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    Touring Through Omicron: Broadway Shows Hit Bumps on the Road

    The “Mean Girls” tour made it to Oklahoma before it was knocked out by the coronavirus. At first, the production had been able to keep going by flying in alumni from its Broadway run, but ultimately the number of company members testing positive was just too high, so earlier this month the show decided to cancel its remaining shows in Tulsa, and then postponed the runs that would have followed in two Wisconsin cities, Madison and Appleton.When the show hit the pause button, Jonalyn Saxer, the actress playing Karen Smith, found herself with two weeks off and no home of her own — like many actors, she gave up her New York apartment and put her stuff in storage when she signed on to tour. The show offered to fly her wherever she wanted to go, and she chose her parents’ house in Los Angeles.“I was home over Christmas, and when I left I said, ‘I don’t know when I’ll be back,’ ” she said. “Two weeks later, I was like, ‘Hi Mom and Dad!’”The lucrative touring market for Broadway shows is being jolted by the Omicron surge, as coronavirus cases increase in parts of the country even as they have begun to fall in the nation as a whole.This past weekend, productions of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” in San Francisco and “The Prom” in Baltimore were canceled because of positive tests in their companies.“Hamilton” has been particularly hard hit: This month it halted all four of its American touring productions, in Buffalo, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City and San Antonio, because of positive coronavirus tests.The phenomenon is in some ways similar to what happened on Broadway, where so many theater workers tested positive in December that half of all shows canceled performances on some nights. But there is a key difference: Whereas on Broadway, there has also been a damaging drop in ticket sales, elsewhere in the country, producers say, attendance has generally remained steady.Gabrielle Bappert checked the vaccine cards of ticket holders at the Orpheum Theatre in Minneapolis before a performance of “Come From Away.”Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Touring, when we can perform, is going great — the audiences are showing up, and the audiences are enthusiastic,” said Jeffrey Seller, the lead producer of “Hamilton.” “Touring is not going great when Covid sweeps through our company, which has happened to every one of our tours.”For actors, touring now involves less sightseeing, and more risk management, than it once did.“It’s the highest of highs, because we’ve been waiting for a year and a half to be back doing what we love to do, but it’s not the same,” said Saxer, who tested positive for the virus in November when her tour was in Spokane, Wash., and recovered while quarantining there.“It’s not like we can say ‘Let’s go check out this cool bar,’ because actors all around are losing their jobs because someone tests positive,” she added. “It does raise the stakes.”Christine Toy Johnson, an actor in the “Come From Away” tour, said she had not eaten inside a restaurant since July.“In some cities, we’re in hotels and we’re the only people wearing masks,” she said. “It’s very stressful — I’m not going to lie. But it’s also been an exciting time to be back in the theater, making art again.”There are currently about three dozen shows moving from venue to venue, stopping at a mix of nonprofit performing arts centers and for-profit theaters in nearly 300 North American cities, according to Meredith Blair, the president and chief executive of the Booking Group, an agency that arranges touring shows. The shows bring in a lot of money: those featuring union actors (there are also tours with nonunion casts) grossed $1.6 billion at the box office in 2018-2019, which was the last full season before the pandemic; that’s just slightly less than the $1.8 billion spent by theatergoers attending Broadway shows in New York City during the same period, according to the Broadway League.While there has been a damaging drop in ticket sales on Broadway, producers say that attendance has generally remained steady elsewhere in the country.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThere appear to be several reasons the touring audience has remained more stable than the Broadway audience. Most of the venues that present touring productions depend on locals, rather than visitors, so they are less vulnerable to the drop in tourism that has walloped Broadway. Many of the touring venues have large numbers of subscribers who, remarkably, retained their subscriptions throughout the pandemic. And some venues are in parts of the country where residents have been less inclined to make changes to their routines because of Covid.“There’s a huge difference between New York and the audience on the road,” said Rich Jaffe, a co-chief executive of Broadway Across America, which presents Broadway tours in 48 North American markets. “On the road, they consider these venues their theaters — it’s a big part of their communities, supporting jobs and creating economic ripple effects for local downtowns that are quite significant. If we have a show, the audience is there.”Many North American tours are bypassing Canada because of government-mandated capacity restrictions there. But in the United States, where there are generally no capacity limits, venue operators seem pleased with how things are going, despite the bumpiness of Omicron.