into the cyber void.“We Are in the Army Now,” from the Greek director Elias Adam, at the Munich Volkstheater.Pinelopi GerasimouWhile their tools of self-expression are TikTok and Instagram — and many parts of the live performances are captured with the performers’ smartphones or computers and projected at the back of the stage — their grievances are old as the hills: rage at their parents, unhappy loves, the impotence to change a world that refuses to accept them. Their autobiographical monologues, staged with furious energy and physicality, are alternatively heartbreaking and empowering. In an exuberant finale, the actors engage in some kick-ass cosplay, battling against the patriarchy and their own self-destructive tendencies as glam-rock Power Rangers.Our world and the people in it need some serious sorting out. The innovative productions at Radikal Jung suggested that theater can help us untangle things, however modestly, by fostering a greater sense of solidarity with the victims of complex systems of oppression. As an actor in “We Are in the Army Now” says, “Ideology can’t be explained using emojis.”Radikal JungThrough Saturday at the Münchner Volkstheater; muenchner-volkstheater.de. More

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    Seth Meyers Calls Out Fox News Hosts for Falling Speechless

    Meyers said hosts couldn’t “settle on a coherent narrative the way they usually do,” as indicated by a long, awkward pause during a live broadcast about Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony.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.Dead AirCassidy Hutchinson’s testimony continued to be the talk of late night on Wednesday. The former Trump White House aide’s statements on Tuesday were so powerful that Fox News hosts appeared speechless on air, specifically a long, awkward pause during a broadcast with Bret Baier, Sandra Smith and John Roberts.“They couldn’t settle on a coherent narrative the way they usually do,” Meyers said. “They just cycled through a bunch of different lines, from screaming about media bias to claiming everyone knows Trump gets angry to dismissing Hutchinson as a low-level staffer who supposedly had ulterior motives.”“Oof. That’s like when you get in the car with your parents after they took you to a movie that had way more nudity than they were expecting.” — SETH MEYERS“I also like how they all act like the question was for the other person: ‘John, why don’t you go ahead?’” — SETH MEYERS“[imitating Fox News hosts] ‘I’m sorry, are you talking to me John or the cameraman John?’ ‘Sandra, do you want to take this one?’ ‘Oh, sorry, I couldn’t hear you. Why don’t you go ahead, Bret?’ ‘No, no, no, no, no, no. Ladies first.’” — SETH MEYERS“That’s quite the pause. Explains Fox’s new slogan ‘Fair and … indeed, yes, we are still here.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And I just wanna say, hey, John Roberts, way to throw Sandra under the bus! [imitating John Roberts] ‘Sandra, are you still there? Because I sure wish I wasn’t here.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Giuliani 2.0 Edition)“Well, guys, it’s been a tough couple of days for the Giuliani family. First, Rudy Giuliani — I don’t know if you heard this — he claimed that he was assaulted at a grocery store, but security footage showed that it was more of a pat on his back. And then, last night, Rudy’s son Andrew Giuliani lost the Republican primary for New York governor. Yeah. His biggest weakness? Name recognition.” — JIMMY FALLON“It was a tough night for Andrew. He gave his dad a big hug, and then Rudy accused him of assault.” — JIMMY FALLON“Andrew, honey, I hope you know that you lost, not because of your swollen bee sting head, or because you’ve got a smile like a jack-o’-lantern, or because you have zero qualifications. You lost because your last name is now toxic, because your dad had one week after 9/11 when he was considered a hero, but then he blew it when he went [expletive] nuts.” — CHELSEA HANDLER, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“There are so many questions left unanswered. Would Andrew have lost if his dad didn’t try to overthrow democracy from a landscaping store, or sweat gravy during a press conference? We’ll never know.” — CHELSEA HANDLERThe Bits Worth WatchingJames Corden took “The Late Late Show” this week to London, where John Boyega, Minnie Driver and Sam Smith discussed the best breakup songs on Wednesday night’s show.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightAriana DeBose will sit down with Jimmy Fallon on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Constantine Rousouli, Marla Mindelle and Alex Ellis in “Titanique,” a production that doubles down on “Titanic” and Celine Dion as modern camp icons.Emilio Madrid“Titanique” is a campy reimagining of the blockbuster film set to songs by Celine Dion. More

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    ‘Titanique’ Review: A Musical Finds Its Sea Legs

