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    Stephen Colbert Recaps Jan. 6 Hearings’ ‘Episode One’

    He called the prime time congressional hearings “this summer’s most compelling drama.”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.The First EpisodeLate night hosts weighed in on the first Jan. 6 hearing on Thursday night, or as Stephen Colbert referred to it, “Episode One of this summer’s most compelling drama.”“It’s like ‘Stranger Things’ — we met the monster years ago, and we’re pretty sure the Russians are involved.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, guys, we had a great lead-in tonight. We’re following the Jan. 6 hearing, so, you guys ready for some comedy?” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, earlier tonight, Congress held the first public hearing on the Jan. 6 attack, and it aired in prime time across all major networks. Yep. The footage is rough to get through. Right after the hearing, I watched an episode of ‘Dateline’ just to lighten the mood.” — JIMMY FALLON“Five minutes in, even Mike Pence was like, ‘I’ve had enough — let’s see what’s happening on ‘RuPaul’s Drag Race.’” — JIMMY FALLON“After two hours of documentary evidence and testimony, we learned that this insurrectionist conspiracy was, like everything else associated with that last administration, exactly what you thought, but worse than you could have imagined. The next episode drops on Monday morning, and to quote the former president, ‘Be there. Will be wild.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Bad News Edition)“It was such a juicy burger that Fox News knew that even their viewers would be tempted to take a bite, which is why — and this is true — for the first hour of his show opposite the hearings, Tucker Carlson took no commercial breaks. Do you understand what that means? Fox News is willing to lose money to keep their viewers from flipping over and accidentally learning information.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“That’s right, the Jan. 6 committee aired a 90-minute hearing tonight, which was carried live by all the major news networks except Fox News. Though Fox ended up with better ratings by just airing the original Capitol attack.” — SETH MEYERS“Instead, they’re showing reruns of Jan. 6 with a laugh track.” — JIMMY FALLON“Of course Fox isn’t airing it — they’re a key suspect in it. They would be — that would be like if Court TV’s coverage of the O.J. trial had been hosted by O.J.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee took Republicans to task for the gun violence epidemic on this week’s “Full Frontal.”Also, Check This OutMembers of the Jane Collective, an activist group that helped provide safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade.HBOHBO’s new documentary “The Janes” spotlights the women activists who banded together to form Jane, a clandestine group providing safe abortions in the years before Roe v. Wade. More

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    Song Hae, Beloved South Korean TV Host, Dies at 95