“We’ve already presented five weeks of touring Broadway, and we’ve had great attendance — our audiences are showing up enthusiastically,” said Joan H. Squires, the president of Omaha Performing Arts, which hosted touring productions of “Cats” and “Hamilton” in the fall and then “Dear Evan Hansen” in the days before and after the New Year’s holiday. Squires wound up scanning tickets at the door for “Dear Evan Hansen” because too few volunteer ushers were available, but she attributed that more to winter weather than Covid concerns.Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except where such requirements are barred, and vaccination rules are up to local jurisdictions.Tim Gruber for The New York TimesThe biggest brand names, as always, are selling the strongest. And “Hadestown,” which won the Tony Award for best musical in 2019 and began its tour in October, is starting strong. “‘Hadestown’ arrived just as we were starting to see Omicron spike, and it far exceeded our targets for attendance and sales,” said Maria Van Laanen, the president and chief executive of Fox Cities Performing Arts Center in Appleton.Presenters in some cities describe a softening of sales as Omicron hit. “We certainly noticed a slower pattern of buying over the holidays — in any other year, we would have been completely sold out, but that obviously wasn’t the case because there was some hesitancy,” said Jeffrey Finn, the vice president of theater producing and programming at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington. “That said, I’m watching a big upturn as we head toward the spring with the hope and expectation that Omicron won’t be as present.”Safety precautions vary across the country. Most shows are requiring that audiences wear masks, except in cities where such requirements are barred; vaccination rules for audiences follow local government protocols (actors and other theater workers are required to be vaccinated).Keeping tours going has required shows to add staff members. “Hamilton” now employs seven “universal swings,” who are versatile performers ready to travel anywhere they are needed to fill in, up from four before the pandemic; “The Lion King” has brought in three additional swings.After canceling three performances, “Come From Away” returned thanks to a blended cast that included veterans of every production, including Broadway, Australia, Canada and Britain. Tim Gruber for The New York Times“Come From Away” offers a particularly vivid case study in the creativity also required to keep shows afloat. The company got hit by Covid earlier this month as it arrived in Minneapolis, where it was scheduled to spend two weeks.“We went 15 weeks without any problems, but then Omicron came and started to wreak havoc,” said Johnson, who has been with the tour since 2018. “At one point half the cast was sidelined.”The producers canceled three performances, which bought them enough time to bring in actors from California, New York and Toronto, and the show then resumed with a blended cast that included alumni not only from Broadway but also from productions in Australia, Canada and Britain.“It’s the never-ending Rubik’s Cube of trying to keep a show up and running,” said Sue Frost, a lead producer of “Come From Away.”Among those who flew in was Happy McPartlin, a standby in the Broadway cast, who had just recovered from her own case of Covid. “I said, ‘Of course,’ because that’s what we do here,” she said. “I knew the state we were in. We had a couple of bad weeks where the numbers were not in our favor, and one of the people from the tour came in and saved us. I said, ‘If you guys need me, I’ll do the same for you.’”Not all of the cancellations have been short-lived. In December, “Ain’t Too Proud” canceled two weeks in Washington; “The Lion King” missed 12 performances in Denver, while “Wicked” canceled six performances in Cleveland. “Hamilton” shut down for a month in Los Angeles, and upon its reopening next month, it is now scheduled to stay just six more weeks, rather than running into the spring as initially anticipated.“I almost forgot about Covid for a little bit because we got so used to it, and it was so much fun to do the show, but then Christmas Eve we had so many positive tests we couldn’t do the show, and we canceled a half-hour after it was supposed to start,” said Nicholas Christopher, who plays Aaron Burr in the Los Angeles production of “Hamilton.” Christopher had moved from New York to Los Angeles for “Hamilton”; he, his wife, and their new baby all tested positive in December, and then he found out the show’s Los Angeles run was ending.“It’s very eye-opening, and very humbling, and makes me appreciate what we do even more, because it’s been taken away so many times,” he said. “It’s almost like PTSD, having the show be shut down again. It still feels like a dream that I’m ready to wake up from.” More

