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    Bruce Campbell on ‘Hysteria!’ and Why the Satanic Panic Never Ended

    The Peacock horror comedy finds timeliness in a dark chapter of American history. “Satan was always an existential threat,” the actor said.In 1981, Bruce Campbell knocked horror fandom’s socks off as Ash Williams, the iron-jawed demon fighter in “The Evil Dead,” Sam Raimi’s outré and now-beloved film about friends who battle unholy hell at a cabin in the woods. It was, it seems fair to say, a defining role.Now at 66, after decades of swashbuckling, bone-crunching roles in cult horror films and on TV, Campbell’s life seems a bit more Mayberry. He is a grandfather who still uses AOL Mail. Later this month, he’ll host what he called a “casino-ween” party at an Elks Lodge in Ashland, Ore., the mountain town where he lives with his wife, Ida. His taste in music, he said, is “way more Lawrence Welk than you might imagine.”In some ways, his role in the Peacock series “Hysteria!,” which debuted on Friday, reflects something of this kinder, gentler new reality. As the aw-shucks police chief Dandridge, his domain is a sleepy Michigan suburb in the 1980s, a place where boring is beautiful. But this is Bruce Campbell, so of course the peace is shattered as local holy rollers blame a high school heavy metal band for inviting Satan to their town and unleashing a series of deathly evil deeds. But the devil rarely needs an invitation.“Hysteria!” is a supernatural horror-comedy, but it takes its cue from a very real and unfunny chapter in American history: the so-called satanic panic, when a flood of unwarranted accusations about cults committing ritualistic child abuse swept the country. That abuse was abetted, according to many leaders on the religious right, by satanic messaging in popular culture.Campbell stars in “Hysteria!” as the humble police chief of a town consumed by fears about Satan.PeacockBut for a series set in the ’80s, “Hysteria!” is in some ways timely. It is the latest of several popular treatments of the satanic panic in recent years — including the documentary “Satan Wants You,” the novel “Rainbow Black” and the most recent season of “Stranger Things” — as culture wars, new technologies and misinformation have helped incite a fresh wave of conspiracy theories and conservative book bans.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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    Lin-Manuel Miranda Releases ‘Warriors’ Album With Eisa Davis

    He collaborated with Eisa Davis to make a concept album inspired by the 1979 movie. One big change: the main gang is made up of women.“The Warriors,” a 1979 film about a group of gang members fighting their way home to Brooklyn from the Bronx, isn’t the most brutal movie ever made, but it’s not exactly Sesame Street either — when it was first released, it was blamed (on pretty flimsy evidence) for inciting violence. And yet, somehow, Lin-Manuel Miranda found himself watching the movie when he was 4, thanks to a friend’s older brother.Sure, the experience was a little scary. But the film also stuck with him. Miranda, like any number of New Yorkers raised in the ’80s, treasures the sights and sounds of a bygone city preserved in the film, as well as its empathy for its characters. (If some of the gang members seem heroic, well, the story, from a novel by Sol Yurick, is based on an ancient Greek military narrative by Xenophon, “Anabasis.”)Now, after a pivot to television and film, the “Hamilton” creator has spent the last two-plus years working with the playwright and performer Eisa Davis to create a “Warriors” concept album.“You write the things that won’t leave you alone, and this won’t leave me alone,” Miranda said in a joint interview with Davis, conducted at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.The album was released on Friday by Atlantic Records. You can listen here.What is ‘The Warriors’ about?Miranda offers a succinct plot summary: “All the gangs of New York are meeting in the South Bronx for this unprecedented peace summit. Cyrus, the charismatic leader who has called the summit, is assassinated. The assassin blames the Warriors, and the Warriors have to fight their way home to Coney [Island], while every other gang in the city is trying to kill them.”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 Recaps Harris’s Time on Fox News and Trump’s on Univision