    Born in what is now North Korea, he was known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks as the host of South Korea’s weekly “National Singing Contest” for more than three decades.SEOUL — Song Hae, who fled North Korea as a young man during the Korean War, became a beloved television personality in South Korea and was recognized by the Guinness World Records as the world’s “oldest TV music talent show host,” died at his home in Seoul on Wednesday. He was 95.His death was confirmed by Lee Gi-nam, the producer of a 2020 documentary on Mr. Song’s life, which charted a tumultuous course that reflected South Korea’s modern history through war, division, abject poverty and a meteoric rise. No cause of death was given.A jovial Everyman figure known for his cheeky grin and folksy wisecracks, Mr. Song became a household name in South Korea when he took over in 1988 as the host of the weekly “National Singing Contest,” a town-by-town competition that mixes down-home musical talent, farcical costumes, poignant life stories and comedic episodes.Mr. Song was recognized by Guinness World Records in April as the “oldest TV music talent show host.”Jung Yeon-Je/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesHis talent show, which he announced with his booming voice piped into households in South Korea every Sunday, ran for more than three decades. Mr. Song traveled to every corner of South Korea and to the Korean diaspora in places like Japan and China, and even to Paraguay, Los Angeles and Long Island, N.Y. He continued as host until the show went on hiatus during the coronavirus pandemic, and officially remained at its helm at the time of his death.While the show was on hold, his health seemed to deteriorate without his weekly outlet, according to Jero Yun, director of the documentary, “Song Hae 1927.”“It was, in some ways, the driving force of his life, meeting people from all walks of life through the program and exchanging life stories,” Mr. Yun said. “People would always recognize him, crowd around him and want to talk to him.” Referring to the K-pop megagroup, Mr. Yun added, “He might as well have been BTS.”Mr. Song was posthumously awarded a presidential medal for his contributions to South Korea’s culture, the president’s office announced on Wednesday. He was entered into Guinness World Records in April.Mr. Song was born Song Bok-hee on April 27, 1927, under Japanese occupation in what is now Hwanghae Province in North Korea. His father was an innkeeper. A few months after the Korean War broke out in 1950, he left his home at 23 to avoid being drafted to fight for the North, and made his way south. He eventually boarded a U.N. tank landing ship, not knowing where it was headed. Staring out at the water, he would later say, he renamed himself Hae, for the character meaning sea.He left behind his mother and a younger sister in North Korea, and well into his 90s, any mention of them would reduce him to tears.After the ship took him to the South Korean city of Busan, on the peninsula’s southern coast, he served as a signalman in the South’s army. He had said in interviews that he was one of the soldiers who tapped out the Morse code in July 1953 transmitting the message that there was a cease-fire halting the war.After his discharge from the army, he peddled tofu in impoverished postwar South Korea before joining a traveling musical theater troupe, in which he sang and performed in variety shows. He eventually became a radio host, anchoring a traffic call-in show that catered to cab and bus drivers. It aired an occasional segment in which the drivers would dial in for a sing-off.In 1952, Mr. Song married Suk Ok-ee, the sister of a fellow soldier he had served with in the war, and they had three children. After 63 years of marriage, Mr. Song and his wife held the wedding ceremony they never had, having originally married in the poverty and turmoil of their youth. She died in 2018.He is survived by two daughters, two granddaughters and a grandson. In 1986, his 21-year-old son was killed in a motorcycle accident, and Mr. Song could not bear to continue working on his radio traffic show. Around the same time, he was tapped to host the singing contest for the national broadcaster, KBS.With Mr. Song at its center, the show quickly became a national pastime, particularly among older residents and those in rural communities — groups that the program spotlighted and that were seldom seen on television.Grandmothers break-danced and rapped; grandfathers crooned sexy K-pop numbers. Countless young children charmed the host onstage, some of whom went on to become stars. Once, a beekeeper covered in bees played the harmonica while a panicked Mr. Song cried out, “There’s one in my pants!”Mr. Song never fulfilled his lifelong dream of revisiting his hometown in North Korea, but because of his show, he came tantalizingly close.A memorial to Mr. Song at a hospital in Seoul on Wednesday.Korea Pool/Yonhap via APIn 2003, during a period of détente between the Koreas, the show filmed an episode in the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The songs were carefully screened by the North’s censors to include only propagandist ones, and the atmosphere was so tense that Mr. Song never broached the possibility of visiting his hometown, Chaeryong, even though it was just 50 miles south of the capital, he said in interviews.At one point during the trip, he recalled, he got drunk with his North Korean minder, who told him that he wouldn’t recognize his hometown anyway because everything had changed in the intervening five decades and most of the people had moved away.In a 2015 biography of Mr. Song, Oh Min-seok, a poet and professor of English literature, wrote: “As a refugee who fled south during the Korean War, there is a loneliness that is wedged in his heart like a knot. He has no problem connecting with anyone, from a 3-year-old to a 115-year-old, from a country woman to a college professor, from a shopkeeper to a C.E.O. That’s because inside, he’s always pining for people.”In South Korea, the show’s contestants and adoring fans became his family. Women — including the show’s oldest contestant, a 115-year-old — took to calling him “oppa,” or older brother, Mr. Song later recalled.“Who else in the world can claim to have as many younger sisters as I do?” he said. “I’m happy because of the people who boost me, applaud me, comfort me.” More

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    New 42 Worker Files Bias Lawsuit Over Diversity Training

