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    ‘The Doors Didn’t Open Easily’ on Her Path to ‘Cinderella’

    The choreographer JoAnn M. Hunter has quietly become an important figure in the world of musical theater, especially with her work for Andrew Lloyd Webber.LONDON — Midway through Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella,” the male ensemble throws itself into a thrusting, muscle-popping number that perfectly illustrates the musical’s fictional setting of Belleville, a town devoted to beauty in all its superficial forms. It’s also laugh-out-loud hilarious, a sly take on an objectification more usually embodied by a female chorus, and a witty amplification of the musical’s reimagining of the Cinderella myth.That dance (which incorporates kettle bells), and all the others in this West End production, is the work of JoAnn M. Hunter, a longtime Broadway performer and choreographer who has quietly become an important figure in a field that boasts very few women, and even fewer women of color.“A great number of choreographers go their own way,” Lloyd Webber said in a telephone interview, “but JoAnn is completely different, a wonderful collaborator who you can really talk to about what the show needs. She is hugely important to the look of the show.”“Cinderella,” which finally opened on Aug. 18 at the Gillian Lynne Theater here after multiple pandemic-related delays, has a book by Emerald Fennell (“Promising Young Woman”) and lyrics by David Zippel (“City of Angels”). It’s Hunter’s third collaboration with Lloyd Webber and the director Laurence Connor, after the 2015 Broadway production of “School of Rock” and the much-lauded 2019 West End revival of “Joseph and His Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”Carrie Hope Fletcher as Cinderella in the new West End production. Tristram Kenton A few critics jibed at Fennell’s rewriting of the Cinderella story: The heroine, played by Carrie Hope Fletcher, is a spirited, grumpy Goth; Prince Charming is M.I.A.; and his younger brother, Prince Sebastian (Ivano Turco), is the shy and awkward hero. But most reviewers concurred that the new musical is a great deal of fun, helped along by the wittily inventive, hugely varied dances that characterize Hunter’s style.“JoAnn M. Hunter’s choreography keeps it all swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes,” Sam Marlowe wrote in The I.Hunter, who is in her 50s, was born just outside of Tokyo, but grew up in Rhode Island with her Japanese mother and American father. She and her older brother were the only mixed-race children in their community. “I got taunted quite a lot, and I didn’t understand what was different about me,” she said.Ballet, which she started studying at 10, proved a savior. “In dance class I didn’t feel different at all,” she said. “I was just a dancer, with dancer friends. I always wonder if that’s why I fell in love with the art form.”At 16, she went to New York City on a summer dance scholarship. One night she bought a standing-room ticket for Bob Fosse’s Broadway musical “Dancin’.” As she watched, she made a silent vow: “I’m not going back home. This is where I belong.” What she saw, she said, was the possibility of “expressing all those things inside you.” Her family, she added, “never hugged, never said ‘I love you.’ But onstage I saw you had permission and freedom to show your feelings.”She went back to Rhode Island just long enough to tell her mother she wasn’t returning to high school, then moved to New York, taking dance classes, working at Barney’s and attending audition after audition, but staying under the radar in spite of her efforts. “I couldn’t get arrested at the time,” she said wryly.After working at the Opryland USA theme park in Nashville in the early 1980s (“we sang, we danced, we did four shows a day; I loved it”), she was hired for tours of “West Side Story” and “Cats.” But she experienced long periods of joblessness and insecurity.There was hardly any diversity on Broadway in the late 1980s, she said, and she felt acutely aware of looking different than the “beautiful tall blond girls” at auditions. “People would look at me, and say, ‘What are you?’” she recounted. “I would answer, ‘whatever you need me to be.’”She played the white cat in “Cats” for 15 months, and began to gain confidence. Then, in 1989, she had an experience that was pivotal for her subsequent choreographic career. She joined the cast of “Jerome Robbins’s Broadway,” an evening-length show of selections from Robbins’s choreography for musicals like “Fiddler on the Roof” and “On the Town.”The ball scene in “Cinderella.” A theater critic credited Hunter with choreography that keeps the story “swishing along, from blowzily romantic waltzes to homoerotically charged rapier skirmishes.”Tristram Kenton“Jerry was a tyrant,” she said, “but I adored working with him, and I think I was absorbing so many lessons without thinking about it. He was unsurpassed at telling a story through movement.”Ensemble roles in Broadway shows (“Miss Saigon,” “Guys and Dolls,” “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying”) followed, and soon Hunter began to work as a dance captain, the ensemble member who can teach the choreography for every character. While she was performing in “Thoroughly Modern Millie” in 2002, the director, Rob Ashford, asked her to be his choreographic associate.“JoAnn was always the smartest person in the room as well as the best dancer, and I knew she would be invaluable,” Ashford said in a telephone interview. Hunter, who had just gone through a divorce, wasn’t so sure. (She said her initial response was “aaarghhhh.”) But she had to take the chance.“She is a real problem solver and a great collaborator,” Ashford said. “In a musical, a choreographer has to get inside a director’s head and translate that vision into their own creation. She was always about the goals of the show.”The director Michael Mayer, who hired Hunter to oversee Bill T. Jones’s choreography for “Spring Awakening” in 2006, said in a telephone interview that one of her great gifts is to “understand why the steps are there, what the characters are trying to accomplish through the movement, and how the movement is in conversation with the rest of the elements of the show, even though at that point she hadn’t made up the moves.”Hunter’s first independent choreography for a musical was for a 2008 U.S. touring production of “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.” “I remember thinking, I’m never going to know unless I try this,” Hunter said. “And if I’m bad, not too many people will have seen it!”Asked whether she thought this kind of insecurity was particularly rife among women, Hunter looked thoughtful. Perhaps, she said. “Men tend to try things without worrying if they have the experience.” She added that the paucity of female choreographers on Broadway didn’t help her confidence.Although there are still relatively few female choreographers working on Broadway, this has begun to change: Camille A. Brown, Michelle Dorrance, Ellenore Scott and Ayodele Casel are all choreographing upcoming Broadway shows. Hunter agreed that women are now somewhat more visible in musical theater. “It’s amazing to think as a dancer I only ever worked with two female directors, Susan Stroman and Tina Landau,” she said. “At the moment these issues are at the front of our brains, as is racial diversity. I hope it’s something enduring, not a fad.”When she choreographed “Chitty Chitty Bang Bang,” she added, she was still too fearful about a choreographic career to give up the insurance having an Equity card provides. “I am afraid of failure; we all go through life thinking, ‘I’m going to be found out,’” she said. She laughed. “I’m still petrified.”Hunter’s choreography, the director Rob Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from [Jerome] Robbins of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Charlotte Hadden for The New York TimesHer first Broadway commission came from Mayer, with the short-lived revival of “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever.” Then came “School of Rock.”Hunter said she had worked closely with Lloyd Webber on “Cinderella,” both on Zoom during lockdown, and in person from August last year. “People don’t really understand that a choreographer on a musical does much more than the dance sequences,” she said. “You move people around, deal with the transitions, where the audience’s focus should go. You have to be totally connected to the vision of the composer, writer and director.”The choreographer also often works with a dance arranger, she added, who adapts the score for dance sections. “A script direction might say, ‘goes into a dance moment,’” she explained. “But I think, ‘What do we want to say here?’ You might want a Latin feel, a tango rhythm, a French chanson, as a way of making mood and story more understandable.”For the “Muscle Man” dance in “Cinderella,” for instance, she thought about what the musical was trying to say and suggested a sound equivalent. “They are such macho, testosterone guys, and I had the idea of using kettle bells, which sounds like something dropping and is funny.”For “Cinderella,” Lloyd Webber did the dance arrangements himself. “I sketched out what I thought the dance music should be,” he said. “Then JoAnn took that, and actually stayed very faithful to it, but we added accents and she would ask for elements that the dance might need. It’s a really important collaboration, because you can’t look at the dance if you can’t listen to the music; it has to be good.”Hunter said that while she doesn’t read music, she has an acute sense of instrumentation and rhythm. “I just say things like ‘I don’t want it so pingy-pingy!’” she said. “That way I can make funny funnier and sexy sexier.” She added, “I always want every movement to tell a story. When Prince Sebastian dances at the end, I told Ivano, it’s not about the dance, it’s about you speaking up for yourself.”Her choreography, Ashford said, “has the great gift, which she learned from Robbins, of ‘just enough,’ of never taking longer than she needs.”Hunter, who last year directed and choreographed “Unmasked,” a concert retrospective of Lloyd Webber’s career, is working as both director and choreographer on “SuperYou,” a new musical written by Lourds Lane. Hunter described it as “a superhero, self-empowering piece about women finding their own voice” and said she hopes it will go to Broadway.Hunter added that she was still frequently the only woman on a creative team. “I’ve worked with great people, but the doors didn’t open easily,” she said. “I still feel I am constantly proving myself.” More

