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    ‘Franklinland’ Review: A Founding Father, but Not the Best Dad

    Lloyd Suh’s nimble period comedy about Benjamin Franklin examines a timeless struggle: the unmet expectations that divide parents and children.Lloyd Suh’s “Franklinland,” now running at the Ensemble Studio Theater in Manhattan, finds Benjamin Franklin (Thomas Jay Ryan) at a crossroads: balancing his roles as a founding father of a young nation and floundering father to his naïve son, William (Noah Keyishian). In six tight scenes, Suh whisks us through three decades of their turbulent relationship, starting in 1752 when William is an eager young adult and ending with the men at odds in 1785.The result is a nimble period comedy — with enough spoonfuls of droll humor to help the history lessons go down — but Suh’s play is just as concerned with a more timeless struggle: the friction of unmet expectations that can divide parents and their children.“Franklinland,” developed through the EST/Sloan Project in 2011, had its premiere in 2018 at Chicago’s Jackalope Theater. It shows the playwright’s early fascination with great historical figures and movements and the personal wreckage left in their wake. These themes resurface in works like “The Chinese Lady” and “The Far Country,” a 2023 Pulitzer Prize finalist in Drama.Suh paints a narcissistic portrait of Benjamin. His obsession with progress — first scientific, then political — is exemplified by his purchase of 20,000 acres in Nova Scotia (the real Franklin did own land there), with the intent of building a “playground of imagination and possibility” he calls Franklinland.Though Benjamin’s inventions — harnessing lightning for electricity, creating bifocals, adding flexibility to the urinary catheter — are undeniable societal improvements, his work sessions with William consist of bullying jokes at his son’s expense. This is not your grandmother’s Benjamin Franklin. In Ryan’s mischievous hands, the old man is downright sassy — quick with an eye-roll and oozing condescension. The actor’s antics convey a man obsessed with control, but blind to the familial cost.As a young William, Keyishian is an awkward goof who begins the play unexceptional and prosaic. But by the middle of the show, Suh levels the playing field. William — now in his 30s — is appointed royal governor of colonial New Jersey, though his moments of self-empowerment are weighed down by spurts of pedantic dialogue. Veering away from the playfulness we’ve enjoyed so far, the script resorts to playing out a melodramatic truth we’ve already gleaned: life is cold in Benjamin Franklin’s shadow.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Review: A Reverse Angle on Arthur Miller in ‘A Woman Among Women’

    Julia May Jonas’s compelling play, opening the Bushwick Starr’s new theater, explores how a story written about men looks from the other side.Ian McKellen sure knows how to baptize a stage. In 2007, at the recently opened Times Center in Midtown Manhattan, adhering to what he described as his tradition, he capped an evening of public conversation by kneeling to kiss the spotless new boards. Then he rose and recited a speech attributed to Shakespeare.The birth of a theater is always a miracle and a joy, never more so than when the herd is thinning. But the harder work comes after the kiss. Whose words will be spoken there? How smartly, usefully will the space be filled?The Bushwick Starr, a home since 2001 to original and often out-there work, can celebrate on both counts: It has given birth to an adorable new theater and opened it with a healthy new play.The theater, after 23 years in a dim, janky, jury-rigged space on the second floor of a former doll factory, where God forbid you had a bum knee or claustrophobia, has moved three stops farther into Brooklyn on the L train to a former dairy on Eldert Street. The place is still not fancy, but it is bright and welcoming without having sacrificed the invitation of wildness. It honors and improves on the company’s institutional past and the building’s industrial one.And though “A Woman Among Women,” by Julia May Jonas, which opened there Friday in a co-production with New Georges, is likewise a response to an older work, it is nevertheless that rare thing onstage: a fresh story freshly told.The work it responds to, but only generally, without overdrawn parallels, is Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” In that 1947 drama, a pillar-of-the-community type — “a man among men,” as Miller describes him — knowingly sells defective airplane parts to the Air Force, resulting in the deaths of 21 pilots. The collateral damage as the blame is shifted to a business partner drives the plot; the conflict between personal and communal responsibility is the theme.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Seth Meyers Isn’t as Nice as You Think He Is

