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    Seth Meyers: Madison Cawthorn Is Gone, but Soon Forgotten

    “Hopefully, he’ll learn his lesson: Next time you get invited to a cocaine orgy, just go,” Meyers joked.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.UninvitedMadison Cawthorn, a representative from North Carolina, lost his re-election bid in the state’s primary on Tuesday.“Hopefully, he’ll learn his lesson: Next time you get invited to a cocaine orgy, just go,” Seth Meyers joked.“You know, guys, politics is a rough-and-tumble business, and D.C. can be a cruel town. Just when you feel like you’re making headway in Congress, you’re unceremoniously forced out by a cruel and unforgiving system of cutthroats and back stabbers. And that’s exactly what happened last night when one of our nation’s most committed public servants, a camera-shy policy wonk who is laser-focused on serving the greater good, lost his bid for re-election. Oh, wait, I think I read that whole thing wrong. Oh, I read every word wrong. It was just Madison Cawthorn!” — SETH MEYERS“Oh, Madison, you may be gone, but soon you’ll be forgotten. At least now he’ll have more time for his other job, starring as the, I don’t know, bad-boy villain in a CW drama? He looks like he should be next to a locker threatening to tell Pacey about Dawson’s relationship with Joey.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Pennsylvania Primary Edition)“The results are in, and America has upheld its proud tradition of not knowing who won.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, as of right now, Dr. Oz is in first place, David McCormick is in second, and the ‘Cash me outside’ girl is in third.” — JIMMY FALLON“Last night, McCormick’s chief strategist tweeted, ‘Based on how many uncounted absentee ballots there are and the margin by which Dave has won them so far, that’s why we are confident of victory,’ while an adviser for Dr. Oz pointed to uncounted ballots in Philadelphia and declared, ‘It’s a jump ball,’ which, I will remind you, is how they eventually decided Bush v. Gore.”— STEPHEN COLBERT“And while Dr. Oz is in the lead for the Republican nomination, more votes have to be counted because the race is still too close to call. This is kind of great. I mean, for once it’s nice to have a doctor waiting for us.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Chip n’ Dale: Rescue Rangers” co-stars John Mulaney and Andy Samberg guest-hosted Wednesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live” as the host recovered from a second bout of Covid-19.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightJoJo Siwa of “So You Think You Can Dance” will appear on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutBilly Eichner filming a scene for “Bros.” “I’m so excited to finally be able to play a three-dimensional human being,” he said.Nicole Rivelli/Universal Pictures“Bros” is a studio-made rom-com written by and starring gay people that doesn’t recycle straight tropes. More

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    Review: In ‘Exception to the Rule,’ Detention Is Sinister