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    Is It the Weekend? Not Until He Says So.

    The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

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    Why It's Not The Weekend Until @CraigWeekend Says So

    The 18-year-old behind the viral Twitter account @CraigWeekend has offered people a routine reminder to take a load off.In a scene from “Saturday Night Live,” the English actor Daniel Craig stares into the camera and flops his arms halfheartedly, as if he meant to raise them above his head but got tired halfway.“Ladies and gentlemen, the Weeknd,” he says, announcing the episode’s musical guest: the Canadian pop star Abel Tesfaye. The studio audience begins to cheer.These four seconds of footage, notable if only for Mr. Craig’s ambiguous tone (was he exasperated? dubious? expectant? neutral?), were surely forgotten by most viewers after the episode was broadcast on March 7, 2020. But not by Miles Riehle.Watching Mr. Craig on “S.N.L.,” he was amused by what he saw as a double entendre. “It sounds like he’s welcoming in the weekend, as in Saturday or Sunday,” said Mr. Riehle, 18. “I was like, ‘Man, that’s really funny.’”Following in the footsteps of Twitter accounts that tweet only on specific dates — think “Mean Girls” and Oct. 3 — Mr. Riehle claimed the handle @CraigWeekend and started tweeting the clip every Friday afternoon.When the account took off months later, in November, “I was excited to have so many people following something that I was doing,” Mr. Riehle said. Soon, interview requests started rolling in.The extra attention, while thrilling, was also daunting, he said, “because now I have to make sure I keep all these people entertained.”That said, he seems to be sustaining the interest of his more than 450,000 followers, who Friday after Friday await his announcement that the workweek has come to an end. Some people message him when they feel he has not delivered his proclamation early enough.Mr. Riehle thinks the account’s appeal can be chalked up to its positive and predictable messages during a period marked by fear and uncertainty.“Given how much stress there was going on in the world, for a lot of people it was extra potent, being able to embrace the weekend and get excited for it,” he said. Fans of the account, he said, have developed “a community of good vibes.”“It always seems like people are nice to each other in the replies and the comments and the quote-tweets,” Mr. Riehle said. “I think that’s sort of rare on the internet.”He usually posts between 3:45 p.m. and 4:20 p.m. Pacific time, but never on the hour. “I kind of want to keep people on their toes,” he said.Indeed, that his followers know something is coming — but not exactly when — could be key to keeping them engaged, said John Suler, a psychology professor at Rider University.The predictability “is very reassuring to people, especially during a pandemic when people have little else to do on a Friday and everything else in life seems so unpredictable,” Dr. Suler said. “But then, he does mix in a bit of unpredictable reinforcement by posting at different times of the night.”Josh Varela, a fellow at Lead for America, a local government leadership program for recent college graduates, from Ventura, Calif., has notifications turned on for the account so he and his roommate know it’s time to put aside their responsibilities for the week.“Whenever @CraigWeekend tweets, we see it as the time we’ll crack open a beer and hang out,” Mr. Varela, 23, said.Derek Milton, a 34-year-old film director from Los Angeles, said that “any anxieties, any worries, any hardships that have accumulated over the past five days are relieved by a four-second clip.” He and his friends love the video so much that they recorded a parody version of their own while on the set of a photo shoot with none other than the Weeknd.Mr. Craig was not available to comment on the “S.N.L.” clip, but the Weeknd appears to be in on the joke. In May, he tweeted, “ladies and gentlemen, the …”It wasn’t hard for Mr. Riehle to fill in the blank.“I consider that to be a call-out tweet to me personally,” he said. “I think he likes it.”Mr. Riehle starts college this fall at the University of California, Davis, where he plans to study environmental policy and planning. He intends to keep running the account while in school.“I don’t know when it will end or if it will end,” he said. “Obviously if it gets to a point to where it’s harming my relationship with the internet, then I might get rid of it, but I have no plans right now to ever stop doing it.”For all the relief his account give the weekday 9-to-5 crowd, Mr. Riehle knows that, for some workers, the tweet could also be a dispiriting reminder of impending duties. He himself works as an ambassador for Orange County’s public transit service — on the weekend.“It is kind of ironic,” he said. More

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    ‘Ted Lasso’ Season 2, Episode 7 Recap: What’s the Matter with Ted?

