Eliana Willis

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    The Best Movies and TV Shows Coming to HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and More in April

    Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to their libraries. Here are our picks for some of April’s most promising new titles.(Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)Rinko Kikuchi in “Tokyo Vice.”Eros Hoagland/HBO MaxNew to HBO Max‘Tokyo Vice’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 7This TV adaptation of the journalist Jake Adelstein’s memoir is a spiritual successor of the influential 1980s show “Miami Vice,” examining organized crime and its effect on a nation’s social order in the 1990s. Ansel Elgort plays Adelstein, who struggles to be accepted as an American working in the highly competitive Japanese newspaper business. He later gains respect when he begins investigating the Yakuza. Created by the Tony-winning playwright J.T. Rogers (best known for “Oslo”), “Tokyo Vice” explores the complexities of class and race in an era when Japanese business was booming and some of the people making money didn’t want anyone — and especially not some upstart foreigner — to look too closely at how and why.‘The Flight Attendant’ Season 2Starts streaming: April 21Although Season 1 of “The Flight Attendant” deftly — and thoroughly — adapted Chris Bohjalian’s thriller novel of the same name, the series was so well-received that it was bound to get a sequel. At the start of Season 2, the alcoholic flight attendant Cassie (played by Kaley Cuoco, also one of the show’s executive producers) has cleaned up her life after helping international law enforcement solve a murder for which she was once the prime suspect. In the new episodes, Cassie settles into her new part-time gig as a spy and gets caught up in another dangerous mystery. Much of the series’ terrific supporting casts returns, including Rosie Perez as Cassie’s friendly colleague and Zosia Mamet as her best pal.‘Barry’ Season 3Starts streaming: April 24After a three-year layoff, Bill Hader returns as the hit man and aspiring actor Barry Berkman in the dark comedy “Barry,” the series he cocreated with Alec Berg. Season 2 took chances with its story, playing up the inherent absurdity of a stoic killer getting in touch with his feelings in a drama class. Taking cues from classic modern TV crime dramas like “Breaking Bad,” Hader and Berg ratcheted up the tension as Barry ducked the mob, the law and a vengeful old associate played by Stephen Root. Season 3 will continue down that path, while also spoofing the pretensions of Hollywood wannabes, including the promising ingénue Sally (Sarah Goldberg) and the big-hearted acting coach Gene (Henry Winkler).‘We Own This City’Starts streaming: April 25The latest Baltimore-centered series from David Simon, creator of “The Wire,” is a collaboration with his frequent writing partner, the best-selling crime novelist George Pelecanos. Based on the crime reporter Justin Fenton’s nonfiction book of the same name, “We Own This City” stars Jon Bernthal as Sgt. Wayne Jenkins, who becomes involved with Baltimore’s Gun Trace Task Force, a well-meaning but ultimately corrupt organization that attempted to quell crime by tracking how gangs armed themselves. Set in the years immediately after the city’s police department came under increased scrutiny because of the death of Freddie Gray in its custody, “We Own This City” is a gritty drama about how some entrenched institutions respond to attempts at reform: by learning the new laws well enough to skirt them.Also arriving:April 4“The Invisible Pilot”April 5“Tony Hawk: Until the Wheels Fall Off”April 8“A Black Lady Sketch Show” Season 3April 14“The Garcias” Season 1April 24“The Baby” Season 1April 27“The Survivor”April 28“The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin” Part 2Cynthia Erivo in “Roar.”Apple TV+New to Apple TV+‘Slow Horses’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 1Gary Oldman stars in this twisty British spy drama as Jackson Lamb, the grouchy supervisor of a ramshackle MI5 division known as Slough House, where disgraced agents are sent to do drudge work. Jack Lowden plays River Cartwright, a young operative determined to claw his way back from the bottom by doing some unauthorized investigating on a tricky case — and ends up dragging his misfit cohorts into it. Based on a Mick Herron series of mystery-thriller novels, “Slow Horses” features a terrific cast (including Olivia Cooke as Cartwright’s savvy-but-cynical colleague, Jonathan Pryce as his disappointed father and Kristin Scott Thomas as an upper-level MI5 boss) and a plot rooted equally in old-fashioned espionage stories and the modern realities of European security.