    A white teaching artist at the theater organization says it discriminated against white people. The nonprofit declined to comment.A contract worker at a nonprofit New York theater organization has filed a lawsuit saying that the institution’s diversity trainings were themselves discriminatory.Kevin Ray, a part-time teaching artist at New 42, an organization that runs rehearsal studios, youth programs and a children’s theater in Times Square, filed the lawsuit late Wednesday in Federal District Court, accusing the organization of discriminating against white employees. He is asking the court to determine that New 42 violated the federal civil rights act as well as local human rights laws, and to award him an unspecified amount of damages.In the lawsuit, Ray, who is white, alleged that the diversity programs implemented by New 42 included “racially-discriminatory propaganda and lectures promoting discriminatory ideology on the basis of race.” Ray said he was asked to join a conversation about a “white affinity group” at New 42, and said the organization had designated a “white-identifying breakout room” at an online town hall.“In reality, ‘diversity training sessions’ were race-based indoctrination sessions that promoted the division of employees on the basis of race,” the lawsuit says.Ray’s job involves visiting schools for educational programs, usually related to a show the students are about to see. He claims that he has been assigned less work and has been subjected to retaliation after raising concerns about the organization’s diversity training programs.The lawsuit comes at a time when the use of antiracism training programs and the creation or expansion of diversity initiatives has grown significantly in the theater industry, as in many other sectors of society, following the unrest over racism in the United States in the summer of 2020.The lawsuit is being backed by an organization called the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, which says it is concerned about a “cynical and intolerant orthodoxy” that “pits us against one another, and diminishes what it means to be human.” The organization, founded by Bion Bartning, has filed other lawsuits challenging what it says are forms of discriminatory overreach by organizations trying to implement diversity programs; the Ray suit is the organization’s first in the arts arena, but it has begun an arts program as it considers other action.A lawyer for New 42, David Lichtenberg, said via a spokeswoman that the nonprofit had “no comment at this time.” More

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    Review: In ‘Snow in Midsummer,’ It’s Not Just the Forecast That’s Amiss

    Adapted from a 13th-century drama, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s play is part ghost story, murder mystery and family melodrama.In the Chinese town of New Harmony, a three-year drought has ravaged the landscape. The lake has evaporated. Ash falls from the sky. Nothing grows. While some characters blame global warming, these natural disasters have a supernatural explanation. A young widow has been executed for a crime she did not commit. Before she dies, she curses New Harmony: Until she is avenged and buried, the town will suffer.In these broad, climactic strokes, Frances Ya-Chu Cowhig’s “Snow in Midsummer,” at Classic Stage Company, resembles the 13th-century Yuan dynasty drama from which it is adapted, “The Injustice to Dou Yi That Moved Heaven and Earth.” A commission of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Chinese Classics Translations Project, the play updates a classical tragedy. But in this Classic Stage production, with hectic, erratic direction by Zi Alikhan, the translation appears garbled, stranding the play among genres and tones. A ghost story, a murder mystery, a family melodrama, and a tale of greed both corporate and personal, it has been staged in ways that confuse place, time and intention.After a prologue set three years in the past, before the execution, the play proper begins with the arrival of Tianyun (Teresa Avia Lim), a self-made woman intent on buying a local factory, and her adopted daughter, Fei-Fei (Fin Moulding). Tianyun makes and distributes synthetic flowers, as no real ones can grow in this drought-stricken town. Selling the factory is Handsome Zhang (John Yi), who will use the money to relocate with his fiancé, Rocket Wu (Tommy Bo). But the hungry ghost of the widow, Dou Yi (Dorcas Leung), threatens these transactions.The script exists on multiple planes — reality, surreality, memory — which the production collapses. There’s fog everywhere, and Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s evocative lighting is ghostly throughout. The set, by the design collective dots, is an undistinguished wooden platform, sometimes adorned with posters or flags or blood. The stage’s loft is at first a love nest. And then it is the afterlife. This offers little sense of place. I couldn’t possibly tell you how remote New Harmony is, how prosperous, how contingent on an actual China. The period seems confused as well, which does not feel like a deliberate choice. One character speaks of the Cultural Revolution as if it were fairly recent. But then how to explain the cellphones?Cowhig’s heightened language (“Heaven mistakes the wise man and the fool/Both leave me nothing but two streams of tears”) clarifies little. Queering a central relationship and applying the lens of climate change refreshes a classical drama. But in rendering the play as a mystery, Cowhig delays solutions until the middle of the second act, which means the audience will spend more than an hour watching characters without remotely understanding the reasons for their behavior, rendering the psychology somewhat flat.There are gestures toward implicating the audience in Dou Yi’s fate, but these are incomplete. In an early scene, Dou Yi offers her wares to several spectators. Each person seemed keen to buy one. In keeping with the script, the actress had to pretend otherwise.Chinese theater is so little seen here and in a time in which threats to Asian American and Pacific Islander communities feel more pronounced than ever, representation seems critical. But this play feels inchoate and its cast of Asian American actors underserved. At the performance I attended, several of the actors seemed under-rehearsed, others had vocal difficulties. Leung, in her bloodstained shroud (Johanna Pan designed the costumes), was made to scream and scream and scream.The play’s themes — a classical riff on no justice, no peace, a reckoning with the human impact on the environment — should reverberate. Instead only the screams echo. “Snow in Midsummer” may haunt you. But not in the ways that a ghost story should.Snow in MidsummerThrough July 9 at Classic Stage Company, Manhattan; classicstage.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    Jodie Comer to Make Broadway Debut in ‘Prima Facie’ Next Spring