    Teenagers bond after school in a sort of classroom purgatory. And, where is the teacher?Detention is a drag. For the students in “Exception to the Rule,” it’s also emblematic. Whatever landed them in the after-school slammer, these teenagers were already trapped by forces far beyond their control.They barrel in one after another, their voices ricocheting around the Black Box Theater, where the Roundabout Underground production opened on Wednesday night. In a space no bigger than a classroom, the audience, sitting on three sides, is spitball distance from the bickering, the posturing and revelations of what lies beneath.There’s Mikayla (Amandla Jahava), who balks at her reputation as a bad girl while relishing the attention; the goofball Tommy (Malik Childs), who claims he’s “not tryna holla” at Mikayla while very obviously taking his shot; Abdul (Mister Fitzgerald), who appears guarded and pensive, preferring to keep his head down; Dayrin (Toney Goins), who is quick-tempered but eager for a laugh; and the sweet but tart Dasani (Claudia Logan), whom Dayrin mockingly calls Aquafina (as in the other bottled water brand).Then there’s Erika (MaYaa Boateng), otherwise known as “college-bound Erika,” whose late entrance comes as a shock to the bunch. Upwardly mobile and buttoned-up, she’s what Dayrin calls “the whitest person in a room full of Black people.” What could she have done wrong? And where is the teacher, anyway? They can’t go home until he signs them out.As for the show’s conceit, the playwright, Dave Harris, borrows from both “Waiting for Godot” and John Hughes’s classic portrait of detained and misunderstood youth, “The Breakfast Club.” It’s doubtful that the students’ savior will ever come, and discovering what they’re in for, and what that says about their stations in life, propels the story forward. Throw in a few romantic sparks between opposites, and it’s all a bit too familiar.But what appears at first like a mundane exercise in remedial discipline sours into something more sinister. The P.A. system starts to glitch, no one can tell the time, and bars slide over the window as the school goes into after-hours lockdown (sound is by Lee Kinney). Take away the desks, and the scuffed floors and cinder-block walls could just as easily be the setting of a prison (the set is by Reid Thompson and Kamil James). And the flicker of fluorescents and red glow of the hall suggest a kind of purgatory (lighting is by Cha See).As the kids clash and open up to one another, surreal elements creep up, appearing to represent the systems and obstacles — poverty, redlining, over policing — that can entrap many Black people in rooms like this, and worse. And the students’ back stories illustrate how they try to maneuver against such repression: Dasani has stolen food because she’s hungry; Mikayla made her own too-short skirt out of necessity. (“You think I got money for all that extra fabric? I look sexy on a budget.”)Under the direction of Miranda Haymon, the performances have an exaggerated quality that keeps the characters at a distance, despite the action being in your face. Each one has subtler, more grounded moments, but there’s a heightened sense to their personas that hints they’re stand-ins for broader ideas. Even as the even-keeled Erika, Boateng has an almost mechanical, doll-like carriage that evokes the concept of what it takes to escape social constraints rather than someone with one foot out the door.As in his previous work “Tambo & Bones,” Harris toys with stereotypes about Blackness in order to turn them inside out, pointing to the history, circumstances and motivations behind ways of thinking and behavior. It’s an exercise performed for the benefit of audiences presumed to be in need of instruction, and for some it will no doubt be an eye-opening lesson.But there’s a restlessness inherent to every schoolroom timeout, and to theatergoers being positioned as pupils. What happens once we can see people for who they are and then dig deeper into their contradictions? Understanding how lives are shaped by their limitations, as Harris details here with an ultimately pat sort of logic, is foundational to social justice. But in order to see that there’s more to people than what keeps them in margins, first we may have to set them free.Exception to the RuleThrough June 26 at the Black Box Theater at the Harold and Miriam Steinberg Center for Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. More

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    Broadway Deal Over Rudin Shows Will Limit Nondisclosure Agreements

    Performers and stage managers were released from agreements they signed to work on four shows that were produced by Scott Rudin after their union, Actors’ Equity, filed complaints.Performers and stage managers will be released from the nondisclosure agreements they signed to work on four Broadway shows connected to the producer Scott Rudin under a settlement between the Broadway League and Actors’ Equity Association.The union said that the two parties had agreed that, going forward, producers would no longer require actors or stage managers to sign such agreements unless approved by the union, which might sign off on them in limited circumstances to protect things such as intellectual property or financial information. The League declined to comment.The settlement arises from a labor dispute that began last year, when Rudin, long one of the most powerful producers on Broadway, was facing accusations that he had behaved tyrannically toward a variety of people who worked with him, prompting an Equity stage manager to alert the union to the nondisclosure agreements required by some Rudin shows.Last spring, the union asked Rudin to release employees from the nondisclosure agreements, and in January, the union filed a pair of unfair labor practice complaints with the National Labor Relations Board regarding “To Kill a Mockingbird” and “West Side Story,” both of which were at the time produced by Rudin.The union argued that nondisclosure agreements illegally restricted worker rights. Its complaints were initially filed against Rudin and his general manager; in recognition of the fact that Rudin is not currently actively producing on Broadway or in Hollywood, and last year resigned as a member of the Broadway League, the complaints were expanded to include the Broadway League, which is a trade association representing producers.The union said it has since learned that nondisclosure agreements were being used by four recent Broadway productions, including not only “Mockingbird” and “West Side Story,” but also “The Iceman Cometh,” on which Rudin was a lead producer, and “The Lehman Trilogy,” on which Rudin was among the lead producers.The union withdrew the National Labor Relations Board complaints earlier this month, after reaching a settlement agreement with the League. According to a copy of the settlement agreement, the League has agreed to release from confidentiality, nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements any actor or stage manager who signed such an agreement with the four recent productions. (The agreement does not affect workers in Rudin’s office, many of whom were required to sign detailed nondisclosure agreements as part of their employment contracts.)The settlement comes at a time when nondisclosure agreements in many workplaces have come under increasing scrutiny.“Exploitation feeds off of isolation,” said Andrea Hoeschen, the union’s general counsel. “There is no stronger tool for an abuser or a harasser, no matter the setting, than silence.”It is not clear how frequently nondisclosure agreements are used on Broadway.“We intend to tell our members broadly about this settlement, and if they are asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement, we are going to push back on those as violative of our members’ rights,” Hoeschen said. More