‘Roar’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 15The writer-producer team of Liz Flahive and Carly Mensch — the cocreators of the TV series “GLOW” — go the anthology route with their new project “Roar,” which features lightly surreal half-hour dramas and comedies about women struggling to be seen and heard. Nicole Kidman is an executive producer, and also stars in one episode as an Australian woman taking her increasingly senile mother (Judy Davis) on a road trip, in a desperate effort to keep their family memories alive. Other episodes feature Issa Rae, as a best-selling author who travels to Hollywood and gets ignored by the people who want to adapt her book; Betty Gilpin, as a retired model whose husband (Daniel Dae Kim) puts her on a shelf as a literal trophy wife; and Merritt Wever, as a woman who falls in love with a duck.Also arriving:April 8“Pinecone & Pony” Season 1April 22“They Call Me Magic”April 29“Shining Girls”Andrew Garfield in “Under the Banner of Heaven.”Michelle Faye/FXNew to Hulu‘Under the Banner of Heaven’Starts streaming: April 28In Jon Krakauer’s controversial 2003 nonfiction book “Under the Banner of Heaven,” the author combined the true story of a heinous crime committed by a Mormon splinter group with the story of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints itself — making the argument that the line between fringe fanaticism and mainstream religion is thinner than many presume. The TV adaptation was written by the Oscar-winning “Milk” screenwriter Dustin Lance Black, who grew up Mormon (and who also worked on the HBO series “Big Love,” about polygamous families in Utah). This mini-series focuses mainly on the murders covered in Krakauer’s book, with Andrew Garfield playing the detective investigating the case.Also arriving:April 1“Love Me” Season 1“Night Raiders”“Snakehead”April 4“Madagascar: A Little Wild” Season 7April 5“The Croods: Family Tree” Season 2“Monster Family 2: Nobody’s Perfect”April 6“The Hardy Boys” Season 2April 7“Agnes”April 8“Woke” Season 2April 9“American Sicario”April 10“The Hating Game”April 14“The Kardashians” Season 1April 21“Captive Audience”April 29“Crush”Rueby Wood, center, as Nate in “Better Nate Than Ever.”David Lee/Disney+New to Disney+‘Better Nate Than Ever’Starts streaming: April 1Based on Tim Federle’s Y.A. novel, “Better Nate Than Ever” tells the story of the enthusiastic and socially awkward middle school theater kid Nate Foster (Rueby Wood), who hops a bus from Pittsburgh with his best friend Libby (Aria Brooks) to attend an open audition for a Broadway musical. Federle wrote and directed this movie adaptation, which retains two of the central ideas from his book: that it takes a winning personality and a lot of good luck to make it in show business, and that Nate won’t succeed until he is honest with himself and with his loved ones about his sexuality. Lisa Kudrow plays a pivotal role as Nate’s Aunt Heidi, whose fading dreams of stage stardom still inspire her nephew.Also arriving:April 13“Scrat Tales” Season 1April 22“The Biggest Little Farm: The Return”“Explorer: The Last Tepui”“Polar Bear”April 27“Sketchbook” Season 1New to Peacock‘Killing It’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 14The affable comic actor Craig Robinson anchors the half-hour dramedy “Killing It,” playing a particular kind of Florida Man: an unflappable dreamer named Craig, who keeps pursuing his plans to become an entrepreneur even as he stumbles repeatedly into catastrophes. Rell Battle plays Craig’s brother Isaiah, who tries to lure him into a life of crime, while Claudia O’Doherty plays Jillian, an upbeat Australian ride-share driver who presents him with a strange and uniquely Floridian business opportunity: the chance to kill giant snakes for reward money. Cocreated by the “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” writers Luke Del Tredici and Dan Goor, “Killing It” is a show about people following especially rocky paths as they chase their versions of the American Dream.Also arriving:April 20“So Dumb It’s Criminal” Season 1April 28“Smother” Season 2Christopher Walken in “The Outlaws.”James Pardon/Amazon StudiosNew to Prime Video‘The Outlaws’ Season 1Starts streaming: April 1Stephen Merchant is best known for co-writing the Ricky Gervais sitcoms “The Office” and “Extras,” but he tries something different with “The Outlaws,” a show halfway between a broad comedy and a crime drama. Merchant plays one of a handful of eclectic British citizens sentenced to community service to atone for various petty misdemeanors. As they shovel garbage in a blighted neighborhood, the members of this motley crew get to know each other, learning there’s more to their lives than their mistakes. The cast of cons also includes Christopher Walken as an aged reprobate, Darren Boyd as an uptight businessman, Eleanor Tomlinson as a celebrity influencer, Rhianne Barreto as an honors student who compulsively shoplifts, and Gamba Cole as a reluctant gangster who accidentally gets everyone into bigger trouble.Also arriving:April 8“All the Old Knives”April 15“Outer Range” Season 1April 29“Undone” Season 2 More