    The “Killing Eve” star will reprise her role in Suzie Miller’s solo show, which is wrapping up a run in London.Jodie Comer, known for playing the charismatic assassin Villanelle on “Killing Eve,” has received glowing reviews for her West End stage debut in the one-woman play “Prima Facie.” Now she’s setting her sights on Broadway.Next spring, Comer will reprise her role, as a lawyer named Tessa who discovers the limitations of the law after being sexually assaulted, when the show arrives on Broadway at a yet-to-be-announced Shubert theater. This will be her Broadway debut.The play, written by Suzie Miller, is currently in the final weeks of its run in London’s West End. Critics praised Comer for her breakneck performance in an emotionally demanding role that, under Justin Martin’s busy staging, is quite physical. It calls for her to leap onto furniture, endure a brief onstage rainstorm and more as she tells the story of working her way up from working-class origins and later being assaulted by a colleague whom she brings to trial.“There’s no denying the visceral power of an evening that owes its sellout status to a theatrical neophyte who possesses the know-how of a seasoned pro,” Matt Wolf wrote in his review for The New York Times.The play originally premiered in 2019 in Miller’s native Australia. The playwright is a former human rights and children’s rights lawyer.No dates have been announced for the Broadway production, which will be directed by Martin. The lead producer is Empire Street Productions, led by James Bierman. More

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    A Homecoming, of Sorts, for Viennese Plays