    The camp reimagining of the maritime blockbuster revs up into increasing absurdity and Celine Dion songs.“Titanic” got a lot right. After all, it grossed roughly a bazillion dollars, cemented Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet as stars, spawned catchphrases and iconic poses and, most important, reminded us that romance was not dead.Yet some fans still think that wasn’t enough. After all, the movie featured only one Celine Dion song, and you had to wait over three hours to hear it. Clearly this structural defect had to be fixed.Enter “Titanique,” a musical retelling of James Cameron’s nautical blockbuster in which the co-authors, Tye Blue (also the director), Marla Mindelle and Constantine Rousouli, have cranked the Celine-o-meter all the way up. They added not just a bunch of her songs to the story, but the Canadian superstar herself. As played by Mindelle (Broadway’s “Sister Act” and “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella”), she is now a narrator who keeps popping in and out of the action.The premise is that Dion was on the doomed cruise liner in 1912 and is somehow still around to explain what happened — cue “I’m Alive,” of course. The singer mingles with the passengers, and by mingle I mean she shamelessly tries to overshadow them, sneaking in one of her hits at every opportunity. As James Corden said in his epic “Carpool Karaoke” with Dion: “You really have a song for every moment.” (The music supervisor Nicholas Connell did the arrangements and orchestrations.)Unlike, say, Bob McSmith and Tobly McSmith’s spoofs (“Love Actually? The Unauthorized Musical Parody,” “Showgirls! The Musical!”), “Titanique” does not feature an original score. It feels closer to “Cruel Intentions: The ’90s Musical Experience,” which added a number of tracks from that decade to its adaptation of the film (itself an update of “Dangerous Liaisons”). Rousouli, who portrayed the scheming Sebastian Valmont in that 2017 production, distinguishes himself again here as the lovelorn Jack. He renders him as an aw-shucks, wide-eyed naïf straight out of “Newsies,” a very funny performance that teeters inches from caricature yet never quite spills into it.“Titanique,” playing at Asylum NYC, incorporates a measure of improvisation and a strategy of shattering the fourth wall.Emilio Madrid“Titanique” is playing at the subterranean Asylum NYC, the former home of the Upright Citizens Brigade comedy troupe, a fitting spot for a show that incorporates a degree of improvisation. But it takes a little while to find its sea legs. The first scenes are frantic yet oddly sluggish, and it looks as if the entire evening will consist of Mindelle leaning hard on the goofball humor, idiosyncratic body language and seemingly random non sequiturs that have made Dion’s interviews so popular on YouTube.But eventually “Titanique” comes into its own as it revs up into increasing absurdity and the actors try to out-ham one another. Contrast that with Michael Kinnan’s one-man retelling of “Titanic,” “Never Let Go”: If that production captured the emotion running through both the movie and the feeling of watching it, this one doubles down on “Titanic” and Dion as modern camp icons. And speaking of camp: Ryan Duncan, in the drag role of Rose’s mother, is reminiscent of Everett Quinton at his Ridiculous Theatrical Company finest. Younger pop-culture fiends are more likely to spot Frankie Grande — yes, Ariana’s half brother — as Jack’s pal Luigi and Victor Garber (who played Thomas Andrews, the ship’s builder, in the film).That Grande plays the actor and his character in “Titanic” is typical of the show’s fourth-wall-shattering strategy, which is pretty much its entire strategy. As the production spins ever more crazily into a finale that involves that darn iceberg (Jaye Alexander), a lip-syncing contest and “River Deep, Mountain High,” you might as well admit you have been clubbed into satisfied submission.TitaníqueThrough Sept. 25 at Asylum NYC, Manhattan; titaniquemusical.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. More

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    She’ll Have You at Moo: Milky White and the Power of Puppetry