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    A Producer Seeks a Broadway Comeback, Mired in Offstage Drama

    With the musical “Paradise Square” preparing to open Sunday, Garth Drabinsky is hoping to re-establish himself after serving time in a Canadian prison for fraud.Ten days before opening night of his Broadway show, “Paradise Square,” Garth Drabinsky was sitting at a breakfast table at the Peninsula Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, fending off a stream of cellphone calls from members of his production team.That morning’s crisis: Chilina Kennedy, one of the show’s lead actresses, had called in sick (and would be out for nine days after testing positive for coronavirus). Drabinsky decided which of the two understudies should take her place. A few minutes later, he spoke with the director Moisés Kaufman.“You’re happy with the choice?” Drabinsky asked. He listened. “Yeah, right, but make sure that she can really deliver ‘Someone to Love,’” one of the musical’s big ballads. “And the comedy.”The days before an opening are always stressful for a Broadway producer. But few have been under a harsher spotlight than Drabinsky, a storied Canadian impresario whose return to Broadway has generated the sort of drama that even he couldn’t have scripted.First came the pandemic, which delayed the show’s Broadway opening by two years. Then an out-of-town run in Chicago last fall drew mixed reviews and (hampered by the Covid-19 surge) disappointing sales. The show’s preview performances on Broadway have earned only around $350,000 per week at the box office, with most of the seats filled by heavily discounted or even free tickets. That’s not the best omen for a producer who is staking everything on his big comeback after an ignominious fall.He was a brash outsider even during his heyday in the 1990s, when he took a string of Tony-winning musicals to Broadway, among them “Ragtime,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and a revival of “Show Boat.” Then, in 1998, his company, Livent, imploded, and Drabinsky was accused of understating expenses and inflating profits in order to disguise the company’s precarious financial state. He was eventually convicted of fraud and forgery in his native Canada, and served 17 months of a five-year sentence, before being paroled in February 2013.Now, he’s back. And he hasn’t lost his salesman’s bravado, his lawyerly verbosity or his passion for theater, even though his show has faced many challenges, including questions about its financial health.Sidney DuPont, left, and A.J. Shively in the musical “Paradise Square,” which opens Sunday at the Barrymore Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAs New York rehearsals started in February, stories began circulating about slow payments, contract problems and a budget ($13.5 million, according to Drabinsky) that seemed on the slim side for a big Broadway musical with a performing company of nearly 40 and a producer known for lavish spending. Actors Equity, the performers’ union, even instructed the cast not to show up for rehearsals one day, so that it could deal with a “failure to provide our members with contracts reflecting their agreed-upon terms of employment” and “a myriad of other significant contract violations,” according to an Equity statement.“When Garth Drabinsky is involved, people are rightly concerned that all the I’s are dotted and the T’s are crossed,” said David Levy, an Equity spokesman. The problems were apparently resolved, but it was hardly the sort of incident anyone wants at the outset of a Broadway run.Drabinsky blamed a delay in delivering final contracts for the dispute, and misunderstandings about what the actors were owed when the show transferred to New York from Chicago. “The Chicago contract froze the deal for New York,” he said. “There was no variation allowed. They were asking for something we were not committed to give.”What’s more, Drabinsky stressed, he is not in charge of the show’s finances — an arrangement made explicit by the limited partnership formed to bring it to Broadway. “I walked away from every element of fiscal control of this show,” he added. “I don’t sign checks. I don’t get involved. I never want to live through the horror of what I went through in 1998 again.”Instead, he’s been working to get “Paradise Square” in shape for Broadway. The show began life nine years ago with a small-scale musical called “Hard Times,” written by the Irish American musician Larry Kirwan, lead singer of the rock band Black 47. It is set during the Civil War, in the gritty Five Points neighborhood of Manhattan, where Irish immigrants and freed Black Americans lived together — and where Stephen Foster (whose music formed the bulk of the score) resided during his final years. The show climaxes with the draft riots of 1863, when white working-class New Yorkers formed violent racist mobs following a draft lottery.Drabinsky loved the concept, but shied away from anchoring the show in Foster’s music, with its romanticization of the slavery-era South. So he set about reworking the piece, hiring the composer Jason Howland to write a new score (only two Foster songs remain), a succession of writers to shift the story’s focus to the owner of a neighborhood saloon (played by the Tony nominee Joaquina Kalukango), and a top-notch creative team, including Kaufman, as the director, along with the choreographer Bill T. Jones.The themes of racial justice and the immigrant experience have long attracted Drabinsky, and their currency has only grown in the years of development, which included a 2019 workshop production in Berkeley, Calif. “When the show began to parallel what was happening today in America and the world, it was sort of freaky,” he said. “And it hasn’t stopped changing. Even to the point that days before our first preview, Russia invades Ukraine. Three million immigrants are now looking for a new home.”Drabinsky also made an effort to diversify the creative team, hiring Christina Anderson, a Black playwright, to revise Craig Lucas and Kirwan’s script, and the composer-lyricist Masi Asare, who collaborated with Nathan Tysen on the lyrics.Still, suspicion of Drabinsky runs high in the Broadway community, where many were burned financially by his company’s bankruptcy.Yet some people clearly are willing to give him another shot. The list of more than 30 producers for “Paradise Square” includes few established Broadway names, but many who have confidence in Drabinsky’s record as a dedicated, hands-on producer. Among them are the former Queens congressman Joe Crowley (who was brought into the project by Kirwan); Matthew Blank, the former head of Showtime who is now interim chief executive of AMC Networks; and Richard Stursberg, a former top executive at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.Drabinsky’s former company, Livent, brought a critically acclaimed revival of “Showboat” to the Gershwin Theater in 1994.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“I liked the dynamic of this motivated producer, needy of success, putting it all on the line,” said Jeffrey Sine, another producer, whose Broadway credits include “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical.” “I think people deserve a second chance.”Or third or fourth. Drabinsky, 72, grew up in Toronto. At age 4 he contracted polio and spent much of his childhood in hospitals, distracting himself with music on his transistor radio — everything from ’50s rock ’n’ roll to Charles Aznavour. He earned a law degree, but soon turned to the entertainment business, building the Cineplex Odeon chain of movie theaters, before resigning in 1989 amid concerns about the company’s financial health.He re-emerged as a theater mogul, parlaying a long-running Toronto production of “The Phantom of the Opera” at his Pantages Theater into a far-flung company, Livent, that owned theaters (in New York, Chicago and elsewhere) and produced the shows that went into them. He pioneered a new business model for Broadway: Rather than cobbling together investors for each new show, Livent was a vertically integrated company that used the profits from its theaters and touring shows to finance the new work.But it all came crashing down in 1998, after the struggling company was bought by the Hollywood agent Michael Ovitz and the investment banker Roy Furman, who discovered bookkeeping irregularities. Drabinsky was fired; bankruptcy followed; and fraud charges were brought against Drabinsky and his longtime associate Myron Gottlieb, both in the Southern District of New York and (after Drabinsky fled to Toronto) in Canada as well.Drabinsky doesn’t like to talk much about that time. His finances were decimated, and his reputation a shambles. A rare bright spot was the Orthodox rabbi who began visiting him in prison. “It came at the time when I was at my absolute lowest emotionally,” he said. “It gave me a bit of a second wind.” He said he and the rabbi have met regularly for lunch ever since.Two years after his release from prison, he received a diagnosis of Stage 4 melanoma, cancer of the skin that had metastasized to his lungs. (After a year of immunotherapy, he said he is cancer free.) He returned to producing with the musical “Sousatzka” (backed by a Canadian company in which he has no financial interest), but that closed in Toronto after poor reviews. And still, Drabinsky was unable to travel to the United States because of the pending indictment against him in New York. That changed in July 2018, when the New York prosecutors dismissed the charges, noting that he had already served time for essentially the same crimes.“Paradise Square” is the sort of serious, original musical that Broadway claims to want more of. Yet without a major star, or a presold brand to market (and little advertising thus far), it faces a tough road. Much is riding on the critics’ reactions, which will come after Sunday’s opening. But Drabinsky remains upbeat, citing the “wonderful” audience response and positive tweets.“I made the decision, in terms of marketing, that our best course was to ensure that we filled the previews to capacity at whatever average ticket price we could get, and let word of mouth take over,” he said.His showman’s optimism is bolstered by a sober, even sentimental, belief in redemption. “There is a spirit in the soul of this country,” he said, “that allows somebody the opportunity to come back and work hard and be able to deliver a cultural work hopefully that will be meaningful. It’s one of the things that fills my heart every day.”Whether “Paradise Square” fills the seats at the Ethel Barrymore Theater will decide if Drabinsky has a future on Broadway — or whether it’s back to square one. More

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    How Stephen Sondheim’s Work Did (and Didn’t) Translate to the Screen