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    Cristin Milioti Finds Harmony in Fiona Apple and a Location Change

    The “Palm Springs” actor talks about playing the object of adoration in her HBO Max series, “Made for Love,” and a few of the things she obsesses over herself.Cristin Milioti was certain she was made for “Made for Love.”“I banged on every door for this role, and they were like, ‘Absolutely not, no way, no way, no way, no way,’” she said. “They had a short list of people that I was not anywhere near. I don’t even think I was on a medium list or a long list. I didn’t make any of the lists.”But Milioti was undaunted. And over lunch with Patrick Somerville — a creator of this dark comedy about a tech billionaire’s wife on the lam from the virtual-reality cube in which he’s cloistered her for a decade — she made the hard sell.“I remember saying, ‘Hey, I know that you guys have your sights set on way fancier people,’” said Milioti, who had just wrapped “Palm Springs,” the “Groundhog Day”-esque rom-com with Andy Samberg. “‘But I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you that this is exactly what I think this show is, and this is how I would play it.’”When Milioti was offered the part a couple of weeks later, she said, “I don’t think anyone was more shocked than I was.”Season 2, which started April 28 on HBO Max, finds Hazel trapped in a labyrinth of lies, having returned to the cube with her husband (Billy Magnussen) to save the life of her father (Ray Romano).From the moment Hazel popped out of a door in the ground in the show’s first episode — as a reluctant dream girl breaking free of the man who monitors her every move, down to her orgasms — the story line has spoken “to the ways in which I feel like women are forced to perform for so much of their lives,” Milioti said. “Then you hit a breaking point where you suddenly realize that you’ve been performing for an audience that you have no interest in performing for. And you want to scream.”In a video call from Puerto Rico, barely rested after a late-night shoot for the upcoming Peacock romantic thriller “The Resort,” a gorgeously bed-headed Milioti spoke about her favorite food as a Jersey girl, how New York still thrills her and why the best times are all about location, location, location.Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Fiona Apple She has been such a beacon for me my entire life. Her artistry has helped me navigate not only my own personhood, but the world that I walk through. I think she’s unparalleled as a lyricist, and her melodies are like little galaxies. Something that was so incredibly special about this last album [“Fetch the Bolt Cutters”] is that you could tell that that’s what she’d been moving toward her entire career. Every album she releases is astonishing, but this was like her magnum opus. She is a [expletive] North Star, and she has never wavered.2. Graphic Novels I’m an extremely avid reader, but I’d never read a graphic novel. Then for my birthday last year, one of my closest friends got me “Wendy’s Revenge,” in this trilogy by Walter Scott. To me, they open up some other portal in my brain that is wildly soothing and fantastical, because you can pore over the universe of the page. It feels like it exercises some lobe that I didn’t know about, like brain and soul calisthenics.3. Adam McKay’s “Step Brothers” I’ve probably seen “Step Brothers” 25 times, and it’s just so fantastically, gloriously stupid. I think I like it so much because everyone in it is treating it like it’s a prestige drama. There’s no winking at the camera. Kathryn Hahn’s performance is so outrageously funny because she’s playing it like a Greek tragedy. Richard Jenkins is playing it so serious and so is Mary Steenburgen — not to mention Will Ferrell, John C. Reilly and Adam Scott. It’s like a murderers’ row playing the most absurd concept as if it’s an Oscar film.4. Harmonizing There is something about how we figured out harmonies that chills me. You’re making this sound with someone else where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It is the most beautiful form of listening. I was in chorus in high school and we