    Also: Nate seems headed to a dark place, and Keeley and Roy explore whether there can be too much of a good thing.Season 2, Episode 7, ‘Headspace’At last: A clear vision of the trajectory of this season — hinted at last week — has come into focus. It’s not about wins and losses. We still have no idea of AFC Richmond’s chances of rejoining the Premier League. We don’t even know their next opponent in the FA Cup, following last week’s shocking upset of Tottenham Hotspur.What we do know is a little bit more about Ted and the journey he appears to be on this season. But I’ll come back to that. Let’s instead start at the beginning of the episode.To Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe,” the show posits the downside of a perfect relationship: Your jobs, interests and romantic ideals overlap so utterly that you are around each other every single minute. At least, that’s how things feel for Keeley. As self-evidently wonderful as Roy is, living with Angry Yoda 24/7 does sound a bit exhausting.And then, another subplot, more concerning still: Nate is obsessed with social media declaring him a hero after the win over Tottenham. But his father is still utterly dismissive. While yelling at other parts of the newspaper — “Let me know if they ever talk back,” says Nate’s mother — he ignores the back-page story about his suddenly famous, soccer-coach son.“They say humility is not thinking less of yourself,” he lectures Nate. “It’s about thinking about yourself less.”Maybe throw in a “Well done, son” somewhere? Or an “I’m proud of you”? Between Jamie and Nate (with Sam presented as a counterexample), Season 2 of “Ted Lasso” is turning into an exploration of poor fathering.And that’s all before the title sequence. We’ve already had a mouthful of plot, and we haven’t even tasted Ted’s crucial, perhaps season-defining, story line. Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night.After the titles, we find Ted back in Sharon’s office, where he’d collapsed on the sofa last week. He seems much better than the curled-up fetal mess he was then, but only on the surface.The manic activity Ted has displayed in the last couple of episodes is again on full display, as he fiddles around about where to sit and anxiously messes around with Sharon’s vintage water-drinking bird. (Who would have guessed that the “Doctor! Floor! Ceiling! Trash can!” scene of two episodes ago would have been one of the most revealing moments of the season?)After Ted springs a quick trio of references to “Mad Men,” the “New Yorker” and “The Sopranos,” Sharon offers her most significant line of the season to date:“Don’t worry, Ted.”Like many, I’d initially imagined that Sharon would be a new foil for Ted, the old ones — Rebecca, Jamie, et cetera — having been so completely won over. But no. She is not here, like the others, to be helped by Ted. She is here to help Ted. And he clearly needs help.This will be the first of three visits Ted takes to Sharon this episode, and two out of three will end with him storming out angrily in distinctly non-Ted Lasso (maybe more Led Tasso?) fashion. The irony, clearly deliberate, is that Ted’s profound suspicion of psychotherapy is driven in large part by the fact that it is the professionalized version of what he does himself as a nonprofessional: get inside someone’s head as a paid quasi-friend and try to “fix” them. (Sharon makes this point herself fairly elegantly.)By the end of the episode, we still have little idea of precisely what is eating at Ted beyond his recent divorce. But Sharon’s role in the season — she is played, again, by the wonderful Sarah Niles — is much clearer. Stay tuned.That said, this is still a nascent story line. Let’s go back, for now, to our two big, pre-title-sequence subplots.Nate’s state of mind, which has been headed down a dark path for most of the season, has taken a still darker turn. His abuse of Colin, both on the pitch and off — you may recall he called him a “dolt” last episode — is accelerating, with him ultimately comparing Colin to a painter whose work hangs in a Holiday Inn. (Genuine question: Are Holiday Inns a significant presence in the U.K.? Or is this one of those moments when the series’s American roots show?)One of the things I’ve appreciated about this arc so far is that it understands that a deterioration like Nate’s isn’t linear. It takes place in fits and starts, sparked — in both directions — by specific occurrences. This episode, Nate has two clear moments of contrition, of maybe resetting himself in a good way for him and others alike. The first is when Coach Beard calls him out and a visibly stricken Nate asks, “Did you tell Ted?” (Beard subsequently disapparating is a nice touch, but one I hope won’t become a shtick.)The second is when Nate apologizes to Colin in front of the whole team. I love that while the rest of the team is using unprintable nouns to describe Nate’s behavior, Dani Rojas interjects — quite accurately — that he is a “wounded butterfly.”But Nate’s moments of self-correction don’t quite take root in his fragile psyche. All it requires is one nasty social-media comment to set him off, as he threatens to make the young kit manager Will’s life a “[expletive] misery” for coming up with his gag “Wonder Kid” jersey.It’s not clear precisely where this is all going. But I think it’s fair to say that it will get worse before it gets better.The episode’s other major plotline — Keeley’s need for just an ounce of “Me Time” away from Roy — is a new one, and one that seems to have been quickly resolved. (I should note that, having worked at the same organization with my wife not once but three times, I am supremely familiar with this dilemma. It may in fact be the closest I ever come to being Roy Kent.)I’m not sure there’s much more that needs to be said about this one, except that Roy’s effort at self-correction is vastly more successful than Nate’s. If anyone associated with “Ted Lasso” wants to pay me to market the “‘Roy Is Sorry for Not Understanding Keeley’ playlist,” well, you know where to find me. I promise it will be a chart-topper.So, Keeley and Roy are probably fine. Nate is getting worse. The Rebecca-Sam flirtation remains, for now, unresolved. And Ted’s manic-depressive turn requires further exploration. But don’t worry, Coach Lasso: We got you, babe.(Lots of) Odds and EndsPerhaps the biggest surprise of the episode was what didn’t happen. Last week concluded with the Big Reveal that Rebecca and Sam are romantic Bantr buddies — but that fact remains unrevealed to either of them. The episode reminded us that it was aware of this conundrum with its awkwardly-bumping-into-one-another scene, but that was it.How great is it that Keeley and Roy each describe the other at one point as “the cat’s pajamas”?Jan Maas’s role on the show has come into clearer focus, too. As a Dutchman, he has become the show’s inveterate truth-teller. When he sides with Jamie against Roy on the question of whether Jamie should crowd a teammate on the pitch — “He’s right, actually” — even Roy has no recourse but a frustrated obscenity.Ted’s reference to the Jerky Boys and the post-caller-ID decline of crank calling hit me particularly hard, as I devoted considerable energy to that vocation as a young teen. If you lived in Connecticut in the 1980s and received a call from “Fran the Funky Man at WDOD Waterbury” asking you to sing three lines of a Rolling Stones song in exchange for concert tickets — well, I apologize.Sharon’s line about needing to be Ted’s “tormentor” in order to be his “mentor” was a good one, but the subsequent exchange — Ted: “I like that”; Sharon: “I knew you would” — was priceless.Are Higgins and his wife becoming one of the great televisual romances of the 21st century? I say yes. The “have you seen her dressed in blue” moment in the bravura, five-minute “She’s a Rainbow” sequence from Episode 5 may be the highest point of an overall series high point.It was great to see Trent Crimm, who after his breakthrough role in Episode 3 of the first season (a.k.a. “the “Trent Crimm episode”) has become a kind of mascot for the show. But do more with him than having him seek a dumb, random quote from Ted. His screen time is precious!I’m not certain how Roy feels, but if people tried to cover up talking about me by jazz scatting whenever I entered the room, I think I’d be OK with that.As a premier Roy Kent fan from the start — I actually own a Kent jersey; I don’t get Nate’s issue with novelty gear — the idea that he is a fan of “The Da Vinci Code” is almost too terrible to bear. That said, his commentary, “You can’t put it down because the chapters are so short” is pretty spot on.After a slow week last time, we’re back in the game on pop-culture references, including (in addition to those already mentioned): Vladimir Putin, “Sex and the City,” Glenn Close, “Citizen Kane,” “Ratatouille, and “Twelfth Night” (Mae’s “If music be the food of love….”). Please remind me of others I missed in comments.Last week, folks pointed out that I should have cited Esther Perel and Brené Brown, and also offered two deep, deep cuts: The David-and-Goliath reference to “Steve Wiebe vs. Billy Mitchell” cited two past world champions of “Donkey Kong” (that was evidently a thing), and Ted’s voice mail greeting, “You gotta leave your name, leave your number…,” was a riff on an old “comic” answering-machine tape called Crazy Calls. (Hard as it is to believe, that was a thing, too.) Another reader pointed out that the Rebecca-Sam relationship parallels — in names at least — the romantic will-they-or-won’t they of Kirstie-Alley-era “Cheers.” I would say that’s a coincidence, but Jason Sudeikis is George Wendt’s nephew … More