    A new series of adaptations, documentaries and more examines the different ways the composer-lyricist left his mark on movies.Stephen Sondheim, the unparalleled composer-lyricist who died in November, may have changed musical theater forever, but as a new program at the Museum of the Moving Image argues, he left his mark on film as well. Whether it’s Elaine Stritch’s screen-shattering performance of “The Ladies Who Lunch” in D.A. Pennebaker’s documentary “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” or Madonna’s slinking around and cooing “Sooner or Later” in “Dick Tracy,” Sondheim’s work has given film audiences memorable moments.The museum program, See It Big: Sondheim, assembled by the guest programmer Michael Koresky, the film curator Eric Hynes and the assistant curator, Edo Choi, offers a survey of adaptations of Sondheim’s work and other examples of his contributions to film, including a murder-mystery screenplay and the score to a French new wave film. I spoke with Koresky about Sondheim’s gifts to cinema and why it’s so hard to adapt his work. Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.Sondheim let people adapt his work freely, which your program shows.He said in many interviews that he is OK with someone massaging and changing and doing things for their own sake, and I think that just shows his generosity and his experimentation ability to allow others to be experimental. You can see that all the way through to 2021. With the Spielberg version of “West Side Story,” you could tell that he was sort of delighted to find that it had this new life.I think it’s up to us, as Sondheim lovers, to [say] when something isn’t working. But because of that, it takes something really different and experimental and strange to be a truly successful adaptation, which is why I think that “Original Cast Album: ‘Company’” is probably the best “adaptation” of a Sondheim musical.What about that film is able to articulate the skill and artistry of Sondheim in ways that some other attempts do not?Remembering Stephen SondheimThe revered and influential composer-lyricist died Nov. 26, 2021. He was 91. Obituary: A titan of the American musical, Sondheim was the driving force behind some of Broadway’s most beloved shows. Final Interview: Days before he died, he sat down with The Times for his final major interview. His Legacy: As a mentor, a letter writer and an audience regular, Sondheim nurtured generations of theater makers. ‘West Side Story’: Does the musical, which features some of the artist’s best-known lyrics, deserve a new hearing? ‘Company’: The revival of his 1970 musical features a gender swap.I think with Sondheim, witnessing the artistic process is part of the whole experience, creation is baked into the actual production. When you’re really attuned to the lyrics and the melodies, you’re thinking about how this possibly could have come about. So you’re constantly aware of the richness of the text and the complexity. For a documentary to just be about that literally: You’re seeing people do things over and over again, you’re getting a glimpse into an aspect of musical production that you probably never would have the chance to see. Pulling the strings and looking becomes part of the text. His musicals are so much about their own construction, so I can’t think of a better film based on Sondheim.Was there a particular piece that you wanted to start this series as a kind of guiding ethos for what you wanted the program to say about his legacy?For me, it was the 1966 television program “Evening Primrose,” which didn’t end up in the program, only because it was impossible to find. I grew to love “Take Me to the World,” which is a song I discovered in a piano book. That show typifies everything that I love about Sondheim: the melodies, the strange subject matter, the weird sources of adaptation, the really idiosyncratic, disturbing, bizarre and beautiful. I wanted that to be the discovery for people.We started with the 2021 “West Side Story” because we want to give people the chance to see it on the big screen, since so many people missed seeing it last December.What is it that makes it so difficult to adapt Sondheim to the screen? There aren’t, with very few exceptions, great screen interpretations of his work that aren’t filmed theater productions.He gives you something that you think you understand. Even with “Into the Woods” (the 2014 film), it’s like, “Oh, it’s a deconstruction of fairy tales.” But that’s really not enough to go on. There’s something really profound going on there about sadness and loneliness that is probably really hard to square with the genre trappings. They’re tricky because he’s always doing two things at once. And when you make a film, filmmakers often focus on the spectacle, not realizing that the spectacle has to be elided. That’s really hard to do in film.I was thinking today about which Sondheim works I wish there were movies of. I never want “Sunday in the Park With George” to be a movie, just by virtue of what it is, how it’s produced, what it’s about. What it’s doing feels so New York stage, it would be so strange.Could you talk about Sondheim and Madonna’s cinematic work in “Dick Tracy”?For me, as a little gay boy with his Madonna “I’m Breathless” cassette tape in 1990, it was the essential thing. Period. “Dick Tracy,” the gruff lantern-jawed masculine comic book detective, just does not interest me. But I remember those songs. It’s one of those things that’s a queering agent. “Dick Tracy” really feels like a hybrid of a lot of different sensibilities. I like the way that Sondheim and Madonna’s contributions help to negate the uber-masculinity of the text.And we have to talk about “The Last of Sheila” (1973), which he co-wrote with Anthony Perkins.That’s a tricky one. It’s interesting that they chose an intricate, whodunit murder mystery plot, because how else would you intelligently funnel this Sondheim complexity and idea of overlapping narratives, characters, themes into a genre film? I think that’s what makes it delightful. With Sondheim you see the gears working without it taking you out of the film. It’s a movie about game playing, in which you’re constantly being asked to size up the people involved. It’s very mechanical in a fun way.And in a nasty way that I love, too.One of the game cards in the film reads, “You are a homosexual.” And the way they talk about it is surprisingly casual and sort of progressive. There’s the idea that this is an accusation. But when it’s revealed, there’s a real casualness about it. It’s surprising for “closeted” — at the time — gay men to write.See It Big: Sondheim runs through May 1 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, Queens. For more information, go to movingimage.us. More

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    Late Night Gets Why Putin’s Advisers Keep Him in the Dark