sang “O Magnun Mysterium,” and we were accepted into this choral competition at Riverside Church in Manhattan. I remember us practicing in a hallway. I was a New Jersey teenager, smoking in diners and sort of living a Bruce Springsteen song like, “I can’t wait to get outta this town.” And we all sat in this hallway singing to each other, listening to the sound of each other’s voices and all the social constructs — the fighting, the cliques — melted away. Just a bunch of [expletive] teens from Jersey in this old church, creating something that was so beautiful that we couldn’t believe that it was coming from us. We sang it in this competition, and we were holding each other’s hands, tears streaming down our faces like, “We did it!” Then this show choir from Florida came right after us singing the exact same song. And they annihilated us.5. Wawa Hoagies Wawa was featured heavily on “Mare of Easttown,” and I was like, “Well, well, well, look at her go.” It was like seeing an old friend hit the big time. Wawa is basically a convenience store, like a 7-Eleven, but they make these hoagies, which is a very Jersey thing. I’m pretty sure they’re made from yoga mats. The meat is possibly not meat. It’s like cheese-colored or turkey-colored material. Sadly, I can’t eat them anymore because I’m vegan now. Ironically, they might be vegan because they might all be made of napkins. I have no idea. What goes into these things, it’s unintelligible.6. Crossing over the Manhattan Bridge I have lived in New York for a million years, and when I am in a taxi with the windows down rumbling over the Manhattan Bridge — and I can see the skyline and the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty — I can’t believe that I live there after all this time. I always stop everything I’m doing and I just stare out the window at the majesty of where I live, and that the city continues to run and thrive, and it’s been through so much and it holds so much. It’s like a little prayer.7. Amy Morton at the end of Act 2 of “August: Osage County” by Tracy Letts I think I had just dropped out of [New York University] when I saw that play, and I had never seen anything like that. I remember when she turned around — she spins over her shoulder and comes at her mother with her arm pointed — and the way that she bellowed, “I’m running things now!” I still get goose bumps. My skeleton burst into doves. I melted in my seat, like my spirit rose away and was floating at the rafters.8. Traveling Solo I was always very afraid to take solo trips. I have a couple of friends who had done it and I was like, “But what do you do?” And then I took one by myself. After a job, I went to the Adirondacks for a week, and it was incredible. You’re one on one with your own personhood, and parts of your brain and heart open up when it’s just you and your thoughts, walking through the woods. I think it is so valuable. I’ve taken another solo trip since then, to the Galápagos, which I was very nervous about because it’s so far away. But I wanted to do one by myself again, to sort of shake hands with myself and say, “Hello.”9. Blooper Reels It’s like an immediate dose of laughter, Prozac for your brain. I like compilations of people falling down, farts on live TV, all of that. I think the internet is so dangerous, but one part of it that I really like to utilize is being able to go onto YouTube and watch something that makes me laugh so hard that it’s just like a lovely little reset.10. A Location Change I love going out so much, but I really love a location change. I like to go to like a place for dinner, and then you have a location change and you go to a bar, and then you maybe have one more location change for a dessert. It’s like an adventure where I’m like, “What’s going to happen?” It feels like a delightful game of Russian roulette, which is one of the reasons why I love living in New York. It’s just endless possibilities, and there’s something about it that’s very sexy and romantic. It’s effervescent. It’s like if champagne were an activity. More

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    Stephen Colbert Celebrates Sweden and Finland Applying to Join NATO