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows New to Netflix, Amazon and Stan in Australia in September

    Our picks for September, including ‘Billions,’ ‘Goliath’ and ‘Worth’Every month, streaming services in Australia add a new batch of movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for September.New to NetflixSEPT. 2‘Q-Force’ Season 1The animated series “Q-Force” is both a campy social satire and a parody of over-the-top action-adventure movies. It follows the exploits of a team of secret agents who are frequently undervalued by their government handlers, because many of these superspies are openly gay. Sean Hayes cocreated the show and also voices the main character, Agent Steve Maryweather (dubbed “Agent Mary” by his dubious bosses). Wanda Sykes, Matt Rogers and Patti Harrison voice some of the hero’s colleagues, who have to fight both the nation’s enemies and their peer’s prejudices.SEPT. 3‘Worth’Kenneth Feinberg was the attorney assigned by the U.S. government to help manage its 9/11 compensation fund, intended to get the terrorist attacks’ survivors and the victims’ families paid quickly — while saving American businesses from potentially devastating lawsuits. In the provocative drama “Worth,” Michael Keaton plays Feinberg as a well-meaning pragmatist, who changes his way of thinking about the project after many of his potential payees take offense at the idea of putting dollar values on human lives. Sara Colangelo directed and Max Borenstein wrote this film, which has a unique take on the true cost of 9/11.‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’NetflixSEPT. 9‘Blood Brothers: Malcolm X & Muhammad Ali’The boxer Muhammad Ali and the activist Malcolm X were close friends for a few years in the early 1960s, leaning on each other for advice and support at a time when they were each defying an establishment determined to silence them. The director Marcus A. Clarke’s documentary “Blood Brothers” — based on a book by Randy Roberts and Johnny Smith — uses new interviews and vintage footage to tell the story of how these two men urged each other on, while also examining the circumstances that eventually drove them apart.SEPT. 10‘Kate’In this gritty thriller, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the title character: a skilled assassin who gets dosed with a deadly poison, leaving her with 24 hours to find out who is trying to kill her. As she races through Tokyo, Kate seeks the guidance of her longtime handler, Varrick (Woody Harrelson), while also trying to protect a teenager, Ani (Miku Martineau), who is related to one of her former targets. This story of violence and redemption puts an all-too-rare spotlight on Winstead, a fine actress and a compelling action heroine.‘Chicago Party Aunt’NetflixSEPT. 17‘Chicago Party Aunt’ Season 1The actor and comedian Chris Witaske is probably best-known as part of the cast of the Netflix series “Love,” but for several years Witaske has also run a Twitter account called “Chicago Party Aunt,” writing in the voice of a fictional Windy City long-timer who has spent some wild nights with nearly every famous Chicagoan. That Twitter feed has now been adapted into an animated series, with Lauren Ash voicing the legendary libertine Diane Dunbrowski, who knows how to find a good time in every neighborhood dive from Wrigleyville to Armour Square.SEPT. 22‘Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan’In the late 1970s, an Ohio man named Billy Milligan was accused of being a serial rapist. He was ultimately committed to a mental hospital instead of a prison term, after a team of psychiatrists determined that Milligan suffered from multiple personality disorder, and thus had no conscious awareness of having committed his crimes. The four-part docu-series “Monsters Inside: The 24 Faces of Billy Milligan” looks back at a trial and verdict which still raise a lot of questions today about mental health and justice.SEPT. 24‘Midnight Mass’The writer-director Mike Flanagan — the creator of Netflix’s “The Haunting of Hill House” — combines supernatural horror with small-town melodrama in this mini-series about a floundering fishing community which sees its fortunes start to change with the arrival of a mysterious new Catholic priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). The increasingly strange and possibly dangerous phenomena that sweep across this tiny island cause the locals to face their past mistakes and regrets. Particularly shaken up is Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford), an ex-con hoping to repair his broken life without the aid of any shady miracles.Also arriving: “Afterlife of the Party” (Sept. 2), “Money Heist” Season 5, Part 1 (Sept. 3), “Kid Cosmic” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Into the Night” Season 2 (Sept. 8), “JJ+E” (Sept. 8), “Lucifer” Season 6 (Sept. 10), “Metal Shop Masters” (Sept. 10), “Pokémon Master Journey: The Series” Part 1 (Sept. 10), “Prey” (Sept. 10), “Nailed It!” Season 6 (Sept. 15), “Schumacher” (Sept. 15), “Too Hot to Handle: Latino” (Sept. 15), “Sex Education” Season 3 (Sept. 17), “Confessions of an Invisible Girl” (Sept. 22), “Dear White People” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “My Little Pony: A New Generation” (Sept. 24), “Ada Twist, Scientist” (Sept. 28), “Sounds Like Love” (Sept. 29), “Love 101” Season 2 (Sept. 30).New to Stan‘Minari’StanSEPT. 