    There was a hole in Seth Meyers’s office at “Saturday Night Live” for seven years.A sketch he’d written was cut for someone else’s piece, and in a fit of what Meyers described as “door-slamming petulance,” he threw the dressing room entrance open so hard that the door handle went through the wall. Michael Shoemaker, a producer on the show who has become perhaps Meyers’s closest professional partner, refused to get the crater fixed.“I want you to see it every day,” Meyers recalled Shoemaker telling him. “I want you to remember how small of a thing it was.”Shoemaker said his response to Meyers’s tantrum was a little simpler: “Stop it,” he told him. Then Shoemaker quoted Meyers’s father, whom he had gotten to know: “When something goes wrong, you have to think, what is it that you did that you could have done better?”Aggravated pettiness might seem at odds with the persona Meyers has crafted over more than two decades on television: 13 years on “S.N.L.,” with the final eight as an anchor of Weekend Update, followed by a decade as the comedically precise but genial host of “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” He struck a similarly charming note in 2019 in his first stand-up special, “Lobby Baby,” about the birth of his second child in the unexpected location the title suggests.Seth Meyers at the Beacon Theater in Manhattan, where he has a monthly stand-up residency with John Oliver.Sinna Nasseri for The New York TimesHowever, when Meyers’s new HBO special, “Dad Man Walking,” premieres on Saturday, the idea that he could be an antagonist — even if only of the most benign and humorous type — might make more sense. It’s about parenting, specifically the reality that “good parents have moments where they really hate what their kids are doing,” Meyers said. And while the broadly cantankerous tone of the special seems like a departure, it actually reflects a facet of Meyers that has always been there.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Angela Merkel Is Solving Crimes on TV

    This fall on TV from the rest of the world: a German small-town murder show called “Miss Merkel,” an Italian “Citadel” and an Israeli act of witness.Plucked from the bountiful fall harvest of international series, this selection of notable shows travels from the sheerly fanciful — Angela Merkel whiling away her retirement investigating small-town murders in “Miss Merkel” — to the achingly real, as survivors of the Oct. 7 attacks tell their stories a year later in the Israeli series “Picture This.”‘The Tower’Gray and quiet in tone, this British cop show is a little like a more serious, less amped-up “Line of Duty” and a little like a simpler, less emotionally walloping “Unforgotten.” Situating it between two of the most absorbing British crime dramas of recent years does not do this modest series (its four-episode third season concluded last week on BritBox) any favors, but it holds its own as a character piece in genre clothing.Gemma Whelan (the seagoing Yara Greyjoy in “Game of Thrones”) stars as Sarah Collins, a by-the-book detective sergeant in a working-class, racially mixed district of south London; the show’s title refers to the apartment building from which a Muslim girl and a policeman fall to their deaths in the first season. Collins is variously allied or at cross purposes with a cocky inspector (Emmett J. Scanlan), a nervous rookie (Tahirah Sharif) and a tough, stoic constable (Jimmy Akingbola) in stories involving agonizing questions of personal and professional conduct; all four are excellent.‘Miss Merkel’Angela Merkel, free of her duties as chancellor of Germany and retired to the fictional Klein Freudenstadt (Little Happy Town), stays sharp by solving the occasional local homicide in two German television movies that premiered Tuesday on MHz Choice. This Merkel, played by the veteran stage actress and director Katharina Thalbach, is a gossipy, evidence-stealing, slightly smug 70-ish pixie whose stern East German upbringing gives her the wherewithal to run rings around feckless local cops in the former West.That attention-grabbing twist on the cozy-village mystery (the films are based on novels by David Safier) does not entirely make up for some lackluster direction and a Teutonic propensity to deliver even sharply written laugh lines with as little expression as possible. But Thalbach’s running patter of political in-jokes and jabs at Merkel’s contemporaries and successors is consistently amusing, even accounting for the number of references that are most likely opaque to American viewers. “How do you manage to exploit me for your own goals against my beliefs?” Mike (Tim Kalkhof), her young bodyguard and reluctant crime-solving partner, plaintively asks, speaking for a generation of European politicians.Matilda De Angelis stars in “Citadel: Diana” as an operative caught between rival spy organizations.Marco Ghidelli/Prime VideoWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Michael Kosta Thinks He’s Found Elon Musk’s Next Failed Purchase