    Colbert called the move “good news” based on it being “bad news for Russia.”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 Swedish Are ComingLeaders from Sweden joined Finland in announcing plans to submit an application for NATO on Tuesday.Stephen Colbert called the announcement “good news” because it’s “bad news for Russia.”“Wow, first Finland, now Sweden. It seems like every day we’re learning about another country we could have sworn was already in NATO.” — SETH MEYERS“Finland and Sweden are very serious about making this official. They each left a toothbrush in NATO’s bathroom already.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“One of Russia’s main goals in invading Ukraine was to weaken NATO. Now, instead, the alliance is ‘on the brink of starting its largest potential expansion in nearly two decades.’ How ironic. It’s — it’s like that O. Henry story where the guy buys his wife combs for her hair, and she joins NATO.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Primary Day Edition)“You can feel the electricity in the air because it is Primary Day all across America. Five states are choosing their party nominees for state and federal office: Pennsylvania, Oregon, Idaho, North Carolina and Kentucky. Or as election experts collectively know them, ‘POINCK.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Ah, yes, the excitement of midterm state primaries. Put the coffee on, honey, it’s gonna be an all-nighter.” — JAMES CORDEN“Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania all held primaries today, which, of course, is news to the vast majority of people in Idaho, Kentucky, North Carolina, Oregon and Pennsylvania.” — JAMES CORDEN“One of the most-watched races is in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Oz is trying to win the Republican nomination for senate. My apologies to Dr. Oz, but I can’t cross party lines — I’m a Dr. Phil guy through and through.” — JAMES CORDEN“Because there’s nothing more impressive than being called smart by a man who stared directly at an eclipse.” — STEPHEN COLBERT, referring to Dr. Oz’s touting his endorsement from Donald Trump.The Bits Worth WatchingJimmy Fallon and the “Tonight Show” guest Nick Jonas performed auto-tuned tracks based on topics such as “a Craigslist ad for a roommate.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightSarah Silverman will appear on Wednesday’s “Late Night With Seth Meyers.”Also, Check This OutA commuter walking past Nick Cave’s video work, “Every One,” which plays every quarter hour and brings the suits to life in motion.Amr Alfiky for The New York TimesThe musician-artist Nick Cave’s “Each One” installation shows Soundsuits “that seem to be in motion, creating visual vortexes, variously spinning and rising or falling,” in the subway under One Times Square. More

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    Review: ‘Golden Shield’ Is an Exercise In Miscommunication

    Anchuli Felicia King’s play about an internet firewall belongs to multiple genres all at once.In “Golden Shield,” which opened Tuesday at the Manhattan Theater Club, a blowhard executive at a tech company comes up with a way to build a more effective firewall: decentralize it into multiple checkpoints.This appears to also have been the strategy of the young Thai-Australian playwright Anchuli Felicia King, whose show belongs to multiple genres all at once: It is a legal drama, a romance, a story of sibling estrangement, and a cautionary tale about technology and the cost of political activism. “Golden Shield” is a lot to chew on and somehow it is not filling.The director May Adrales nimbly steers the production, which goes back and forth between 2006 and 2016 as we follow a class-action lawsuit by eight Chinese dissidents against the fictional ONYS Systems, an American company, led by the aforementioned tech bro, Marshall McLaren (Max Gordon Moore), contracted by the Chinese government to build a system filtering problematic internet content — the Golden Shield of the title. (The case borrows elements from real-life ones against Yahoo and Cisco.) Julie Chen (Cindy Cheung), a Chinese American partner in a law firm, leads the charge on behalf of the plaintiffs.Besides Marshall, Julie clashes with her younger sister, Eva (Ruibo Qian), whom she has hired as a translator because Eva has a better command of Mandarin. Julie says she picked her sister because she wants “someone I trust over there,” but the two women can’t stand each other, let alone trust each other. Eva won’t even tell her sibling how she makes a living, only specifying that “it’s not illegal.”Julie is a little slow on the uptake, and it’s a safe bet most audience members will be way ahead of her. She also appears to be terrible in court (I kept mentally interjecting “Objection!”) and flusters easily. “Where the [expletive] am I gonna get a Mandarin translator in Dallas?” Julie wonders after finding herself in a bind in the city where the trial is taking place. Where, indeed, could she possibly locate this unicorn in a huge agglomeration with enough corporate headquarters to sustain a cottage industry of specialized translators?The show’s main concern is communication, or rather miscommunication, an idea it incorporates in its very fabric with the Translator (Fang Du), an omniscient character who hovers on the periphery of the action. At regular intervals he volunteers context, explains what is spoken and verbalizes what is not — he essentially dispenses audio footnotes.At worst, which is most of the time, the Translator spells out the obvious, ruining the silences, allusions and, yes, lies that undergird many conversations, and by extension theater. It’s as if someone were filling in the blanks in a Pinter play. A little after Eva tells an Australian nonprofit employee named Amanda (Gillian Saker, in an unfortunate wig that looks as if the 1970s had crash-landed on it) that they could make out in the women’s room, for example, Amanda coyly announces, “I feel a sudden and overwhelming urge to powder my nose.” The hint is none too subtle, and yet the Translator immediately informs us that she means, “Meet me in the bathroom.”At best, which is not nearly enough, the Translator sneaks in insights that are tantalizingly thought-provoking, as when he steers a conversation between Marshall and a Chinese official, or says that his job “is not really to translate but to interpret. Not to transmit truth to truth but to give you informed approximations.”A wealth of possibilities lies in the difference between these two words, but “Golden Shield” is more interested in histrionics than in how approximations can get close to the truth, or at least a truth.Golden ShieldThrough June 12 at City Center Stage I, Manhattan; manhattantheatreclub.com. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. More