1‘Animaniacs’ Season 1Aimed primarily at the ’90s kids who grew up watching the original “Animaniacs,” this revival mostly sticks with what fans loved the first time: zany irreverence, a blizzard of pop-culture references, and an animation style that is broadly cartoony and un-slick. The new series features the same core characters: the kooky siblings Yakko, Wakko and Dot, and the would-be world-dominating mice Pinky and the Brain. The show features a lot of the same entertaining schtick, balancing third-wall-breaking, “Looney Tunes”-style slapstick adventures with some cleverly snarky songs.SEPT. 2‘The Dissident’Bryan Fogel’s documentary “The Dissident” is an illuminating piece of investigative journalism, digging into both the scandalous murder of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi and the rise of tech-savvy authoritarian regimes around the world. The film is about how Khashoggi and the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — who has been accused of ordering the reporter’s assassination — each used the media to shape the international community’s opinions about the future of the Arab world. Fogel asks his audience to consider what becomes of society if the powerful decide which voices are heard and which crimes go unpunished.‘Billions’StanSEPT. 6‘Billions’ Season 5, Part 2This popular drama about the rivalries of the mega-rich was in the middle of another great season last year when COVID-19 shut down production. The creative team was finally able to reassemble to shoot the last five episodes, continuing a story which has seen the venture capitalist Bobby Axelrod (Damian Lewis) try to buy respectability by founding his own bank, while the ruthless U.S. attorney Chuck Rhoades (Paul Giamatti) is using every quasi-legal method at his disposal to bring Bobby down. “Billions” fans have been waiting for over a year to see how the season ends; they should savor every juicy plot twist still to come.SEPT. 16‘Minari’Youn Yuh-jung won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her role in the writer-director Lee Isaac Chung’s semi-autobiographical dramedy “Minari,” about a Korean immigrant named Jacob (Steven Yeun) and his wife Monica (Yeri Han), who move to rural Arkansas to establish a produce farm. Youn plays Monica’s mother, who joins the family and urges them to preserve their cultural traditions as they pursue their American dream. Chung surrounds his leads with vivid detail, placing the humor, the anxiety and the hope of this family in the context of the sometimes welcoming and sometimes alienating Southern state where they try to make a home.SEPT. 26‘Black Mafia Family’The producing team of Randy Huggins and Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson (best-known for the “Power” franchise) turn to the true crime genre for their latest series, which begins in Detroit in the late 1980s. Demetrius “Lil Meech” Flenory Jr. plays his own father, “Big Meech,” who alongside his brother Terry “Southwest T” Flenory (Da’Vinchi) rose from low-level drug trafficking to become nationwide gang bosses and players in the hip-hop industry. As with Huggins’ and Jackson’s other shows, expect “Black Mafia Family” to be frank about what it takes to get ahead in the criminal underworld — and about the toll it takes on those who succeed.Also arriving: “The Zhu Zhus” Season 1 (Sept. 1), “Code 404” Season 2 (Sept. 2), “Les Misérables” Season 1 (Sept. 2), “A.P. Bio” Season 4 (Sept. 3), “Jamie’s American Road Trip” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Scaredy Squirrel” Season 1 (Sept. 3), “Dead Pixels” Season 2 (Sept. 7), “Where the Wild Men Are” Season 1 (Sept. 8), “Wu-Tang: An American Saga” Season 2 (Sept. 9), “Spliced” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “Love, Inevitably” (Sept. 10), “The Remarkable Mr. King” Season 1 (Sept. 10), “The Departed” (Sept. 12), “Liar” Season 2 (Sept. 15), “Storks” (Sept. 15), “The Fear” Season 1 (Sept. 16), “Streamline” (Sept. 16), “They Call Me Dr. Miami” (Sept. 19), “Pacific Rim” (Sept. 21), “New Amsterdam” Season 4 (Sept. 22), “Home Economics” Season 2 (Sept. 23), “Trigonometry” Season 1 (Sept. 23), “The Town” (Sept. 26), “Supernova” (Sept. 28), “Silk Road” (Sept. 30).New to Amazon‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’AmazonSEPT. 17‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’The title character in the hit British stage musical “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” is a teenage boy who challenges the bullies at his school and ultimately wins over his classmates when he opens up about his dream of becoming a drag performer. In the movie version, Max Harwood plays Jamie, while Richard E. Grant plays one of his drag mentors and Sharon Horgan plays a teacher who urges the youngster to get back into the closet. The show’s writer Tom MacRae also wrote the lyrics to its songs, set to upbeat and crowd-pleasing music by Dan Gillespie Sells.SEPT. 24‘Goliath’ Season 4In the fourth and final season of this moody, noir-influenced legal drama, the underdog attorney Billy McBride (played by Billy Bob Thornton, in peak form) tackles the big opioid companies, joining his ambitious colleague Patty (Nina Arianda) at a high-class San Francisco firm. “Goliath” has quietly been one of TV’s best crime shows since its 2016 debut; and while it’s too bad it’s coming to an end, at least it’s going out with another season of tense confrontations, big surprises, and stellar performances.Also arriving: “Cinderella” (Sept. 3), “LuLaRich” (Sept. 10), “Pretty Hard Cases” (Sept. 10), “The Voyeurs” (Sept. 10), “Do, Re & Mi” (Sept. 17), “The Mad Women’s Ball” (Sept. 17). More

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    Mal Z. Lawrence, Noted Catskill Quipster, Dies at 88