    “Of course they’re afraid to be honest,” Stephen Colbert said. “No matter what you say to a psychotic boss, you lose.”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.Putin’s LossRussian troops are reportedly afraid to let Vladimir Putin know just how poorly the war in Ukraine is going.“Of course they’re afraid to be honest. No matter what you say to a psychotic boss, you lose,” Stephen Colbert said.“There are a lot of reasons it’s going so terribly. The Russian troops, they have no clear purpose, the troops are running out of food, and it turns out they have really bad technology. For instance, while most modern military radios are impossible to intercept, many Russians forces are communicating on unencrypted high frequency channels that allow anyone with a ham radio to eavesdrop. To which Russian soldiers said, ‘A radio made of ham? Can I have one? I’m so hungry!’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, Russia’s walkie-talkies are being bombarded with heavy metal music from Ukrainian operators. OK, that’s not bad, heavy metal, but if Ukraine really wants to mess with Russian soldiers, they should flood their walkie-talkies with an unbearably long podcast.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But Vladimir Putin may not be aware of how bad his invasion is going because new intelligence suggests his advisers misinformed him on Ukraine. Well, Putin’s clearly a victim of his own pro-Russia propaganda. He doesn’t even know that Russia lost ‘Rocky IV.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Intelligence officials reportedly believe that Russian president Vladimir Putin has only recently learned how poorly the invasion of Ukraine has been going and is angry with his military advisers. And you can tell he’s upset, because now the table is even longer.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Walking It Back Edition)“And Republican congressman Madison Cawthorn is now taking back the comments he made about fellow lawmakers inviting him to orgies and doing cocaine in his presence. In a meeting with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Cawthorn admitted his comments were ‘exaggerated.’ He talked a big game about cocaine and orgies, but in reality, it was just Claritin, and an over-the-pants handy.” — JAMES CORDEN“First he said on a podcast that they did cocaine in front of him; now he says he thinks he may have seen a staffer in a parking garage from 100 yards away. How deluded are you to be in a parking garage, seeing someone lean over to pick up their keys and thinking, ‘Uh oh, looks like another cocaine orgy’?”— JAMES CORDEN“That was obviously a very bizarre and shocking allegation, and it pissed off Cawthorn’s G.O.P. colleagues because he seemed to be accusing his fellow Republicans of being the sex-crazed drug addicts. And by the way, let me just state for the record, I don’t care — have your orgies. You’re consenting adults. If you want to roll out a tarp in a Holiday Inn conference room and go to town on each other, be my guest.” — SETH MEYERS“Dude, when you’re trying to tamp down orgy rumors, don’t say ‘members,’ just say people — we know who you mean.” — SETH MEYERS“He sounds like me in high school trying to convince my mom and dad that everyone at the party was drinking except me: ‘No, I just had — I just had a Sprite because I didn’t like the taste of liquor.’” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingSamuel L. Jackson talked about some of his iconic roles on Thursday night’s “Desus & Mero.”Also, Check This Out Elizabeth Alexander’s book of essays is accompanied by artwork, including Dawoud Bey’s “Martina and Rhonda, Chicago, Ill.,” 1993).Dawoud Bey. Courtesy: Sean Kelly, New York.Elizabeth Alexander’s new book, “The Trayvon Generation,” traces the influences of racism and violence on American culture today. More

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    Review: In ‘I Agree to the Terms,’ It’s Raining Pennies From Amazon

    The Builders Association explores the world of turkers, workers performing thousands of weird, low-paying tasks for an online giant.A place where “information is free” and “money isn’t everything”: That’s how Stewart Brand, the longtime editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, foresaw the future of the internet in 1985.That same year, the management guru Art Kleiner said that his “key impression” of the developing medium was “one of civilization.”And in 1996, John Perry Barlow, in his “Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace,” wrote that the online world was a place “where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”So how’s that going?Cheap are the ironies of hindsight. Yet not as cheap as what happened to a new class of low-wage workers brought about by the internet age — in particular, a group of freelancers on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform known as turkers. They are the subject of “I Agree to the Terms,” an online presentation from NYU Skirball that is less a play than an affable, informative lecture-demonstration on last-ditch labor — and an implicit criticism of it.Because this is the brainchild of the Builders Association — written by James Gibbs, one of its “core collaborators,” and directed by Marianne Weems, its founder — the genre bleed is not unexpected. Previous Builders works, including “Alladeen” (a multimedia piece about Bangalore call centers) and “Elements of Oz” (a riff on the MGM movie musical involving smartphone filters you point at the stage), have often mined delight from novel combinations of technology and storytelling.Even so, when I saw “I Agree to the Terms,” on Saturday, the novelty was causing problems. The 45-minute piece was delayed for 35 minutes by what were described vaguely as “back-end problems.”Once the difficulties were resolved, “I Agree to the Terms” went smoothly if not quite compellingly. In the first part, set during the internet’s early days, recitations from those optimistic manifestoes are interspersed with brief recreations of bulletin board testimony about sexism and addiction. The third part, a glimpse at an online future that includes metaverse avatars, virtual reality and a cyberspace bazaar selling human hearts for NFTs, seems merely glib.Only in between do we learn anything new, as our guides, Moe Angelos and David Pence, introduce the so-called MTurk world. Several hundred thousand workers, we learn, operate on that platform, performing menial online tasks for pennies, sometimes as a side hustle and sometimes as their sole source of income.Semi-scripted interviews with four actual turkers personalize the information. Adah from Florida walks us through the MTurk dashboard, which lists HITs (human intelligence tasks) and how much they pay. Michelle, an actor living in the Bronx, performs HITs on the subway, monetizing time that would otherwise be wasted. Noel, who is quadriplegic, can now work from home in New Mexico — as can Sibyl, from Alabama, who tells us she became a turker when her husband’s death left her with $35 and no source of income.“It was this or murdering chickens at the chicken plant,” Sibyl says, adding that the transportation costs for that minimum-wage work would have wiped out her earnings. At least by turking she can make, on a good day, $100, without leaving what appears to be her basement.It is perhaps for that reason she will not brook any criticism of Amazon. “I know you aren’t all sitting there and judging my pimp,” she says, warningly.That’s it for real-life drama, but there is at least some virtual excitement to come. A QR code leads you to an MTurk dashboard created especially for this production. You have 12 minutes to process as many tasks as possible, accumulating “Builders Coin” and approval ratings as you go. Some of the tasks I faced resembled Captcha challenges; others were short surveys, and a few were simply inscrutable. One, I felt sure, was an SAT reject: an analogous relations question with no satisfactory answer.In any case, I completed 14 tasks, earning $7.17, a 93 percent approval rating and a headache.If the Builders were hoping to expose another Amazonian hellhole of capitalism, I’m not sure they succeeded; the experience, being pleasant enough, was at odds with the message. While turking, I felt no more exploited than while solving the daily Wordle.A more telling exercise might have been drawn from the original Mechanical Turk, an 18th-century scam for which the enterprise is named. That was a chess-playing “machine” operated secretly by a person pretzled into its cabinetry. Talk about back-end problems!I Agree to the TermsThrough April 3; nyuskirball.org. Running time: 45 minutes. More