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    A Central Park Birder Has a New TV Show

    Christian Cooper’s encounter in Central Park with a white woman who called 911 to falsely accuse him of threatening her spurred a national outcry. Now he is hosting a birding series for National Geographic.For years, Christian Cooper has studied the habits of Kirtland’s warblers, Swainson’s thrushes, Acadian flycatchers and the other birds he has spent countless hours searching for or observing.While Mr. Cooper, a resident of Manhattan, has watched birds all over the world, one of his most frequent haunts is his beloved Central Park, where more than 200 species, including, loons, egrets, falcons and owls, live or stop by during migratory flights.He is perhaps best known for his encounter there two years ago with a woman who called the police and falsely claimed that he was threatening her after Mr. Cooper asked that she keep her dog on a leash.Now, he is about to once again be in the public eye — this time on his own television show.On Monday, National Geographic announced a new series featuring Mr. Cooper, called “Extraordinary Birder,” that is expected to run on one of National Geographic’s channels or on Disney+. A premiere date has not been released.“Whether braving stormy seas in Alaska for puffins, trekking into rainforests in Puerto Rico for parrots, or scaling a bridge in Manhattan for a peregrine falcon,” National Geographic said in its announcement, “he does whatever it takes to learn about these extraordinary feathered creatures and show us the remarkable world in the sky above.”Mr. Cooper said that he first heard from National Geographic about the possibility of a show about a year and a half ago — “I was all in,” he said — and that he had completed six episodes of the show, traveling to deserts, cities, rainforests and the rural South.“I love spreading the gospel of birding,” he said in an interview on Tuesday, adding that he was looking forward to encouraging more people “to stop and watch and listen and really start appreciating the absolutely spectacular creatures that we have among us.”Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island.Brittainy Newman/The New York TimesMr. Cooper, 59, has been a semipublic figure in various ways for decades. He served on the board of directors of GLAAD, formerly the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation. While an editor for Marvel Comics, he was credited with creating one of the first gay characters in the Star Trek comic universe.The confrontation in Central Park in 2020 thrust him into the public eye in a new way. Mr. Cooper took out his phone and began recording during a disagreement with the woman he encountered there, Amy Cooper. The video showed Ms. Cooper, who is not related to Mr. Cooper, making a 911 call and saying to him: “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life.”After Mr. Cooper’s sister posted the video to Twitter, it was viewed tens of millions of times. In the resulting furor, Ms. Cooper lost her job with the investment firm Franklin Templeton and was charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office with filing a false police report. Ms. Cooper sued Franklin Templeton in Federal District Court in Manhattan, saying the company defamed and discriminated against her. Franklin Templeton has asked that the suit be dismissed.Mr. Cooper emerged as a thoughtful, measured voice. He spoke publicly about what he called the “deep vein of racial bias” that runs through society, and he said there was no excuse for the racism inherent in Ms. Cooper making a false allegation against him.But he also distanced himself from the public pillorying of Ms. Cooper and declined to cooperate with prosecutors, who ended up asking a judge to dismiss the case against her after she completed a therapeutic program that included instruction about racial biases.Mr. Cooper has loved birds since growing up on Long Island and being struck at the age of 10 by the sight of red-winged blackbirds. He still listens for birdsong, wherever he is.“It adds another dimension to just being on the street,” he said. “It adds another dimension to how you exist in the world.”While making “Extraordinary Birder,” Mr. Cooper said, he added to his life’s list, glimpsing burrowing owls for the first time. “They are actually quite adorable,” he said.Mr. Cooper still goes regularly to Central Park, especially this time of year — he’s usually there around daybreak. On Tuesday morning he had been excited to see a Tennessee warbler, a difficult-to-spot bird with “a really distinctive, urgent cry” that he said sounds in part like “a machine gun.”“The second you hear that,” he said, “it’s like, oh boy, there’s a Tennessee around.” More