    “Yes, both Kamala and Trump went into ‘the lion’s den’ this week — although they only got Trump there by telling him it was the name of a strip club,” Desi Lydic said on “The Daily Show.”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.Lions, Foxes and BaiersVice President Kamala Harris appeared on Fox News on Wednesday, where she was interrupted several times during an interview with Bret Baier, the network’s chief political anchor. On the same day, former President Donald Trump held a Univision town hall, where, as Desi Lydic joked on Thursday’s “Daily Show,” he “faced down his biggest fear: Hispanic people.”“Yes, both Kamala and Trump went into ‘the lion’s den’ this week — although they only got Trump there by telling him it was the name of a strip club.” — DESI LYDIC“I’d like to point out that there is no difference between his nervous swaying to Spanish and his dancing to ‘Ave Maria.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now Kamala’s ‘lion’s den’ was Fox News, so I guess it was a Fox den, where she sat down with Bret Baier — so maybe it was a Baier’s den.” — DESI LYDIC“I want to be clear about this: I believe that journalists should always ask the toughest questions of presidential candidates, and Bret Baier certainly plays a convincing journalist on Fox News.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Come on, Bret, you invited her on to speak with you. This is an interview with the vice president, not sex with your wife — you have to let the woman finish.” — DESI LYDICThe Punchiest Punchlines (Winning? Edition)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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    Sadie Sink to Star in ‘John Proctor Is the Villain’ on Broadway

    Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain” will be directed by Danya Taymor, who won a Tony this year for “The Outsiders.”Sadie Sink, one of the breakout performers from “Stranger Things,” will star next spring in a new Broadway play about a group of high school students reading “The Crucible” while reckoning with the impact of the #MeToo movement.The comedic drama, Kimberly Belflower’s “John Proctor Is the Villain,” has taken an unusual path: It has been licensed for nearly 100 nonprofessional productions, many of them at high schools and colleges, before arriving on Broadway. (The journey generally goes in the other direction — plays that are well-received on Broadway then get staged around the country, often first at regional theaters and only then at school venues.)Set in the spring of 2018, the play takes place mostly in a classroom in rural Georgia, where the juniors in an honors English class are reading “The Crucible,” Arthur Miller’s 1953 play about the Salem witch trials. At the same time, some of the students are encountering pushback to their efforts to form a feminism club.The play has nine characters — seven students, the English teacher and a guidance counselor — and explores how the students’ ideas and ideals are challenged by unfolding events in their own lives.“As the play goes on, things get very close to home, and the characters have to grapple with what they believe, and who they believe,” said Belflower, 37, an assistant professor of dramatic writing at Emory University in Atlanta. Like the characters in her play, she grew up in a small conservative Georgia community and read “The Crucible” in a high school English class.“Right after the tidal wave of #metoo hit, Woody Allen called it a witch hunt, and my theater nerd brain was like, ‘I should reread “The Crucible”,’ and I was struck by how different it was than I remembered it,” she said. “I was talking to my dad, and I uttered the phrase ‘John Proctor is the villain.’”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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    How Florence Welch Turned Rage Into Power

    O winged Lady,Like a birdYou scavenge the land.Like a charging stormYou charge,Like a roaring stormYou roar,You thunder in thunder,Snort in rampaging winds.Your feet are continually restless.Carrying your harp of sighs,You breathe out the music of mourning. — from “Hymn to Inanna” by Enheduanna,translated from the Sumerian by Jane Hirshfield PROPHETESS ONE RISKS ANGERING the gods […] More

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    Sex, Horses and Stately Homes: Bringing a Naughty British Romance to TV

    Walking into Jilly Cooper’s house in the English countryside is like stepping inside one of her novels.The living room walls are covered in pictures or bookshelves, and the surfaces by ceramic cats, dogs and horses. Pictures of loved ones (family) and notables (royal family) are scattered throughout the room. The windows look over a landscape of rolling hills.It was from this 14th-century home, and on a manual typewriter, that Cooper, 87, wrote the “Rutshire Chronicles,” an 11-book series of romance novels featuring the handsome and troubled horse-riding hero Rupert Campbell-Black. The novels sold 12 million copies in Britain, where they shaped a generation readers’ ideas about romance, sex and the upper classes in the ’80s and ’90s.Known as “the queen of the bonkbuster” — an amalgam of “blockbuster” and “bonking,” a very English way of referring to you-know-what — Cooper’s name is synonymous in Britain with juicy romance and well-heeled naughtiness. In the United States, it has less resonance.Disney+ and Hulu are hoping to change that with the premiere, on Friday, of “Rivals,” an eight-part series based on Cooper’s 1988 novel of the same title from the “Rutshire Chronicles.”“I’m knocked out, because I love this book so much,” Cooper said in a recent interview. “I think it’s my favorite one.” Seeing it turned into a series, she said, was a “great treat,” especially at her age. “Eighty-seven is so old,” she said. “What’s 87 in dog years?”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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    Jimmy Kimmel Slams Trump’s Women-Centered Town Hall