    The “Daily Show” host said Musk “bought Twitter just to drive it into the ground” and is now considering doing the same for America.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.How Low Can You Go?Elon Musk, who’s so excited to support Donald Trump that he jumped up and down to show it, said on Saturday that he’d give $1 million per day to a randomly chosen registered Pennsylvania voter who signs an online petition.On Tuesday’s “Daily Show,” Michael Kosta called Musk “a man of gravitas, a man of dignity, a man with roughly a four-inch vertical leap” and wondered, “How exactly does this bribe — sorry, gift — work?”“Wow, Elon’s giving a million dollars to his fans. Now they can afford the best anime girlfriend pillow money can buy.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“He’s so rich, he bought Twitter just to drive it into the ground for his own personal pleasure, and now he’s thinking, ‘Well, what if I did the same with America?’” — MICHAEL KOSTA“I know what you’re thinking right now: How could Republicans sink so low? And also, can I sink low enough to register for this?’” — MICHAEL KOSTA“During his first solo campaign event in support of former President Trump last week, Elon Musk urged the crowd to ‘pester’ their friends and family who are not yet registered to vote, adding, ‘I would if I had either of those.’” — SETH MEYERSA Tale of Two Town HallsOn his Fox News show on Tuesday, Greg Gutfeld had harsh words for Kamala Harris, saying her Monday night town hall in Michigan “had all the spontaneity of synchronized swimming.”“So right off the bat, we got the lay of the land — another manicured platform for Kamala to blurt out her now legendary word salads. I mean, this broad ought to come to every event with a side of ranch and a bag of croutons.” — GREG GUTFELDOn “The Tonight Show,” Jimmy Fallon noted that Trump had canceled a Tuesday event that would have been titled “Make America Healthy Again.”“Tough to make America healthy again when you were just making them French fries a day ago,” Fallon joked, referring to the ex-president’s campaign appearance behind a McDonald’s counter.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    This N.Y.C. Theater Was a Haven for Adventurous Art. Then the Archdiocese Intervened.

    The Connelly Theater has suspended operations after its church landlord began more carefully scrutinizing show scripts and its general manager resigned.The Connelly Theater in New York’s East Village has for years been a shabby but warm haven for adventurous performing arts: the play “Job,” which is now wrapping up a Broadway run; Kate Berlant’s “Kate,” a one-woman show that went on to London and California after selling out downtown; and the satire “Circle Jerk,” a Pulitzer finalist in 2021.But over the past few weeks, the building’s landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — began more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows whose producers were seeking to rent the space. At least three planned productions had to relocate.Josh Luxenberg, who has been the theater’s general manager for the past decade, submitted his resignation late Friday. And early Tuesday, the Catholic school that is the intermediary between the theater and the archdiocese said it was “suspending all operations of its theater.”Producers who have rented from the Connelly say they were aware that it was owned by the archdiocese, and that there was always a clause in their contract allowing the Roman Catholic Church to bar anything it deemed obscene, pornographic or detrimental to the church’s reputation. But only recently, they said, did the archdiocese seek to rigorously scrutinize scripts before approving rentals.New York Theater Workshop said it was told by a bishop this month that it could not stage “Becoming Eve,” which is adapted from a memoir about a rabbi who comes out as a transgender woman, at the Connelly early next year. It is now looking for another venue.“We had seen a range of really provocative, amazing, inspiriting, artistically rigorous shows there, so I was surprised this would be rejected,” said Patricia McGregor, the artistic director of New York Theater Workshop. “And if in the East Village of New York City we are meeting this kind of resistance, where else might this be happening?”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Reluctant Satirist Takes On the Bomb