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    in Theater

    A Playwright Makes the Scene in New York’s Living Rooms

    In the fall of 2020, a young playwright named Matthew Gasda decided to entertain some friends by staging a one-act drama on a grassy hilltop of Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn. The masked audience quickly realized that what they were watching was conspicuously relatable: Performed on a picnic blanket by seven actors, “Circles” presented a group of pandemic-weary friends who gather over wine one night in a city park to catch up on their lives.After the applause, Mr. Gasda, 33, passed around a hat for donations. Then he began plotting his next play.A few months later he unveiled “Winter Journey,” a drama loosely based on Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale,” in a chilly backyard in Bushwick. Then came “Quartet,” a comedy about two couples who swap partners, which he put on in a TriBeCa apartment. He staged his next play, “Ardor,” about friends who gather for a weekend in the country, in a loft in Greenpoint. He was a long way from Broadway, or even Off Broadway, but he was grateful for the attention.“I’d long been staging plays in New York in anonymity,” he said, “but during the pandemic I became like the rat that survived the nukes. Suddenly, there was no competition.”In the spring of 2021, he fell into a downtown social scene that was forming on the eastern edge of Chinatown, by the juncture of Canal and Division Streets. What he witnessed inspired his next work, “Dimes Square.”“Dimes Square became the anti-Covid hot spot, and so I went there because that’s where things were happening,” Mr. Gasda said.Named after Dimes, a restaurant on Canal Street, the micro scene was filled with skaters, artists, models, writers and telegenic 20-somethings who didn’t appear to have jobs at all. A hyperlocal print newspaper called The Drunken Canal gave voice to what was going on.Mr. Gasda, who had grown up in Bethlehem, Pa., with the dream of making it in New York, threw himself into the moment, assuming his role as the scene’s turtlenecked playwright. And as he worked as a tutor to support himself by day, and immersed himself in Dimes Square at night, he began envisioning a play.From left, Bob Laine, Bijan Stephen, Ms. Grady, Mr. Lorentzen and Eunji Lim rehearse a scene from “Dimes Square,” a new play about a downtown scene.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe reflected face of the critic Christian Lorentzen during a rehearsal of Matthew Gasda’s “Dimes Square.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesThe actor Cassidy Grady, under a flag blanket at the same rehearsal.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesSet in a Chinatown loft, “Dimes Square” chronicles the petty backstabbing among a group of egotistic artists and media industry types. It’s filled with references to local haunts like the bar Clandestino and the Metrograph theater, and its characters include an arrogant writer who drinks Fernet — Mr. Gasda’s spirit of choice — and a washed up novelist who snorts cocaine with people half his age.Adding a touch of realism, Mr. Gasda cast friends in key roles: Bijan Stephen, a journalist and podcast host, portrays a frustrated magazine editor; Christian Lorentzen, a literary critic, plays a haggard Gen X novelist; and Fernanda Amis, whose father is the author Martin Amis, plays the daughter of a famous writer.Since the play opened in February at a loft in Greenpoint, “Dimes Square” has become an underground hit that consistently sells out performances. The people who see the show include insiders eager to see their scene committed to the stage, as well as those who have kept track of it at a distance via Instagram. The writers Gary Indiana, Joshua Cohen, Sloane Crosley and Mr. Amis have all attended.The play, which is scheduled to start a Manhattan run at an apartment in SoHo on Friday, also won Mr. Gasda his first big write-up, a review by Helen Shaw in New York Magazine’s Vulture, that compared him to Chekhov and declared: “Gasda has appointed himself dramatist of the Dimes Square scene.”After the appraisal ran online, Mr. Gasda received a text from a friend on his battered flip phone congratulating him on the fact that he had been “dubbed our chekhov.” But even as Mr. Gasda is getting his shot at success in literary New York, something about the noise surrounding his play has been troubling him.The playwright in his Brooklyn apartment.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York Times“I’m thankful for the attention, but the people coming to see the show seem to think the play is complicit with the scene, and that’s getting totally warped by them,” he said. “The play is pessimistic about the scene.”Moments before actors took the stage at a recent performance, audience members sipped cheap red wine and made small talk about the Twitter chatter surrounding the show. As the lights dimmed, Mr. Gasda, wearing a tweed jacket with elbow patches and his usual scarf, reminded his guests to pay for their drinks on Venmo.After the performance, as the loft cleared out, one audience member, Joseph Hogan, a 29-year-old filmmaker, offered a critique: “The likability of these characters is irrelevant to me,” he said. “What’s important to me is if their insecurities are relatable. And as a person who moved to this city from somewhere else and is trying to make it here in New York like they are, I feel I can identify with them.”“If they’re not considered likable,” he continued, “then neither am I. And that’s fine with me.”The play’s cast made its way to its usual bar, Oak & Iron. There, Mr. Gasda nursed a Fernet as Mr. Lorentzen passed along an evaluation of the show.“A journalist came up to me and told me she thought you’d be just another Cassavetes rehash,” Mr. Lorentzen said, referring to John Cassavetes, the noted indie filmmaker of the 1970s and 1980s. “But afterward she told me, ‘No, he gets it. He’s doing his own thing.’”“I’ve gotten Cassavetes references before,” Mr. Gasda said. “But it’s not my job to be interested in what people think. My job is to keep secreting and writing.”He took a sip.“It’s great we’re getting attention,” he said, “but it’s not like I’m making money out of this. I still have my day job.”“It reminds me of this story I heard about a guy seeing ‘Einstein on the Beach,’” he continued, referring to Philip Glass’s 1976 opera. “Then the guy needed to get his toilet fixed, so he called a plumber. The plumber shows up, and the guy asks him, ‘Aren’t you Philip Glass?’ Glass tells him, ‘Yeah, but I’m not making money on the show yet.’”Mr. Gasda watches from below as George Olesky and Cassidy Grady act out a scene from his play “Minotaur.”Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesMr. Gasda’s quest to become a New York playwright began during his teenage years in Bethlehem, where his father was a high school history teacher and his mother was a paralegal. He grew up watching Eagles games on TV with his dad and hearing stories about a grandfather’s days as a steelworker. He became bookish, compulsively reading “Ulysses” and devouring the works of the poet John Ashbery and the novelist William Gaddis.After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Syracuse University, Mr. Gasda hopped a bus to Port Authority. He spent his first day walking aimlessly until he stumbled on Caffe Reggio, a Greenwich Village institution that was once a gathering spot for bohemians and Beat Generation poets. And there, even among the New York University students doing their homework, he felt at home. He soon moved into an apartment in Bushwick and started his reinvention.He wrote on a Smith Corona electric typewriter. He rocked the scarf and turtleneck to literary parties. He hung out in the stacks of the Strand and made Caffe Reggio his office, writing parts of over a dozen plays there. To make the rent, he taught English at a charter school in Red Hook and worked as a debate coach at Spence, the Upper East Side private school. He is now a college prep tutor and lives in a book-cluttered apartment in the East Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn.But even after a decade in the city, he could get few people aside from friends and family members to see his work — until his luck changed during the pandemic, when young New Yorkers, weary of Netflix, seemed up for some live theater.Now, in addition to the second run of “Dimes Square,” another one of Mr. Gasda’s plays, “Minotaur,” is scheduled to open soon at a small venue in Dumbo. An early and intimate staging of the production included the actress Dasha Nekrasova, who has a recurring role on “Succession” and co-hosts the provocative politics and culture podcast “Red Scare.”Mr. Gasda at home.Mark Sommerfeld for The New York TimesAfter a recent “Minotaur” rehearsal in Midtown, Ms. Nekrasova and another cast member, Cassidy Grady, huddled for a smoke on the street while Mr. Gasda chatted with them. They discussed the debut novel of the moment, Sean Thor Conroe’s “Fuccboi,” as well as the new play that was rounding into shape.“‘Minotaur’ is a kind of Ibsenian drama,” Ms. Nekrasova said. “I’m enthusiastic about Gasda because he represents a burgeoning interest in theater, post-Covid, in the city.”Mr. Gasda slipped into a nearby sports bar. He ordered a glass of Fernet, and as he considered the impending run of “Dimes Square,” he suggested that audiences think about his play differently.“Ultimately, ‘Dimes Square’ is a comedy,” he said. “I’m not trying to send people to the therapist. And I’m not saying I’m better than the people in my play.”“The other side of the play is about striving in New York,” he added. “So it’s about something that’s universal, too.” More