    A popular comic in the Catskills’ heyday as a resort area, he brought borscht belt humor to audiences all over the country, including on Broadway.Mal Z. Lawrence, a mainstay of comedy in the Catskills during the latter years of that resort area’s heyday and one of the four performers who brought borscht belt humor to Midtown Manhattan in 1991 in the hit show “Catskills on Broadway,” died on Monday in Delray Beach, Fla. He was 88.His talent agent, Alison Chaplin, confirmed the death, in a hospice center.Mr. Lawrence came to prominence in the Catskills in the 1950s but soon was known all over the country, playing Las Vegas, Atlantic City, Florida and other stops on the comedy circuit where his brand of relatively mild Jewish-tinged humor was greeted enthusiastically. To a Florida audience he might joke about the Catskills; to a Northern audience, he’d poke fun at Florida.“I worked a place down there called Century Village of West Palm Beach,” one routine went. “Working there was like appearing in Madame Tussauds Wax Museum. If you didn’t have a handicapped parking sticker, there was nowhere to put your car.”The Catskills, which drew a heavily Jewish crowd, gradually declined during the 1960s as a summer vacation destination. Mr. Lawrence, though, kept the flame alive; he was still performing his borscht-belt-style routines as he neared 80, working material at venues in Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and elsewhere that would have fit comfortably into his act a half-century earlier.He recognized that his style of humor had acquired an added dimension of nostalgia, something he, Dick Capri, Marilyn Michaels and Freddie Roman turned into gold in December 1991 as the original cast of “Catskills on Broadway.” The show was little more than each of them in turn doing about 30 minutes of jokes, with Mr. Lawrence going last. Opening at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, it ran for more than a year and then enjoyed a healthy touring life.“‘Catskills on Broadway’ manages to reproduce the ambience of the Catskills,” Mel Gussow wrote in his review of the Broadway premiere for The New York Times. “The basic difference is that on Broadway there is not a nosh in sight. But there is a groaning board of jokes about eaters and stuffers. As Mr. Lawrence observes, everyone in the Catskills wears warm-up suits. Warming up for what, he asks, sumo wrestling?”Mr. Lawrence also acted, portraying secondary characters in films including “Rounders” (1998) and “Boynton Beach Club” (2005) and occasionally turning up in plays. In 1997 he was part of the Broadway cast of a revival of “Candide” directed by Harold Prince, playing (as Ben Brantley’s review in The Times described it) “a giddy assortment of supporting roles.”To play them, he shaved the mustache he had been sporting for some years.“I look 20 minutes younger now,” he told Jewish Exponent at the time.Mr. Lawrence at his home in Monticello, N.Y., in the Catskills, in about 2014. He later moved to Florida. Marisa ScheinfeldManny Miller was born on Sept. 2, 1932, in the Bronx and grew up there. “Mal Z. Lawrence,” as he variously told the story over the years, was the suggestion of an early agent, or perhaps several different agents. “Lawrence” was borrowed from a Long Island village where he was appearing. As for the Z, which stood for nothing, “My agent told me I’d get more marquee space,” he said.He was a decent baseball player as a youth and said he even tried out for the Yankees, but nothing came of it.He was drafted into the Army in 1953, and while serving over the next two years began finding his way toward a comedy career. He resembled Jerry Lewis, he said, and he teamed with another soldier to do a knockoff of Mr. Lewis’s routines with Dean Martin for the amusement of fellow servicemen.He went to work in the Catskills in 1955 at Sunrise Manor in Ellenville, N.Y. He started out as a tummler, or social director, whose job was to keep guests entertained throughout the day and encourage them to join in group activities.“I took women on walks, did Simon Says,” he recalled in an oral history for “It Happened in the Catskills,” a 1991 book edited by Myrna Katz Frommer and Harvey Frommer. “The first time I did Simon Says, I gave away 30 T-shirts. I couldn’t get anyone out.”Soon he was performing, both at Catskills resorts and at small nightclubs in Eastern cities. If he never made the jump to television or film stardom like Danny Kaye, Buddy Hackett and other comics who started in the Catskills, he did work steadily.The Broadway show evolved from a one-night show at the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island that was enthusiastically received, although not everyone was convinced it would work on Broadway.“Many knowledgeable people said that it wouldn’t go,” Mr. Lawrence told The Washington Times in 1993, when the touring version of the show played the nation’s capital. “I think I was one of those people.”In 2000 he, Bruce Adler and Dudu Fisher brought a similarly styled show, “Borscht Belt Buffet on Broadway,” to Town Hall in Midtown. He was the closer in that show as well.“Pronouncing himself thrilled to be on West 43rd Street at the height of the off-season,” Lawrence Van Gelder wrote in a review in The Times, “Mr. Lawrence is soon running through topics like doddering security guards in Florida, gambling in Atlantic City, meals in Catskills resorts, old age and the effects of marriage on behavior. The audience exits smiling.”In 1980 Mr. Lawrence married Patty Heinz, who survives him. They lived in Delray Beach.Mr. Lawrence was not the type of comic to dwell on comedic principles or technique.“My philosophy is, ‘Do anything that you have to do to make them laugh,’” he told The Washington Times. “What else can we do?” More

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    Adult Swim: How an Animation Experiment Conquered Late-Night TV