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    Mahershala Ali Finally Gets the Leading Role He Deserves

    In a more just world, Mahershala Ali, one of America’s most gifted actors, would have played the lead in at least a dozen films by now.He’s certainly paid his dues and then some. Over the past two decades, the 47-year-old actor has starred or played key roles in prestige series (HBO’s “True Detective”), sci-fi franchises (“The Hunger Games”) and network-defining political thrillers (Netflix’s “House of Cards”). In 2017, he won his first Academy Award for his performance in “Moonlight,” a master class in what you can do with just 20 minutes or so of screen time, and a second Oscar two years later, for his performance in “Green Book.”So it may come as a shock to learn that Ali has never played the lead role in a feature film before, not until his star turn in the sci-fi drama “Swan Song,” now streaming on Apple TV+.“I always felt like a bit of a late bloomer,” Ali said.On a recent morning, in a wide-ranging video interview from his home in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ali, dressed in a black jacket over a crisp white Team Ikuzawa T-shirt, talked about “Swan Song,” the debut feature from the Irish director Benjamin Cleary.In “Swan Song,” Ali plays both a dying man and his clone.Apple TV+As if to make up for lost time, Ali plays not just one main character in the sci-fi drama, but two: Cameron, a terminally ill husband and father of a 5-year-old son; and Jack, the perfect clone of himself — complete with every one of his memories — who, unbeknown to Cameron’s wife and child, will soon replace him in order to spare them the grief and pain of having to watch him die. In several scenes, Ali shares the stage with Ali, with only himself to play against. “It was fun after it was hard,” he said with a laugh. “Fun after you move through the hard.”It was a winding life journey that took him to “Swan Song,” with stops and starts and moments of doubt along the way. Like the time he was in his second year of New York University’s prestigious graduate acting program and considered ditching it all to go back to working as a deckhand in San Francisco. “I was still in the union,” he said, “and it’s good money.”Or another time, in the middle of his acting career, when he took off a year and a half to care for his ailing grandfather. “He had a stroke in 2010, and I kind of dropped everything,” he said. “I was living in Las Vegas and taking care of him, just me and my grandma.”And there were other reasons that the actor is only now playing his first film lead. The industry was a lot different back when he was coming up, he explained — more stratified between movies and series, which made feature film roles, let alone feature film leads, tougher for TV actors like himself to come by. Those who started in TV were seen as TV actors only, and so his aim was just to be the best TV actor he could be. He was well into the third season of his third series, “The 4400,” before he was finally called on to “step on Brad Pitt’s character” (a monstrous child whom Ali’s character literally stumbles upon at a nursing home) in “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”Ali is “a really powerful actor, but he also has a really calming energy as a scene partner,” said Awkwafina, his “Swan Song” co-star. “It was probably one of the best experiences I’ve had on a set.”Chanell Stone for The New York TimesOther film roles followed — in “The Place Beyond the Pines,” “The Hunger Games” and, in 2016, “Moonlight” — but no leads.Around the time “Moonlight” was released, a writer for The New York Times conceded that Ali’s rise, unlike those of some of his peers, “has not been meteoric.”“When I look at my trajectory, my start was a little slow, if you think about where I am at the moment,” Ali said.Even so, many of the supporting roles he was getting were ones any actor would kill for, like Juan in “Moonlight,” a hard-on-the-surface dope dealer bursting with love for his young charge. “I hadn’t seen that character,” he said. Or Don Shirley, the African American pianist in the biopic “Green Book” who hired an Italian American bouncer, played by Viggo Mortensen, to serve as his valet in the Deep South. “He was the most gracious type of rebellious you could be,” Ali said of the musician. “Somebody who was so smart and cunning and found a way to buck the system by hiring a white guy to carry his bags in and out of a hotel, and be his bodyguard, in 1962? I thought that was genius.”Ali won his first Oscar for his supporting turn in “Moonlight” (2016),  opposite Alex Hibbert.David Bornfriend/A24Two years later, he won best supporting actor again, this time for “Green Book,” alongside Viggo Mortensen.Patti Perret/Universal Pictures“Swan Song” came to Ali in 2019, after he read the script and asked to meet with Cleary, its writer. Cleary had won an Oscar for his 2015 short film, “Stutterer,” but had never directed a feature film before. After a single “really great conversation” between the two, Ali said yes to the project. “It was one of the most beautiful moments of my life,” Cleary recalled.Five Movies to Watch This WinterCard 1 of 51. “The Power of the Dog”: More

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    Trevor Noah Blasts Robert Kennedy Jr. for Invoking Anne Frank