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    A Director Returns (Uncomfortably) to His Working-Class Roots

    Christophe Honoré’s latest work, for the Paris stage, is part of a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility.PARIS — The French director Christophe Honoré, best known for films including “Love Songs” and “Sorry Angel,” has been making exceptional work in recent years — and international audiences have been missing out on it. The reason? It’s happening on theater stages in his home country.From “The Idols,” a play dedicated to a series of French artists who died at the height of the AIDS crisis, to “The Guermantes Way,” his Proust adaptation for the Comédie-Française, Honoré’s storytelling onstage has a kind of tragicomic immediacy that is instantly recognizable. His latest production, “The Sky of Nantes” (“Le Ciel de Nantes”), applies this sensibility to Honoré’s own family. The resulting journey, back to his working-class roots in the Brittany region of northern France, is fraught, yet poignantly astute.The starting point of the play, running through April 3 at the Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris, is an aborted film. Honoré had long wanted to tell the story of his grandmother Odette and her 10 children — eight of them fathered by an abusive Spaniard, Puig. Honoré went so far as to cast actors and do screen tests; at one point, some videos of these tests are projected on a scrim in “The Sky of Nantes.” Yet the project never came to fruition. Instead, it became a play about the sticky nature of autobiography.Honoré has a stand-in in “The Sky of Nantes”: a young actor, Youssouf Abi-Ayad, who introduces himself as the director in the first line. The play is set in a timeworn movie theater, faithfully recreated on the Odéon stage, its red seats facing the audience. Around Abi-Ayad, six of Honoré’s relatives — Odette and Puig; his mother, Marie-Dominique; and three of her many siblings — have gathered to hear him talk about their family history and the film he is (supposedly) making about it.Honoré’s staging style is playful enough that this meta self-reflection doesn’t weigh the show down. He makes no attempt to recreate things as they might have happened: Instead, “The Sky of Nantes,” like “The Idols,” brings its characters back from the dead and invents new, casual conversations between them. (They are fully aware of their demise but seem unfazed by it.) Regularly, the actors use microphones on stands to deliver pensive monologues, or a song, to the audience, only for others to interject and draw them into spontaneous-seeming banter.And Abi-Ayad, as Honoré, gets interrupted more than anyone else. Fascinatingly, the play makes space for the other characters to disagree with the polished, screen-ready version of their lives he attempts to recount at the beginning. His boorish uncle Roger objects to a poetic description of him contemplating ladybugs on his father’s tombstone, saying indignantly: “I’m not gay!” Soon after, Odette — whose age is superbly conveyed by the much younger Marlène Saldana — offers her take on her marriage to Puig. When Abi-Ayad corrects a word she uses, she berates him for suggesting she doesn’t speak “well enough.”From left, Stéphane Roger, Marlène Saldana, Chiara Mastroianni, Jean-Charles Clichet, Harrison Arévalo and Julien Honoré in “The Sky of Nantes.”Jean-Louis FernandezThe effect is one of dynamic contrast: As in his other plays, it allows Honoré to reconcile impulses — his penchant for literary self-indulgence on the one hand; his love of fantasy and surprise on the other — that film critics have occasionally found contradictory. But the back-and-forth between the director and his unruly characters serves another purpose in “The Sky of Nantes”: It highlights how difficult it can be to narrate the stories of a world one has left behind.Trauma runs deep throughout the play, from violence against women to suicide, and memories of France’s war in Algeria. The life of Honoré’s aunt Claudie is especially tragic and sensitively portrayed by Chiara Mastroianni (a longtime collaborator of Honoré’s, making her stage debut here). Honoré doesn’t shy away from the casual racism and homophobia of some characters, yet he also shows what gave them joy, too, like their fierce, relatable attachment to Nantes’ soccer team.“The Sky of Nantes” adds to a recent wave of stories in France about the complex aftereffects of social mobility, led by writers like Édouard Louis and Didier Eribon. In the role of Honoré — the gay, upwardly mobile grandson who moved to Paris — Abi-Ayad cuts a pained, melancholy figure. He is often seen smoking on the sidelines while the family quarrels, at once detached yet intermittently drawn back to the fold. “I’m mad at myself for changing,” he tells the others when he admits that he couldn’t complete his film. His focus on bourgeois characters throughout his screen career is no coincidence, Honoré says through Abi-Ayad: “I can only betray you.” Without anger, his uncle Jacques replies: “You’re ashamed of us. We’re not chic enough to put into your films.”Honoré allows his mother, Marie-Dominique, the only member of the family who is still alive, to have the last word. Her role is gender-swapped in “The Sky of Nantes,” and affectionately played by Honoré’s own brother, Julien Honoré.At the very end, however, the real Marie-Dominique appears in a short video clip, and reveals her discomfort with the retelling of family stories. “They’re a pain,” she says of her two sons, with a laugh. Here, and elsewhere, “The Sky of Nantes” captures the thorny reality of autobiography — and its heartbreak, too.Bboy Junior, left, and Djamil Mohamed in Julie Berès’s “Tenderness.”Axelle de RusséSo does another new Paris production, Julie Berès’s “Tenderness,” at the Théâtre Gérard Philipe, in the suburb of Saint-Denis. With a cast of eight young people, Berès explores masculinity in the #MeToo era, through a mix of real stories and fiction. Onstage, the diverse cast members appear to be drawing from their lives, yet “Tenderness” (“La Tendresse”) was based mostly on research: Together with her co-writers, Kevin Keiss and Lisa Guez, with additional help from Alice Zeniter, Berès surveyed around 50 young men about their relationship to masculine norms.The result illuminates the reality of men’s experiences without requiring the actors to share their own intimate stories, as other theater projects sometimes do. With the help of the choreographer Jessica Noita, Berès also matches movement to the text, and many in the cast are accomplished dancers. Bboy Junior (Junior Bosila Banya), an astonishing slow-motion break dancer, holds impossible-looking handstands as he speaks, while the ballet-trained Natan Bouzy recounts a youthful addiction to online pornography while on pointe.There are scenery-chewing group dances, too, which unleash extraordinary energy, but like “The Sky of Nantes,” “Tenderness” is strongest when it acknowledges the contradictions and complexity of its characters. Both productions speak to larger realities of French society, and just like Honoré’s best films, they deserve to be seen widely.Le Ciel de Nantes. Directed by Christophe Honoré. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe, through April 3.La Tendresse. Directed by Julie Berès. Théâtre Gérard Philipe, through April 1. More