    Cartoon Network’s nighttime adult programming block, which turns 20 this week, was built on lo-fi animation techniques that were as much a no-budget necessity as an aesthetic choice.By all accounts, it was a minor miracle that Adult Swim ever made it off the drawing board 20 years ago. Money was next to nonexistent. The editor of Cartoon Network’s first original series worked from a closet. A celebrity guest on that series, unaware of the weirdness he had signed up for, walked out mid-taping.In retrospect, it seems right that one of modern TV’s most consistent generators of bizarro humor — and cult followings — had origins that were, themselves, pretty freewheeling.“It was really just a labor of love,” Mike Lazzo, who oversaw programming for Adult Swim before he retired in 2019, said. “I think the audience could tell that and responded to it.”Early on, the idea was to create a late-night programming block for Cartoon Network’s sizable adult audience. What resulted was a hit, and over the years, Adult Swim’s early lo-fi aesthetic — as much a necessity as a choice, Lazzo said — attracted ambitious, out-of-the-box ideas, including an animated show starring a talking wad of meat (“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”), a cheesy talk show hosted by a Hanna-Barbera superhero (“Space Ghost Coast to Coast”) and a surreal, live-action satire of clumsy public-access TV (“Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!”).“Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” one of Adult Swim’s first series, features a character named Meatwad, right, a ball of meat scraps that the F.D.A. wouldn’t allow into a hamburger.Cartoon Network“We wouldn’t have fit in anywhere else,” said Tim Heidecker, who with Eric Wareheim created “Awesome Show” and has worked on several other Adult Swim series since. “There’s no other place on TV that made sense for us, and maybe that’s still the case.”Ahead of the 20th anniversary of Adult Swim’s Sept. 2, 2001, premiere, its creators, leaders, writers, animators and others spoke about the lean early days, the anything-goes atmosphere and the enduring legacy of their ambitious experiment. These are edited excerpts from the conversations.In the early 1990s, Cartoon Network found itself in an unusual situation: It controlled a sprawling animation library but didn’t have the budget to make animated shows of its own. Then a group of executives and cartoonists, led by Lazzo, proposed the idea of recycling the animation from Hanna-Barbera’s 1960s “Space Ghost” cartoon. They reimagined the titular superhero as a cheesy talk show host who interviewed real celebrities in a new show, “Space Ghost Coast to Coast,” which became the network’s first original series when it premiered on April 15, 1994.MIKE LAZZO (former executive vice president and creative director of Adult Swim) I got fed up reading over and over that we were nothing but a Hanna-Barbera rerun channel — which was, of course, true.BETTY COHEN (founding president of Cartoon Network) Mike Lazzo booked some time to come see me one day and said, “I want to show you something my team and I have been working on.” He put a VHS cassette into my machine, and it was the first incarnation of “Space Ghost.” It was so rough that there were times when he was having to personally narrate, and it was all on a rotoscope, which is sort of like cutting and pasting. But I immediately saw the potential. For the earliest funding, I actually allocated money from the marketing budget.LAZZO We went to Los Angeles and hired a reputable production house to make a pilot, which cost us $100,000, but we got it back and hated it. We were like, “This looks good, but it isn’t funny.” So we brought it back to Atlanta and did it ourselves for $25,000. Michael Cahill [now the vice president of on-air and social media for Adult Swim] would edit it in a closet that was just sitting empty.“There’s no other place on TV that made sense for us, and maybe that’s still the case,” said Tim Heidecker, left, who with Eric Wareheim created the sketch series “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” Adult SwimDAVE WILLIS (co-creator of “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” and “Squidbillies,” writer on “Space Ghost Coast to Coast”) We did the interviews over speaker phone, and we’d immediately ask guests the craziest stuff we could come up with — are you getting enough oxygen? What are your superpowers? Paul Westerberg [the musician and member of the Replacements] had never seen the show and walked out on me. He was like, “I don’t have time for this B.S.” That was when we started getting people to sign the waiver before they’d do the interview.The show gained a cult following among teens and young adults. Around 1998, Cartoon Network executives began thinking about another conundrum: how they could fill their ad space late at night, after young viewers went to sleep.MICHAEL OUWELEEN (president of Adult Swim) We started to notice that, at any given time, a third of the people watching Cartoon Network were adults who weren’t parents.LAZZO Our ad department could not sell late-night or overnight time periods on Cartoon Network — no one wanted to advertise to kids after 10 p.m.COHEN The question was, how could we appeal to a young adult audience without destroying our relationship with parents?Lazzo, who oversaw programming for the network, saw the potential of creating a late-night block of shows geared specifically toward adults.JIM SAMPLES (general manager and executive vice president of Cartoon Network when Adult Swim launched) Mike came into my office with a deck he’d put together, describing how he was going to produce all the on-air packaging for Adult Swim on practically zero budget, basically on someone’s computer. All the money that was being spent on fairly high-end packaging for the network, he wanted to divert to original programming. I was blown away by the idea. But we were dealing with resistance from our ad sales team. As a kids’ network, how were we going to actively market to adults? Was it a violation of our contract with cable operators? I put my career on the line to say it was a good idea.OUWELEEN We were given one year to name this thing, brand it and make the content — it was like a gauntlet thrown down. It was a very small group of us doing all of that in addition to our regular jobs at Cartoon Network. I can’t tell you how complicated it was. The creative team I was running came up with four names: “Aviso,” which means “warning” in Spanish; “Parental Block” — on cable boxes at the time, you could set the parental block to stop kids from watching stuff; “Insert Quarter,” like a video game; and Adult Swim. Lazzo always hated the name.LAZZO Blech! To this day, I hate that name. I still think it should be called “Cartoon Network After Dark.” Adult Swim is too clever by half for my taste.The first promotions for Adult Swim, which aired late at night, featured older adults swimming in a public pool, with a voice-over by a lifeguard: “Sundays at 10, it’s all kids out of the pool for adult swim.”OUWELEEN We wanted to send a definitive signal to kids: “This is not for you.” That’s why we chose old people at the pool — to scare kids away. We filmed an old-person aerobics class at the M.L.K. Natatorium here in Atlanta, and then we made [some of the footage] black-and-white to make it even more unattractive.Some of the first original Adult Swim shows, including “Space Ghost Coast to Coast” and “Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law,” were parodies or remixes of Hanna-Barbera superhero cartoons. Another, “Aqua Teen Hunger Force,” drew its heroes from fast food.“Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law” was another early, inexpensively produced Adult Swim show that repurposed old Hanna-Barbera characters.Cartoon NetworkWILLIS The idea for “Aqua Teen Hunger Force” started with a [expletive] fast food restaurant that tried to use all the scraps of meat they weren’t allowed by the F.D.A. to put into a hamburger, wadded together. We saw Meatwad as this poor, neglected creature — I think his line in his first script was like [in Meatwad voice], “Please, God, kill me.” I did the voice, and I can’t tell you how many times people said, “I don’t understand what he’s saying; you need to recast him.” But we stuck to our guns. I always thought of it like Willie Nelson, who sings real quietly, and so everyone is on the edge of their seat trying to listen to what he’s saying. As a result, you’re more into it. At least, that was my excuse! [Laughs.]Adult Swim officially debuted on Sept. 2, 2001, and aired two nights a week from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. It kicked off with a new episode of “Home Movies,” a series that had been canceled midseason on UPN. The show, which featured the voice talents of H. Jon Benjamin (“Bob’s Burgers”), developed a devoted following during its second life on Adult Swim, as did other shows, like “Family Guy,” later on.WILLIS We were beating all the networks in the most prized demographic: men with money to spend. I distinctly remember bumping into the guy running ad sales in the bathroom. He said something to the effect of, “Wow, you really pulled that [expletive] out of the fire!” I was like, “What do you mean?” And he said, “I saw that thing [“Aqua Teen Hunger Force”] and I can’t believe I have to promote it as one of our new shows, but you guys really turned that around.” It was good to know we were thought of so highly. [Laughs.]The Adult Swim audience grew, and the block expanded. The shows got weirder and more experimental as they branched out from animation to live-action shows like the influential “Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!” (2007-10). Heidecker and Wareheim previously had created the similarly eccentric animated series “Tom Goes to the Mayor” (2004-2006) for Adult Swim.LAZZO After “Tom Goes to the Mayor,” Tim and Eric could pretty much come in and tell us what they wanted to do. And with “Awesome Show,” we knew when we were watching it that this was like no sketch comedy we’d ever seen. It changed the tempo of comedy and influenced so many young comedians. The editing style alone became pervasive.One of Adult Swim’s most critically successful series, “Rick and Morty,” has earned two Emmys for best animated series since its debut in 2013.Adult SwimTIM HEIDECKER We never took the writing part that seriously. We’d gather people for a couple of days and sit around and pitch very loose ideas, and then Eric and I would map out the kinds of bits we wanted to do. I hear about these writers’ rooms that are, like, 12-hour days, trying to break every joke and write everything ahead of time, and we were just like, “That’s a fool’s errand.” Give us something to start the process, and we’ll go from there.ERIC WAREHEIM That continued into the editing. There were moments we’d laugh so hard we’d literally cry because we loved our work so much. We were doing things we’d never seen before in comedy or on TV.HEIDECKER It seemed good at the time — we probably should’ve kept doing it.Twenty years later, Adult Swim airs seven nights a week. The lineup includes shows like “Rick and Morty,” which has won two Emmys for best animated series, and “Tuca & Bertie,” a critical darling that was rescued from oblivion after Netflix canceled it.OUWELEEN We joke that Covid finally put to bed every story headlined “Is adult animation a thing?”WAREHEIM We’re working pretty much the same way we worked 25 years ago — we get lunch and talk about ideas, and if we laugh, we write it down. If we don’t, it disappears.LAZZO I used to tell people I could ruin Adult Swim in two weeks — put on the wrong programs, be crass in the presentation. You can’t be greedy; you have to do things for the right reasons and not because they sell. As long as that remains the lamp, Adult Swim will continue forever. More