    Two recent British dramas with Austrian roots made it to Vienna this season: “Leopoldstadt,” by Tom Stoppard, and Robert Icke’s “The Doctor.”VIENNA — Leopoldstadt is the name of a central Viennese district with a large Jewish population. It is also the title of Tom Stoppard’s 2020 Olivier Award-winning play, which opened on the West End shortly before the start of the pandemic.Two and a half years after its London premiere, “Leopoldstadt,” a multigenerational saga of an Austrian Jewish family’s triumphs and tragedies in the first half of the 20th century, has made it to Vienna, where it received its German-language premiere this spring at the Theater in der Josefstadt in a handsome and effectively traditional staging by Janusz Kica. (It will return to the repertoire in December. The London production will transfer in the fall to Broadway, where it will run at the Longacre Theater.)It is a fitting irony that none of “Leopoldstadt” actually takes place in Leopoldstadt, since many of its characters try — and fail — to escape the perceived stigma of being Jewish by reinventing themselves as Austrians.When I saw “Leopoldstadt” in London, I wondered how Viennese audiences would react to Stoppard’s fictional exploration of their history and culture. In particular, I was curious whether his re-creation of culturally oversaturated fin de siècle Vienna, a vanished world that continues to fascinate, would convince an audience more familiar with that glittering epoch. Especially in the first half, set around 1900, Stoppard wears his learning and erudition on his sleeve; at times, the amount of historical and cultural detail that peppers the dialogue threatens to derail the play, with its nearly 30 characters and unusually knotty structure.The closest thing Stoppard gives us to a conventional protagonist is Hermann Merz, an affluent textile manufacturer who has largely shed the traditions of his rag-peddling forebears and entered high society. The Merz clan is a motley bunch who celebrate Christmas and Passover with both relish and irreverence. Baptized and married to a Catholic woman, Hermann nonetheless boasts of the Jews’ colossal contribution to culture, without which “Austria would be the Patagonia of banking, science, the law, the arts, literature, journalism,” he says.Listening to Adrian Scarborough, who played Hermann in the London production, recite Hermann’s triumphalist speeches with bluster, I winced a little. Yet the lines sounded considerably less forced in the mouth of Herbert Föttinger, who played the character in Vienna, and in a faithful and fluid translation by the German novelist Daniel Kehlmann. It’s largely a question of temperament. Scarborough played Hermann as a nouveau riche climber who is both haughty and insecure, while Föttinger portrayed him as suave and self-possessed. We believe him when he observed approvingly that Vienna’s middle-class Jews “literally worship culture.” Föttinger’s elegance and poise at the start of the play helped make Hermann’s subsequent humiliations and his ultimate downfall all the more tragic. When an Austrian officer who had a fling with Hermann’s wife, Gretl, refused a duel with Hermann on the grounds that a Jew is born without honor and hence can’t demand satisfaction for an insult, we understood that this offense wounded Hermann more than his wife’s infidelity.Another ensemble scene in “Leopoldstadt,” which takes place in Vienna.Moritz Schell Hermann Metz epitomizes the worldview of a confident minority who had found acceptance and success in a culture that was an artistic, intellectual, scientific and political hotbed. (Sigmund Freud, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Arthur Schnitzler are all name-checked.) The way Stoppard conjures the milieu of assimilated Jews in the Austro-Hungarian Empire owes much to writers of the period, including Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig, whose posthumously published memoir, “The World of Yesterday,” is perhaps the most evocative and nostalgia-drenched chronicle of the era.“Leopoldstadt” leaps from the early 1900s to the years after World War I and from there to Kristallnacht, the anti-Jewish pogrom that the Nazis orchestrated throughout the Third Reich on Nov. 9, 1938. The pinging around is meant to be disorienting as we visit characters we last saw decades earlier — as well as some new arrivals — in radically changed historical contexts. In its latter half, “Leopoldstadt” finds itself on unsure footing only once. In a scene set in 1924, the family members discuss the Great War, the carving up of Austria in its aftermath, and the messy politics and competing ideologies of the interwar period. In London, I felt that the scene merely struggled to dramatize its themes; here it felt more awkward, and even redundant, as if Stoppard were lecturing the Viennese about their own history.Stoppard’s masterful final scene, in which the three remaining members of the Merz family reunite in 1950s Vienna, was sensitively directed and acted, but many of its revelations were less persuasive in German than in English. One of the family members, Leo, has been raised in England and, crucially, has no memory of his early life in Vienna. (Thus it’s a strain to imagine that he would speak perfect German without an accent.) Now a young man, he is a writer of some renown. In a painful reunion with his cousins — a New York psychoanalyst and a mathematician who survived the Holocaust — long-suppressed memories are dredged up and the past superimposes itself on the present in unexpected and haunting ways.Remarkably, “Leopoldstadt” isn’t the only recent British play with Austrian roots that made it to Vienna this season. Earlier in the year, the Burgtheater mounted the German-language premiere of “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s 2019 rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” which was first seen at the Almeida, the London playhouse that Icke used to run.Sophie von Kessel, seated at right, as the title character defending herself before a panel on television in “The Doctor,” Robert Icke’s rewrite of Arthur Schnitzler’s “Professor Bernhardi,” at the Burgtheater.Marcella Ruiz CruzSchnitzler’s play, first performed in 1912, is an indictment of the Austrian antisemitism that Hermann Merz naïvely takes to be a thing of the past. The most conspicuous change that Icke, who also directed the production, makes in his version is a gender switch central to his reimagining and updating of the piece.Like Schnitzler’s prickly male protagonist, “The Doctor’s” lead character, Dr. Ruth Wolff (Sophie von Kessel in a tour de force performance), finds herself under attack for refusing to let a priest administer last rights to a delirious patient who is unaware that her end is near. In the original, Professor Bernhardi becomes the target of an antisemitic media campaign. In Icke’s retelling, Dr. Wolff becomes the victim of virulent social media attacks that smack more of misogyny. She defends herself against the anonymous online mob by appearing on television to debate a sanctimoniously woke panel. All this gives Icke ample opportunity to skewer cancel culture, identity politics and political correctness, although the satirical and the sincere often coexist uneasily, especially when his supporting characters moralize tediously. At the same time, the colorblind and “gender blind” casting challenges the audience to look past race and sex and reflect on the play’s moral conundrums impartially.As with Stoppard and “Leopoldstadt,” “The Doctor” feels like something of a homecoming: a Viennese return for a contemporary play rooted in the world of yesterday.Leopoldstadt. Directed by Janusz Kica. Theater in der Josefstadt.Die Ärztin. Directed by Robert Icke. Burgtheater Wien, through June 13. More