    About two years ago, when Armando Iannucci began adapting “Dr. Strangelove” for the West End, he didn’t think the 1964 movie had many direct parallels to today.The full title of Stanley Kubrick’s film is “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” and it tells the story of a U.S. Air Force general who goes rogue and orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. In the Pentagon’s war room, an ineffectual president (Peter Sellers) dithers, blusters and flails, as he tries to avert World War III.In the 1960s, the movie became a much-debated hit — a “nightmare comedy,” as Kubrick called it — at a moment when nuclear annihilation was a common fear. Yet for Iannucci, who created the TV series “Veep,” the movie’s contemporary relevance was, at first, more metaphorical: The failure to stop atomic catastrophe was akin to society’s handling of climate change.Then, the news took over.Steve Coogan, left, plays four roles in “Dr. Strangelove,” including the president of the United States in this scene.Manuel HarlanAs Iannucci and the director Sean Foley worked on the adaptation, which opens at London’s Noël Coward Theater on Oct. 29 and runs through Jan. 25, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia floated the idea of nuclear conflict with the West over its support of Ukraine. China has boosted its nuclear arsenal. And violence in the Middle East has renewed fears around both Iran accelerating its nuclear program and Israel pre-emptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.Suddenly, Iannucci recalled in a recent interview in a grand back room of the Noël Coward Theater, his “Dr. Strangelove” felt like “a kind of literal reminder of a real doomsday.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Late Night Mocks Trump for His McDonald’s Photo Op

    The ex-president’s stint at the drive-through window was “blue-collar drag,” said Stephen Colbert. “But with more makeup.”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.‘Blue-Collar Drag’Former President Donald Trump appeared behind a McDonald’s counter on Sunday, trolling Vice President Kamala Harris (he claims, with no evidence, that she’s lying about having worked at one in the ’80s). “No surprise, the man who’s never had an actual job in his life did not actually work at McDonald’s,” Stephen Colbert said on Monday. Citing news reports, he said the Trump appearance “was a half-hour photo op at a closed McDonald’s, and the people he served were preselected supporters.”“He’s not the common man. This is all just blue-collar drag. But with more makeup.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, McDonald’s screwed up my order again!” — SETH MEYERS“That’s his whole campaign right now: ‘Ave Maria’ dance party, ‘I’m going to deport everybody,’ football tailgate, blame the Jews if I lose, McDonald’s drive-through.” — JON STEWART“Yeah, he had a great time at McDonald’s, ’cause for 20 minutes, Trump actually ran a successful business.” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump told reporters, ‘I love McDonald’s. I love jobs. I like to see good jobs.’ Wow, I just realized, if you replace ‘I’ with ‘me,’ he has the same vocabulary as Cookie Monster: ‘Me love McDonald’s. Me love jobs.’” — SETH MEYERS“I love when he said ‘I’ve always wanted to work at McDonald’s’ with a straight face and expects us to believe it. Oh, do you? Well, no one’s stopping you, bro. I noticed you didn’t pick up an application on your way out. Maybe you can get a job jumping out of the ball pit and scaring away kids who have been there for too long.” — SETH MEYERS“Give him the job. I implore you. I don’t care if his references don’t shake out. Save democracy, give him the job.” — JON STEWARTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Eggplant Emoji Edition)“While speaking over the weekend at a campaign rally in Pennsylvania, former President Trump discussed golf legend Arnold Palmer and said he was ‘all man.’ Well, technically, he was half man, half iced tea.” — SETH MEYERS“But for Trump, this was actually one of his milder genital rants. This was kind of his Kidz Bop genitals rant: classy, body-positive, he was complimenting somebody else. I don’t know why we have to parse everything that this guy says so sternly.” — JON STEWART“I think one of his staffers must have said, ‘We need to focus on the polls,’ and Trump was, like, ‘Oh, I’ll focus on the pole.’” — JIMMY FALLONWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More