    Once upon a time on Broadway, back in 1987, the skinny old “cow as white as milk” in the new James Lapine-Stephen Sondheim musical “Into the Woods” was played by a prop as still as a statue. The cow, Milky White, has no lines, so it worked.Years went by, the fairy-tale mash-up musical returned to Broadway in 2002, and this time Milky White was played by an actor in a cow suit. Now she could dance, and that worked, too.Decades passed, and in the frenzied spring of 2022 came a hit Encores! revival so delicious that it transferred almost instantly from New York City Center to Broadway. Now in previews at the St. James Theater, where it opens on July 10, this “Into the Woods” presents Milky White as a puppet who breathes, coughs, moos and mourns — which works enchantingly.Or as an enchantment? It is a mysterious thing, the preternatural dynamic between a puppet onstage and the people in the seats, even the grown-up ones.”We’re best friends,” the actor Kennedy Kanagawa said of the cow puppet that he brings to life in “Into the Woods.”Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesWe, the savvy spectators, know that the puppet isn’t what it pretends to be. We can plainly see, for example, that Milky White is not an actual cow, that her scrawny ribs are built of cardboard, that an agile actor — the Broadway newcomer Kennedy Kanagawa — is operating her. But we look right past the artifice and invest in the puppet. Whereupon it unlocks in us a less guarded, more primal sympathy than we might allow ourselves to feel for a human performer.“There is a funny sort of yes-and that has to take place,” said James Ortiz, the Obie Award winner (for the puppet-filled Tin Man prequel “The Woodsman”) who designed Milky White. “There’s a magical sort of agreement that automatically happens. I really can’t explain fully why, but an audience just leans in and goes, ‘It’s real.’”In the musical, Milky White is the cow traded by Jack — the not-so-bright boy of beanstalk fame — for a pittance of five magic beans. With floppy ears, a free-swinging udder and a head of soft foam textured with paper, she has a handmade aesthetic that’s ideal for Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director, who confessed to having “almost an inverse emotional relationship” to slickly engineered production elements.For her, high-tech means low emotion. Whereas with Milky White, deBessonet melted as soon as she saw her move — though that initial glimpse was digital, in a short video that Ortiz shot after he first built Milky White.Kanagawa, Milky White and Cole Thompson during a rehearsal of “Into the Woods” at New 42nd Studios.Vincent Tullo for The New York Times“He conceived a cow that has a full range of ecstasy and sadness and embarrassment and longing and all of these things,” said deBessonet, the artistic director of Encores!, who is making her Broadway debut with this production. “He knows how to leave just that right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning and play.”As high-profile Sondheim revivals tend to be, deBessonet’s is packed with stars: Brian d’Arcy James as the Baker, Sara Bareilles as the Baker’s Wife, Phillipa Soo as Cinderella, Patina Miller as the Witch, Gavin Creel as the Wolf and Joshua Henry as Rapunzel’s Prince.Milky White is the principal puppet, but Ortiz has designed her some puppet company: a gargantuan and sinister pair of witch’s hands; the Giant’s elegant, open-weave boots (for which Ortiz tapped the wicker expertise of a fellow puppet designer, Camille Labarre); and, as Cinderella’s loyal friends, a flock of normal-size birds. Their wings have fragments of text on them, even though Ortiz knows the detail is too tiny for the audience to see.