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    Are Jan. 6 Hearings Flashy Enough for Prime Time? Late Night Isn’t Sure.

    “Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday.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.Are You Still Watching?The Jan. 6 committee hearings will be televised beginning Thursday night, but late night hosts wondered if Americans would pay proper attention.“Hanging over the hearings is one question that could define the future of our republic: Who cares?” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday.“Yeah, it doesn’t have to look like ‘Top Gun,’ but just in case, they’re going to have Adam Schiff and Jamie Raskin play hot shirtless volleyball.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“What they need to do, you want people to watch in America, is you have to spice things up. You know, have a kiss cam going for the witnesses. Yeah, get Shakira to do a halftime show.” — TREVOR NOAH“Americans like entertainment; Congress wants Americans to pay attention to politics. Those two don’t mix. But there is one person who can make political machinations interesting for the masses; there is only one man: Lin-Manuel Miranda.” — TREVOR NOAH“You know who is going to be torn about the coverage of this? Donald Trump. Yeah, ’cuz think about it: On the one hand, he doesn’t want anyone to know what he did on Jan. 6, but on the other hand, you know he would love his hearings to get the highest ratings of all time. You know it. He’s going to be out there like [imitating Trump] ‘Don’t watch the hearings, folks. The fake news is saying I overthrew the government, which I didn’t do. But it was the biggest overthrow of all time, but I didn’t do it.’” — TREVOR NOAH“In other political news, tomorrow night, the Jan. 6 committee will hold a special prime time hearing, which will air live on all the broadcast networks, and it’s being produced by a former ABC executive. And even more exciting, the halftime show will be performed by Imagine Dragons featuring Congresswoman Liz Cheney.” — JAMES CORDEN“The hearing is being produced by a former ABC executive, which is why it’s being marketed as, ‘Extreme Takeover: Capitol Building Edition.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Fox News Stays on Brand Edition)“Fox News announced this week that it will not air carry live coverage of Congress’s prime time hearings over the Capitol attack. To focus on more important news like, ‘Would it kill Mulan to wear a dress?’” — SETH MEYERS“Yeah, they’re going to be spending all night talking about the real culprit: [imitating Tucker Carlson] ‘Why is nobody talking about how Congress has too many doors? If there was only one door in and out, this never would have happened. The crowd would have peacefully dispersed after hanging Mike Pence, huh?’ ” — TREVOR NOAH“Fox, by the way, has decided not to carry the hearings about Jan. 6 on their news network tomorrow night. Instead, they will show their new special, ‘Tucker Carlson presents: A Racist Cat Meows Confederate Battle Hymns.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It doesn’t surprise me that Fox isn’t airing the hearings. Fox is news the same way ‘The Kardashians’ is reality. Just once, I’d love to see an actual reality TV show, something called, I don’t know, ‘A Man Quietly Eating a Cinnabon Because He Missed His Connection at LaGuardia.’” — SETH MEYERS“It’s not a surprise, because Fox constantly says the opposite of what the hearings will say. The committee will lay out the truth of what happened, and Fox will lie. It’s that simple. The hearings will say Jan. 6 was a violent insurrection fomented by an outgoing president who nearly pulled off a detailed plan for an attempted coup to unlawfully cling to power that would have installed him as an unelected autocrat and destroyed American democracy. And Fox will say it was just a pro-freedom, patriot party where everyone peacefully toured the Capitol like they were on a school field trip, having to find items their teachers gave them on a worksheet.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingPresident Biden sat down with Jimmy Kimmel for a lengthy conversation about the modern Republican Party, gas prices and gun violence, among other things.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightDemi Lovato will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutJuancho Hernangómez, left, and Adam Sandler in “Hustle.”Scott Yamano/NetflixAdam Sandler and Juancho Hernangómez, a Utah Jazz player, star in “Hustle,” a crowd-pleaser about the N.B.A. draft. More