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    Maggie Peterson, a Memorable ‘Andy Griffith Show’ Guest, Dies at 81

    As Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, she appeared in five episodes, beginning with one in which her character became smitten with Mr. Griffith’s.Maggie Peterson, an actress who in a recurring role on the hit sitcom “The Andy Griffith Show” memorably developed an infatuation with Mr. Griffith’s character, Sheriff Andy Taylor, died on Sunday. She was 81.Her death was announced in a post on her Facebook page. The post did not say where she died, but her family said last month that she had been moved from her home in Las Vegas to a nursing facility in Colorado. The family also said that her health took a turn for the worse when her husband, the jazz musician Gus Mancuso, died of Alzheimer’s disease in December at 88.Ms. Peterson was seen on “The Odd Couple,” “Green Acres” and other television shows from 1964 to 1987. But she was probably best known for playing Charlene Darling, a member of the musical Darling family, in several episodes of “The Andy Griffith Show.” (Her brothers were played by the members of the Dillards, a prominent bluegrass band; their father was played by the veteran character actor Denver Pyle.)Charlene and the other Darlings first appeared in the 1963 episode “The Darlings Are Coming,” in which the family visited Mayberry, the fictional North Carolina town where the show was set, and waited for her fiancé to arrive. Sheriff Taylor lets the family spend a night in the courthouse, and Charlene becomes smitten with the sheriff — an infatuation that ends abruptly when her fiancé arrives.Ms. Peterson was a successful singer before she became an actress.via IMDbThe Darlings returned to Mayberry four more times. In one episode, Charlene and her husband are looking for a young boy for their new baby girl to become engaged to. They pick Sheriff Taylor’s son, Opie, played by Ron Howard, but are eventually tricked into changing their minds.Ms. Peterson played a different character in a later episode of the show and two other characters in episodes of the “Andy Griffith Show” spinoffs “Mayberry R.F.D.” and “Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.” She also appeared in movies with Mr. Griffith and another “Andy Griffith Show” cast member, Don Knotts.She returned to the role of Charlene one last time in the 1986 TV movie “Return to Mayberry.”Margaret Ann Peterson was born on Jan. 10, 1941, in Greeley, Colo., to Arthur and Tressa Peterson. She was a successful singer before she became an actress, with a family vocal group called the Ja-Da Quartet (later known as Margaret Ann & the Ja-Da Quartet), which recorded an album for Warner Bros. Records in 1959, and the Ernie Mariani Trio.After her acting career ended, she worked for the Nevada Film Commission and, usually billed as Maggie Mancuso, was a location manager on “Casino” (1995) and other movies.Information on survivors was not immediately available.The Associated Press contributed reporting. More