“The feathers are made out of torn-up pieces of poetry,” he said. “There’s also bits of Shakespeare in there from ‘Twelfth Night,’ because it’s about a young girl who disguises herself and finds love.”Early one evening in June, after the first rehearsal for the Broadway run, Ortiz and Kanagawa were sitting in a rehearsal studio on West 42nd Street, giving an interview for this article. A few feet away Milky White hung next to the birds on a metal rack, looking as lifeless as any puppet does without its puppeteer.Phillipa Soo, right, as Cinderella and Albert Guerzon, rehearsing a scene in which he operates a flock of birds, Cinderella’s loyal friends.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesKanagawa walked over and, after checking with Ortiz to make sure it was OK, took her down. Holding her by the handles, Kanagawa played with her spindly, splaying cardboard legs and recounted how he learned to shift her udder to one side when she needs to sit down. But he wasn’t puppeteering her just yet; she was still inanimate.Then he tilted her head ever so slightly, and instantly there she was: imbued with life and seemingly quizzical — even if her big, almost teary eyes are really just beveled foam coated with clear epoxy that catches the light.“Yeah, we’re best friends,” said Kanagawa, who was praised for his expert puppeteering in Alexis Soloski’s review of the Encores! production in The New York Times.It’s a recent skill for Kanagawa. Ortiz asked him to play Milky White because of his playfulness and imagination as an actor and his deep-rooted passion for the show. Then he taught him how to do it.This production has offered both of them the space to evolve the musical’s performance tradition, considering the sparsely written Milky White as a full character in puppet form.“We just kind of talk endlessly about cow logic,” Ortiz said.“Which honestly is kind of dog logic,” Kanagawa said. “Milky is a pet.”There’s the “right amount of space for the actor’s imagination, the puppeteer’s imagination and the audience’s imagination to combine and lift that object into this whole other stratosphere of meaning,” said Lear deBessonet, the revival’s director.Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesOrtiz, 38, grew up in Dallas, and made his Broadway debut this spring, designing the frolicsome mammoth and dinosaur puppets for “The Skin of Our Teeth” — and, the season being what it was, filling in for three performances as that show’s head puppeteer. The first live musical he ever saw was a high school production of “Into the Woods,” with a statue-style cow.Kanagawa, 37, was born in Tokyo and moved to the Washington, D.C., area when he was 10. In seventh grade, at a birthday party, he watched the video recording of “Into the Woods” with its original Broadway cast and original Broadway cow — then got his own VHS copy and, he said, “absolutely destroyed it with watching it so many times.”More recently, in Rob Marshall’s 2014 movie version (with James Corden as the Baker, Emily Blunt as the Baker’s Wife, Anna Kendrick as Cinderella, and Meryl Streep as the Witch), a genuine cow played the cow — not a casting decision likely to be emulated by many stage productions.Long before that, though, an idea percolated in Hollywood that might have permanently altered the performance tradition of “Into the Woods.” The Muppets creator Jim Henson was interested in making a film adaptation. He “saw the show and was a fan,” Lapine wrote in an email. “He was a wonderful fellow.” But Henson died in 1990.Five years later, the idea moved forward anyway at Columbia Pictures. As Sondheim recalls in his book “Look, I Made a Hat,” the animals in the movie were to be played by “Henson creatures.” The script got a couple of readings with a couple of deliriously starry casts (one had Robin Williams as the Baker, Cher as the Witch and Carrie Fisher and Bebe Neuwirth as Cinderella’s stepsisters) before, Sondheim writes, the project was killed in a studio shake-up.It’s easy to envision a profusion of puppet Milky Whites, a whole generation’s worth, blossoming forth onstage if that film had happened. Instead, the cow that deBessonet asked for, and Ortiz designed, and Kanagawa operates, will be Broadway’s first puppet Milky White.Just lean in and look into her eyes. There’s no question at all: She’s real. More