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    in Television

    Stephen Colbert Condemns Trump’s Digging for Dirt During a War

    “It’s generally frowned upon for U.S. presidents, current or former, to solicit our murderous mortal enemies for dirt on their political rivals,” Colbert said.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.Poor Sense of TimingIn a new interview with a right-wing news outlet this week, former President Donald Trump called on Vladimir Putin to release damaging information on the Bidens.Late-night hosts questioned his timing.“Damn, he’s asking for Russian help through the TV again? Does this man have no shame?” Stephen Colbert said. “And I withdraw the question.”“It’s generally frowned upon for U.S. presidents, current or former, to solicit our murderous, mortal enemies for dirt on their political rivals.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Well, now he’s asking Vladmir Putin to release dirt on the Bidens in the middle of a war. He wants our enemy to dig up damaging information about our president while he is attacking Ukraine — and he doesn’t see anything wrong with this. The whole free world is trying to stop Putin, Trump’s like, ‘Hey, got anything on the president’s crackhead son I can use? I’d really appreciate it.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“As usual, his timing is impeccable. He reminded the world that Putin is his buddy at the exact moment that everyone realizes that his buddy is actual Hitler. This is worse than last year, when Jell-O re-signed Bill Cosby to announce their new flavor, ‘Out on a Technicality Orange.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (G.O.P. After Dark Edition)“Speaking of right-wing weirdos, there’s some splashback to the story from North Carolina congressman and haunted jack-in-the-box, Madison Cawthorn. Recently, Cawthorn made some extraordinary claims that his Republican colleagues in Congress are orgy-frequenting degenerates with a fondness for hard drugs. Given the average age of the G.O.P., I assume they’re snorting Boniva.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Come on, man, do you really expect us to believe that Congress could plan and execute an orgy? At best, I can see them announcing an exploratory committee that would begin to investigate the feasibility of an orgy at a later date.”— SETH MEYERS“House G.O.P. leader Kevin McCarthy called Cawthorn into his office today, maybe hoping to score an invite or to tell him to stop narcing.” — SETH MEYERS“Rep. Dan Crenshaw of Texas said, ‘It does paint the picture here that isn’t accurate.’ Thank god, because that picture is too awful to be real. I’ve interviewed 80 members of Congress, and I’d have sex with two and a half of them. Not at the same time, of course — I’m not in the G.O.P.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This whole group of pro-Trump toadies is just so weird and loathsome, like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, for example, who, I’m gonna go out on a limb here, wasn’t invited to the orgy.” — SETH MEYERS“Oh, please don’t name names, because all those names go with faces we know.” — SETH MEYERS“Also, I got to say, if they were having orgies and doing cocaine, I would actually find that impressive. I mean, they’re all 70 and 80 years old. If you told me Chuck Grassley was snorting blow and boning nonstop, I’d be like, ‘Damn, maybe he’s more with it than I thought.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingA 72-year-old grandmother from the Bronx twerked for Jimmy Fallon on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe creator and star of “Starstruck,” Rose Matafeo, will sit down with Seth Meyers on Thursday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutThe author Casey McQuiston.Tonje Thilesen for The New York TimesAfter years of being relegated to back shelves, sales of L.G.B.T.Q. romance novels from authors like Casey McQuiston are booming. More