    “This was the first time Groper Cleveland has been around this many women since they started padlocking the doors at Miss Teen USA,” Kimmel 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.Father FigureOn Tuesday, former President Donald Trump held a town hall in front of what Jimmy Kimmel called “a handpicked audience of Trump-loving women in Georgia.”“This was the first time Groper Cleveland has been around this many women since they started padlocking the doors at Miss Teen USA.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“In the first part, the women asked questions, and in the second part, Trump went through and rated them physically from 1 to 10.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“One lucky lady was named Miss Fox News Town Hall ’24, so congratulations.” — JIMMY KIMMELAt one point during the town hall, Trump proclaimed himself “the father of I.V.F.”“Now he’s claiming to be the father of I.V.F. — which has been happening since 1978. This guy won’t even admit to being the father of Eric.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s the father of I.V.F. Maybe that’s short for Ivanka, I don’t know.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Y.M.C.A. Edition)“You should not vote for someone because they dance to ‘Y.M.C.A.’ But also, I’m not sure you’d call this dancing.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Those are some bad moves, baby. If this president thing doesn’t work out, he ought to think about being a contestant on ‘Swaying With the Stars’ or ‘So You Think You Can Tilt.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But no matter how gay his music is, young, straight white men love Donald Trump. They see him as a ‘macho, macho’ man, if you will.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He eats red meat, he pretends to follow U.F.C., he’s into crypto and sneakers and NFTs. He’s a dude, a bro and a boss all rolled into one.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Wednesday’s “Late Show,” Stanley Tucci fessed up to fabricating his childhood confessions.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe “Grotesquerie” star Niecy Nash-Betts will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutElizabeth Berkley in the 1995 movie “Showgirls.”Murray Close/United ArtistsA new French stage play based on “Showgirls” speaks to the 1995 film’s enduring allure. More

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    Adam Driver in ‘Hold On to Me Darling,’ a Satire of Sincerity

    A country music star embodies the clichés of celebrity in an Off Broadway revival of Kenneth Lonergan’s 2016 comedy.Women fall hard and fast for Strings McCrane, the “third biggest crossover star in the history of country music.” He dates supermodels “at will.” Fangirls who flirt with him at night send him sex tapes in the morning. A hotel masseuse, kneading his sculptural glutes, exclaims: “I’ve had a crush on you since I was in trade school.”Playgoer, he marries her. But not before seducing a young relative at his mother’s funeral. Coming clean to the masseuse, he later owns his indiscretion. “I went to see Essie as a cousin,” he says. “But I stayed there with her as a man.”Did the clichés of country music make Strings (Adam Driver) such a melodramatic, self-justifying, emotional boomerang? Or are his pre-existing gifts in that department what made him a country music star in the first place?These are among the questions you may find yourself asking, in want of much else to do, while watching the baggy, overlong “Hold On to Me Darling,” a comedy by Kenneth Lonergan now being revived at the Lucille Lortel Theater. Well, not so much revived as — like Strings’s mother — embalmed.Other than a few cast changes, most notably Driver in the role first played by Timothy Olyphant, the show is pretty much what it was when it debuted at the Atlantic Theater Company in 2016. The physical production looks as if it had been preserved since then in mothballs, with the same cramped, slowly revolving set by Walt Spangler. The few tweaks to the script are almost invisible. Neither Lonergan nor the director, Neil Pepe, seems to have felt the need for refinement.And why should they have? Lonergan has proved himself a terrific dramatist many times over: “This Is Our Youth,” “The Waverly Gallery,” “Lobby Hero.” This play, too, was well received by most critics, if not by me. It is certainly funny in places, and droll in others; it is occasionally even stinging in its satire of show-business sincerity. We learn that Strings’s most recent celebrity fiancée, making “a statement of solidarity and sexual enlightenment on behalf of the women of Afghanistan,” wore a see-through mesh burqa on a junket 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