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    Late Night Reacts to Cassidy Hutchinson’s Damning Trump Testimony

    “I mean you’ve got to admit, though, fighting your own Secret Service agent is genius on Trump’s part — he’s hitting the one person who can’t hit back,” Trevor Noah said.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.Go for the JugularThe latest Jan. 6 hearings were called “insane” by late-night hosts several times on Tuesday night, after Cassidy Hutchinson, a Trump aide, testified that the former president hurled his lunch against the wall in anger, lunged at a Secret Service agent and attempted to grab the steering wheel of the presidential limousine so that he could join the rioters at the Capitol.“I, too, was shocked to hear that Trump threw any of his food away. Because let’s be honest, this guy’s taken more selfies with food than some of his kids,” Trevor Noah joked.“And you heard what she said — this wasn’t a one-time thing. Trump was constantly throwing food tantrums. But what’s interesting is she didn’t say ‘flipping the table’; she said ‘flipping the tablecloth.’ So either Trump was an amateur magician, or he wasn’t strong enough to flip a table, so he just did the tablecloth.” — TREVOR NOAH“He went for the throat! When you get into the Secret Service, you know you have to take one for the president, but you never expect to take one from the president: ‘Thank you for your service. Let’s keep this part secret.’”— STEPHEN COLBERT“Always good when you need another Secret Service to protect the Secret Service, you know what I’m saying?”— JIMMY FALLON“Evidently, the former president breaks a lot of dishes, which is why his handlers make sure his meals are served only in bucket or edible bowl.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That is no way to treat the Secret Service — that is how you treat a contestant in the dressing room of the Miss Universe pageant.” — CHELSEA HANDLER, guest host of “Jimmy Kimmel Live”“Trump fighting to take control of the president’s car like it’s an action movie, only he’s the president and this is real life.” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean you’ve got to admit, though, fighting your own Secret Service agent is genius on Trump’s part — he’s hitting the one person who can’t hit back. Yeah, they can punch back but then they’ve got to jump in front of their own punch.” — TREVOR NOAH“When grabbing the steering wheel didn’t work, he grabbed the car by the [expletive].” — CHELSEA HANDLER“Immediately the agents were like, ‘Who the hell let him out of his car seat?’” — JIMMY FALLON“That is insane, but it is going to make a great season premiere of ‘Kleptocrats in Cars Seizing Power.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Not to victim blame, but this is on the Secret Service, all right? You had four years to Trump-proof that vehicle — you knew who you were dealing with. There should have been a toy steering wheel in the passenger seat the whole time. Just let him think he’s driving and go back to the West Wing anyway.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Punchiest Punchlines (Killing Me Softly Edition)“Folks, speaking of Jan. 6 plotters, this weekend Rudy Giuliani was assaulted by a grocery store worker on Staten Island. Before I go any further, before I say anything else, let me say that Rudy Giuliani is fine, other than the fact that he remains Rudy Giuliani.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And more importantly, ‘The Late Show’ and ‘The Late Show’ family of producers condemns violence of any kind. You should not go out and lay a finger on the former mayor in any way. First, because it is just wrong, and, second, because you don’t want to get any of that weird Rudy juice on you.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Something tells me this isn’t the first time Rudy has exaggerated the size of something.” — CHELSEA HANDLER“You think that’s what being shot feels like? No wonder you’re not concerned about guns. That wasn’t a slap. That was a Little League coach saying, ‘You’ll get ’em next time.’” — SETH MEYERS“After the video evidence came out, the D.A. released the assailant, who also had the charges against him reduced. They’ve gone from felony assault down to back-tap with intent to ‘Hey!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Rudy remains undaunted. His son, Andrew, and his load-bearing teeth say we don’t have to worry about Rudy because he’s ‘tough as nails.’ And just like nails, he’s always hammered.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingRepresentative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sat down with Stephen Colbert to discuss Tuesday’s hearing on “The Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSteve Carell will sit down with Seth Meyers on Wednesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutKurt Russell as Elvis in the 1979 TV movie of the same name.Donaldson Collection/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFrom Kurt Russell to Michael Shannon, some of the best modern actors have taken a crack at portraying Elvis on the screen. More