    Noah said anti-vaxxers gathering to hear from Kennedy might have found him leaning too liberal for believing in the Holocaust.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.To Be FrankThousands of Americans attended a Sunday rally protesting vaccine mandates in Washington, D.C. On Monday’s “Daily Show,” Trevor Noah joked they were gathering to “hear why vaccine mandates are worse than Hitler,” after the keynote speaker, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., argued that Anne Frank was better off hiding in an attic during the Holocaust than being alive today.“Yeah, the man is right — who could argue? No one ever talks about how good Anne Frank had it: free room and board, all the time in the world to write — pretty sweet deal if you ask me.” — TREVOR NOAH“I will say, though, crazy is relative because R.F.K. may be saying wild [expletive] about the Holocaust, but half the people he’s talking to don’t even believe the Holocaust happened. Yeah, they’re just standing there like, ‘Anne Frank? Didn’t realize this guy was such a liberal.’” — TREVOR NOAH“Robert obviously never actually finished the book.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It must have been so disappointing. Some of these whack jobs — you know, they’ve been expecting J.F.K. Jr. to come back to life. Instead, they got R.F.K. Jr. It’s like going see the Jackson Five and only Tito shows up.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Robert Kennedy is a notorious longtime anti-vaxxer. Interesting to note, though: He did have a Christmas party at his house last month, and in order to come in you had to show proof of vaccination, in his house, but he blamed that on his wife, so it’s OK.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Good Games Edition)“Well, guys, this weekend was the divisional round of the N.F.L. playoffs, and after all four games were decided on the final play, people are calling it the greatest playoff weekend of all time. Well, everyone from Buffalo, Green Bay, Tennessee, and Tampa are like not, ‘Eh, not so much.’” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, Tom Brady and the defending champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers were knocked out of the playoffs. Brady is really not used to losing — he normally commutes home via parade.” — JIMMY FALLON“Yeah, it was a weekend of upsets on Saturday, Aaron Rodgers and the Green Bay Packers hosted the San Francisco 49ers and lost in Green Bay. In other words, Aaron Rodgers failed his at-home test.” — JIMMY FALLON“It was crazy to see Tom Brady — it was like the Coyote finally caught the Road Runner and ate him right there on TV.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Aaron Rogers, you may recall, was caught in a series of lies about his vaccination status earlier in the season. Before the game, he lashed out at President Biden, said we have a fake White House, a bunch of other stuff befitting a man who has been hit in the head a lot of times.”— JIMMY KIMMEL“Also great to hear someone say ‘He caught it,’ and it’s not about Omicron.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingThe “Late Show” guest Kristen Stewart revealed that she was originally supposed to work opposite Nicole Kidman in “Panic Room.”What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightJeremy O. Harris, who wrote “Slave Play,” will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Late Show.”Also, Check This OutLouie Anderson based his performance as a matriarch in “Baskets” on his own mother.Prashant Gupta/FXThe late Louie Anderson is remembered for, among other things, playing one of the greatest television characters on the FX comedy “Baskets.” More

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    Review: ‘Just for Us’ Reaches Across the Chasm

    The return of this brisk, smart provocation of a monologue is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show.On a narrow, curving street in the West Village of Manhattan, a sign of hope: A production that went dark just before Christmas, as the Omicron variant descended on the city, has opened back up at the Cherry Lane Theater.Sure, that’s what the comedian Alex Edelman’s publicists said would happen when his solo show, “Just for Us,” abruptly cut short its run there in December, promising a Jan. 24 return. But when a production goes into pandemic hibernation, it’s easy to worry that it won’t emerge again.The return of “Just for Us,” then, is a cheering development, all the more so because it’s a belly-laugh funny show. A brisk, smart provocation of a monologue, it’s about race and identity in American culture, and about the tantalizing impulse to reach across the chasm to the hard-core bigots among us.Such as the white supremacists who, Edelman tells us, tweeted a public invitation to a meeting they were having in Queens — though when he took them up on it, he went as an infiltrator. Hoping that no one would realize he was Jewish, he didn’t exactly have unity on his mind. But then he spied an attractive woman he calls Chelsea, and decided to chat her up.“I thought to myself, with no irony: You never know,” he says, and widens his eyes at his own idiocy.He twines the story of that prepandemic gathering, which began with the assembled racists grousing about the then-recent wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, with a recollection from his early childhood: the time his mother, seeking to comfort a bereaved friend, decided that their Orthodox Jewish family would host a Christmas celebration for her, complete with presents and a tree. With a dreidel on top.Is the dreidel detail true? An embellishment? Either way, it works. Tom Stoppard makes a similar joke in his recent epic play “Leopoldstadt,” only there the tree topper is a Star of David. The two shows are apples and oranges, but antisemitism and assimilation are major themes in both. Stoppard is writing about historical Nazis, while Edelman disparages the 21st-century bigots as “Nerf Nazis”: pathetic wannabes. “These are not life’s winners,” he says.Directed by Adam Brace, “Just for Us” is an inherently political piece from a comedian who says he has tended to avoid talking politics onstage. (“Because it bums everybody out!” Edelman booms near the start.) It’s about whiteness, the privileges that accompany it and the hierarchy that — as he saw growing up in Boston — rates Mayflower-descendant types as an aspirational American ideal.More philosophically, the show pokes and prods at empathy and morality, and the ways that othering whole categories of people makes it easy to dehumanize them. Which is a sharply relevant observation in the midst of this ideologically polarized public health crisis.“It’s so hard to hate up close,” Edelman says, but of course that isn’t true for everyone. The white supremacists at the meeting, it turns out, seemed to have no problem with hating him. Which rankled, because part of him wanted them to like him. And yes, he knows that’s absurd.Edelman ends “Just for Us” on a deliciously funny high: by recounting his petty, perfect act of vengeance against the white supremacists. The show itself counts as another revenge — bigger, bolder and with the audience at the Cherry Lane firmly on his side.Just for UsThrough Feb. 19 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 15 minutes. More