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    ‘Come From Away’ to Close, the Latest Broadway Show to End Run

    “Come From Away,” the inspirational musical about a remote Canadian community that rallied to support thousands of stranded air travelers after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, will end its run on Broadway in October.The musical, which has been a hit on Broadway and has been successfully staged around the world, is the third show to announce a plan to close in the last two days, as it becomes clear that with New York City still attracting fewer tourists than it did before the pandemic, there are not enough patrons to support all the productions now running.On Tuesday “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Tina,” two musicals that had been selling strongly before the pandemic, both announced that they would close late this summer.“Come From Away” will close on Oct. 2. It began performances Feb. 18, 2017, and opened March 12, 2017; at the time of its closing it will have had 25 preview performances and 1,670 regular performances at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.The musical continues to tour in North America and Australia and to run in London. A filmed version of the stage production is streaming on Apple TV+.The show was an unlikely hit — before it arrived in New York, the conventional wisdom was that locals would never embrace a musical about Sept. 11 because the subject was too potentially upsetting. The producers, seeking to build word-of-mouth first, took a roundabout path to Broadway, staging it in San Diego, Seattle, Washington, D.C., and Toronto before coming to New York.But the show, arriving early in the Trump administration, quickly became a success, seen as a parable about welcoming strangers and building community.The musical, which won a Tony Award for Christopher Ashley’s direction, is based on true events that took place in Gander, Newfoundland, where 38 commercial planes were diverted. The musical’s writers, a married couple named Irene Sankoff and David Hein, went to Gander a decade after Sept. 11 to interview locals, and created the musical based on those interviews; the show was first staged at Sheridan College in Ontario, where a school dean, Michael Rubinoff, had been trying to persuade someone that the subject would make a good musical.The show’s original star, Jenn Colella, who portrayed an airline pilot, will rejoin the cast from June 21 to Aug. 7.“Come From Away” is produced by Junkyard Dog Productions, which is led by Randy Adams, Marleen and Kenny Alhadeff, and Sue Frost, who spotted an early workshop of the show at a festival held by the National Alliance for Musical Theater.The show’s grosses have dropped significantly since the pandemic shutdown of theaters. Last week it grossed $461,760; during a comparable early June week in 2019 it grossed $897,186.On Tuesday, “Tina” said it would close Aug. 14, and “Dear Evan Hansen” said it would close Sept. 18. More