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    To Play Hamlet, Alex Lawther Became an ‘Expert on Grief’

    The British actor shares what helped him transform into the doomed Danish prince: French poetry, “Pandemonium,” and postcard art (with breaks for lemon cake).Alex Lawther, known for his portrayal of troubled young men in projects like “The End of the __ing World” and “Black Mirror,” has taken on the Western canon’s moodiest: the title role in “Hamlet,” now running at the Park Avenue Armory.Though the English actor, 27, said his second New York stage appearance (following 2019’s “The Jungle” at St. Ann’s Warehouse) is going smoothly, the production has not been without its troubles, including an injury during rehearsals that delayed the premiere and led to the last-minute recasting of Gertrude.“Angus Wright, who plays Claudius and did so back in London, says he’s now played the part with four different Gertrudes,” Lawther said. “I suppose it’s a testament to the resilience and flexibility of actors that there’s no such thing as ownership of parts; you just find your feet in a company.”In a recent interview, Lawther described the works of art that have helped him get into the play’s tragic key; in order to embody Shakespeare’s doomed prince, he said he was counseled by the director, Robert Icke, to “become an expert on grief.”“The wonderful thing about literature is that there’s so much grief — it’s something of a whole genre,” he laughed. “So I readied some literary allies and friends, as it were; books and poets I could turn to that offered some sort of reflection on Hamlet, accidentally or not.”These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. “Pandemonium” by Andrew McMillan One of my best friends gave it to me on my birthday, and I read it in one sitting. It deals with acute suffering, but with such a language that you might have with a friend on the phone. Toward the end of the book, there are a lot of allusions to working a garden, and the connection between that, the relationship the speaker has to someone they love, and the struggle between keeping the garden alive and keeping this loved person alive. It’s not an easy read, but it’s very moving.2. The song “Grace” by Kae Tempest I started listening to the album this is from, “The Line Is a Curve,” as rehearsals kicked off, but not because I was searching for a soundtrack to the play in any way. This last song is like some ancient saint has looked something terrible in the face and come back from that only interested in talking about love. There’s this sense of experiencing pain and responding to it with masses of love. I listen to this song every night before I go onstage.3. “The Argonauts” by Maggie Nelson I remember a director once saying to me that sometimes it’s useful to think of text as an obstacle, and that you’ll never really get to say what you want to say. In the book, Maggie and her partner Harry have a conversation quite similar to that, about how you can’t blame a net for having holes, or something like that. That was a facet of something I was trying to understand with the heavy, thorny text of Shakespeare.4. “Paroles” by Jacques Prévert I live partly in France, and I speak quite good French now, but I didn’t when I first arrived. So I was trying to find French writers that I could read in French to try and get better. Prévert is amazing because, as a writer, he has immense profundity, but his language is really, really simple. For a non-speaker, you can sort of sit there quite happily, with a pencil, reading his poems, which are often quite short and with simple syntax. It’s words you might learn in high school, but the ordering of them is so beautiful.5. “Keep the Lights On” (2012) dir. Ira Sachs I wanted to watch a film set in New York before coming here, and I’d seen this one years ago and been really moved by it. It sat in my brain for a while and came back to me. There’s something so vulnerable and tender and sort of feral about Thure Lindhardt’s performance in it.6. Nigel Slater’s lemon and thyme cake I have some things that I cook again and again, and one of them is this cake. My mom introduced me to Nigel Slater, and now we both buy each other his cookbooks for Christmas. It’s basically a lemon drizzle cake but with a ton of almond powder, so it’s very moist, but it feels very grown up because you put thyme in it. It makes me feel like I’ve got control over my life and quite sophisticated, which are both sort of fantasies of mine.7. “A Common Turn” by Anna B Savage This is her debut album, and it’s extraordinary to have the courage to be as frank as she is here. It’s this otherworldly voice that touches on something almost operatic, something huge and expansive and intimate. She’s going to cringe if she reads this, but I gave our Ophelia, Kirsty Writer, a copy of this album because there’s something I think Hamlet’s obsessed with about using honesty as a tool. I think he would love Savage’s music for that reason.8. Duncan MacAskill’s postcard art MacAskill has a project he’s been doing for decades where he will send other artists pieces of his own work to wherever they are in residency. They might just be colors or cartography or collage, and he’ll often put a GPS coordinate on them, which points you to another place in London.I love the idea of an artist being in conversation with another artist through their work. I think it’s good, when you’re working in a group, to remember that there’s other work being made elsewhere, and that we’re all part of something a little bit larger.9. “Mayflies” by Andrew O’Hagan The friend who gave this to me described it as an ode to friendship, which I think is a better way of putting it than I possibly could. It’s about two young men who are best friends during their high school years. The first part is about this crazy, sort of filthy weekend they spend in Manchester and how that weekend encapsulates the whole of their youth. In the second half, 30 years later, one of them is terminally ill. It tricks you into thinking it is a coming-of-age story, but it’s more about coming to terms.10. “The Sopranos” It does something I suppose we’re trying to do with this production, which is making something on a very big scale that is ultimately about the fractured nature of being part of a family, and how complicated it is to live with other people. They live in a castle, and the choices they make influence the well-being of an entire state, but they’re still struggling as mother and son, sister and brother. More

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    in Television

    Baratunde Thurston Wants You to Be Part of Nature. Right Now.