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    In ‘Back to The Future: The Musical,’ the Car Is the Star of the Show

    A devoted fan of the 1985 movie helped the London production’s creative team recreate the iconic time-traveling DeLorean, down to the last detail.LONDON — During a recent performance of “Back to the Future: The Musical,” at the Adelphi Theater here, the audience couldn’t stop cheering.They cheered a preshow announcement asking everyone to turn off their cellphones, “since they weren’t invented in 1985,” the year the original movie was released. They cheered when Marty McFly, the show’s main character (played by Olly Dobson), skateboarded onstage in an orange body warmer. And they cheered, again, when he started singing, surrounded by break dancers and women in aerobics getup to complete the 1980s vibe.But the loudest applause came about 20 minutes in. After three loud bangs and a flash of light, a DeLorean car seemed to magically appear in the middle of the stage, lights bouncing off its steel bodywork and gull-wing doors.The audience went wild.Bob Gale, who co-wrote the original movie with Robert Zemeckis and wrote the musical’s book, said in a telephone interview that he always knew the car would be vital to the show’s success. “We knew if we pulled it off, it was going to make the audience go nuts,” he said.He added he had been working on making that happen for over 15 years. In 2005, Gale recalled, Robert Zemeckis took his wife, Leslie, to see “The Producers” on Broadway — another musical adaptation of a cult film. As the couple left the theater, she asked if he had ever considered doing a “Back to the Future” musical. Neither Gale nor Zemeckis had any professional theater experience, but decided to give it a shot — yet finding a producer who would take the project on their terms took the better part of a decade, Gale said.Getting the car right didn’t take as long, but Simon Marlow, the show’s production manager, said it was still a yearlong process. There were two challenges: to achieve the impression of movement and speed on the cramped stage of a theater, and to make sure every detail of the car onstage matched the DeLorean in the movie. “‘The ‘Back to the Future’ fan base is massive, and they’re very pedantic,” Marlow said.Steven Wickenden poses with his replica of the DeLorean time machine, near his home in Deal, southern England.Jeremie Souteyrat for The New York TimesOnly about 9,000 of the stainless-steel cars were made at a factory in Northern Ireland before the company went bankrupt in 1982 (John Z. DeLorean, the company’s founder, went on to be tried, and acquitted, for trying to sell cocaine to prop up his firm’s finances). So Marlow’s team contacted Steven Wickenden, a “Back to the Future” superfan who lives in the seaside town of Deal, England. He owns a drivable replica of the movie’s DeLorean that regularly appears at fan events.Wickenden, 49, said in a telephone interview that he had loved the DeLorean since watching the “Back to the Future” movies on videocassette as a teenager. It was “so cool and futuristic,” he said. In 1980s Deal, a local greengrocer and a dentist had owned DeLoreans, he added. “As far as I was concerned, we had two time machines driving around town,” he said.When he was 21, Wickenden traveled to Universal Studios in Florida to see one of the film’s original cars, he said, and eventually his wife bought him his own as a 40th birthday gift.Wickenden said he was surprised when the musical’s producers got in touch. He put the car onto a truck — because, under the terms of its “classic car” insurance, allowed mileage is limited — and took it to Souvenir Scenic Studios, a London prop maker, where “six or seven guys” used 3-D scanners and took thousands of photos, to capture its likeness, inside and out, to use as the basis for the onstage version. (They called him later to check some details, like the original brand of the tires, he said.)Once the model was made, the show’s team had to “pack it with engineering,” Marlow said, including a device that allows it to spin on its axis (so it looks like it’s doing stunt turns) and pneumatic equipment that lets it tilt in the air (when it crashes into a farmer’s barn). Projections also help create the illusions of movement.“We’re pushing the technology to the limit,” Marlow said. He added that around 20 people had worked on developing the production’s car and associated visual effects.Creating the impression of movement and speed on the cramped stage of a theater was one of the show’s main challenges, a producer said.Sean Ebsworth BarnesAlthough the DeLorean is one of the most memorable features of both the movie and the musical, Gale said it wasn’t part of the original concept. In the first script he wrote, in the 1980s, Marty McFly climbed into a fridge to travel through time; he swapped the fridge for a car when the movie was in preproduction. In addition to its futuristic look, the DeLorean was notorious at that the time because of its maker’s cocaine trial, Gale said, so it seemed an attention-grabbing choice.At the Adelphi Theater, all the hard work on the car seemed to pay off. Ten audience members — many dressed as “Back to the Future” characters or wearing DeLorean T-shirts — said that the car had been a highlight. “I was in tears the first time I saw the DeLorean come out,” said Stephen Sloane, 43. “It’s just got the ‘wow’ factor,” he added.Yet for all the team’s painstaking attention to detail, Roy Swansborough, 44, said he had noticed a few differences between the stage and movie cars. “The steering wheel is slightly different,” he said. But his wife, Beverley, said he was splitting hairs. “If you don’t look too carefully, you can go, ‘Oh, it’s like watching the film,” she said.The only moment of the show when the actors seemed to upstage the DeLorean came right at the end. The cast all came onstage for a final song and dance number, and each player took their moment to claim an ovation. But the car didn’t get one of its own. Despite all the technical wizardry, the one thing it can’t do is bow. More