    The author of “How to Be Black” and host of the “How to Citizen with Baratunde” podcast wants you to experience the outdoors with a new PBS television series.In the midst of the pandemic, Baratunde Thurston decided to start a garden.It was a way for the author, podcaster and TV host to reconnect with his love of the outdoors, and process his feelings about the tumultuous state of the world.“Unfortunately, the squirrels thought I was gardening for them,” Mr. Thurston said. “In the beginning, I saw it as a battle — me versus the squirrels. Over time I realized, these squirrels are my neighbors, too. Maybe we can work something out.”Connecting with the environment, respecting wildlife and finding reverence in nature are all themes of Mr. Thurston’s new television series, “America Outdoors.” The six-part show follows him on a range of outdoor adventures, from running with ultramarathoners in Death Valley, Calif., to bird-watching in Minnesota and trekking through the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia and North Carolina. Viewers learn that nature can be enjoyed by everyone.“Doing a show based in the outdoors was really the right move in terms of ways to experience this country,” Mr. Thurston said. “I got to hang out with true outdoor enthusiasts and was reminded that you don’t have to be obsessive, or particularly well-resourced, to enjoy the outdoors.”“America Outdoors” premieres July 5 on PBS. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.The show is as much about outdoor destinations as it is about people. How do you define an “outdoor enthusiast?”This show is about breaking expectations. When I hear “the outdoors,” I have an extreme landscape like El Capitan in mind. I have a white guy in mind, with a beard, and he’s looking off into the distance, having just conquered something. And we did spend some time with people like that, but we also spent time with the original people on this land. It was a beautiful privilege that I got to interview people from three different Indigenous nations.We spent time with folks who have disabilities, and I got to be guided down a river, white-water rafting and piloted by a man who’s paralyzed. In Idaho, I was hanging out with refugee kids, mostly from Africa and Southeast Asia — part of the “Welcome to America” in Boise is hiking and taking nature walks and getting familiar with all the Americans, all of our neighbors, including the trees and the butterflies. I also met people just in their backyards who maybe don’t have the gear, the car rack, or a subscription to an outdoor magazine, but they know the value of putting their hands in dirt and growing food.You do a lot of really physical outdoor activities in this show — hiking, surfing, rafting, flying a plane! Which was the most challenging?The most challenging by far: sand surfing. Walking in sand, first of all, it’s not fun. That’s a great challenge. I really toned my calves and my glutes and my thighs. So I’m kind of grateful. But trying to ride a board? I don’t do skiing and snowboarding. Trying to stand on frozen water, on an incline, it just feels like … Why would you do that? So then we’re doing it on sand, and there’s no fin on the board. So there’s nothing for it to grip, and so you’re just kind of fishtailing all around. We had so many takes and when you go down a sandy hill, you have to walk back up. There’s no shortcut. It was a lot!Which destinations disrupted your expectations the most?Death Valley was full of life. It was our first shoot and pretty quickly, I was as offended as the Indigenous people by the name because it just sounds barren. The people we spent time with there, they helped me see it differently. The author of “Hiking The Pacific Crest Trail: Southern California,” Shawnté Salabert, took me on this hike to Darwin Falls and it’s just beautiful. I also went running with Mosi Smith, this ultramarathoner, and saw Death Valley through his lens. Of course, being with the Timbisha Shoshone members, who say this place should be called Timbisha, not Death Valley just because some white dude got lost. That’s disrupted expectations just because of what it’s called.There was also a shock for me on Tangier Island, in the Chesapeake Bay, with James “Ooker” Eskridge, the mayor of the community. On paper, me and this guy don’t have that much to say to each other. He was in the Trump-iest voting district in America by some measures, and he’s very, very, very conservative. But I had the luxury of spending real time and feeling his energy and experiencing his hospitality. I learned that his home is disappearing due to rising sea levels, due to climate change. He won’t quite call it climate change, but he acknowledges the waters rising and wants to do something about it. He wants sea walls, he wants federal money to be spent to save his town. We were on the coast of his island and seeing tombstones in the water. You can show data about climate change and you could watch an Al Gore presentation and see the temperature going up. But then you can wade through a graveyard. Hearing him describe having to exhume his ancestor to his own backyard; he got emotional talking about it. It made it real. I didn’t expect to have that experience at all. I definitely didn’t expect to have it with someone who’s seemingly so different from me.Climate change comes up a lot in the show. Was that your intention?Making a show about the outdoors is making a show about climate change. We can’t avoid the topic. In every location, I was witness to the effects of climate change: the dryness and lack of water in Death Valley beyond what’s expected; the firefighter training for those wildland firefighters; in Idaho, the smoke from Western fires, and the low levels of the river and the high temperatures of the river. In Minnesota, the premise of one of our segments with the Abbas family, the farming family, was trying to breed climate-resilient trees that can bear higher temperatures, because the forest we were standing in is going to disappear. And so rather than just mourn that, what kind of new forest can we create in its place? They’re engineering just through basic biology to harden the forest so that their kids have trees, too. When we were in Duluth, Minne., we could hardly breathe. Minnesota is having mad fires now. We couldn’t see Lake Superior. I had to wear an N95 mask when we weren’t shooting, because it was burning inside.Everywhere we went, we had a climate story. Sometimes it was more of a focal point of who we were talking with and the story; other times, it just affected how we could make the show.What do you hope people may learn from this show?I want people to see the outdoors as a place where we can literally experience common ground among the wide range of differences that make up this nation. Pretty much everybody should be able to see themselves in the show — we’ve got different time zones, different ecologies, different ages and body shapes and abilities. I hope we’ve reflected the diversity of the nation both in its natural state and in its human state. I want this show to be a mirror for everybody.The Indigenous people I spoke to have a culture of being a part of nature, as opposed to apart from nature. We got to relearn that. That was a really big takeaway for me, especially as the climate gets more volatile in the next decades. We should all stay connected in that way. This is not just something to use. It’s something to belong to.52 Places for a Changed WorldThe 2022 list highlights places around the globe where travelers can be part of the solution.Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. More