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    Amy Schneider Beats Matt Amodio’s Streak on ‘Jeopardy!’

    The category is: game-show legends.The current “Jeopardy!” phenom, Amy Schneider, surpassed Matt Amodio’s 38-game streak on Monday’s episode, making her the contestant with the second-highest number of consecutive wins in the show’s history.Schneider, an engineering manager from Oakland, Calif., often seems unbeatable with buzzer in hand. According to statistics published by the show, of the clues that she has answered, she has given the correct response 95 percent of the time, and she has answered Daily Double clues correctly 86 percent of the time. She became the first woman to surpass $1 million in winnings on the show, and in the 39 games she has won so far, Schneider has amassed $1.3 million.Her next goal post is far away: beating Ken Jennings’s 74-game streak from 2004, which remains the longest in history. Her new target would be particularly poignant if she meets it when Jennings is the host. (The former champion is currently trading off duties with the sitcom actress Mayim Bialik.)Schneider’s success has spurred discussion among fans and internally among the show’s producers and writers about the recent pattern of streaks. Since 2003, when “Jeopardy!” got rid of a rule that had limited contestants to no more than five wins in a row, only a dozen contestants have managed to win 10 or more consecutive games. Schneider is the third contestant this season to do so.Possible explanations for the unusual number of streaks abound. They include a wealth of online resources that contestants such as Schneider have used to study with, and a new entrance test that hopeful contestants can take anytime. Because of pandemic-related delays in taping the show, some contestants, including Schneider and Amodio, also had an unusual amount of time to study in between when they were initially told that they would be on the show and when they walked into the studio.As a sudden game-show celebrity who is also a transgender woman, Schneider has had a whirlwind of a month, fielding a barrage of questions about her life and her preparation for this moment while also countering anti-trans attacks online. In an interview with the L.G.B.T. advocacy organization Glaad last year, Schneider said she had been unsure of how to discuss her identity on the show initially because she wanted her skill at the game to be the primary focus, but that she then decided to address it by wearing a trans flag pin.“I didn’t want it to seem like something that was secret or that was shameful or anything, or that I was unaware of the significance of it,” Schneider said in the interview, “because I knew that trans people — trans ‘Jeopardy!’ fans — were watching my episodes extra carefully, just as I did with the previous trans contestants.” More

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    ‘Harry Potter and the Cursed Child’ Fires Its Harry Potter

    The Broadway production of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” has fired the actor playing the title character, citing unspecified concerns about his conduct.The show on Sunday issued a statement saying that James Snyder, who played the title role for about a year before the pandemic and then rejoined the show when it restarted last fall, had been terminated following a complaint by Diane Davis, the actress playing his wife, Ginny. (The play begins 19 years after the conclusion of the Harry Potter novels, by which point the boy wizard has become a married man, with children of his own.)The show said that Davis had made a complaint “regarding the conduct of fellow cast member James Snyder” Nov. 19, a week after it had resumed performances following the lengthy pandemic shutdown. A spokesman declined to provide any further details, but the statement noted that the show has “strict prohibitions against harassment in any form.”The production said that, once it received the complaint, it suspended Snyder and commissioned “an independent investigation by a third party,” and that when the investigation was completed “the producers decided Mr. Snyder should not return to the production and terminated his contract.” Steve Haggard has been playing Harry Potter during Snyder’s suspension, and will continue doing so. Davis has taken a leave of absence, the producers said.Snyder, 40, previously starred in “Cry-Baby” and “If/Then” on Broadway, and also appeared in “In Transit.” He did not respond to an email seeking comment. More

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    On ‘S.N.L.,’ Donald Trump Tries His Hand at Wordle

    Colin Jost and Pete Davidson provided an update on their purchase of a retired Staten Island Ferry boat, in this episode hosted by Will Forte.It’s the viral phenomenon that gets picked apart on social media, where you throw out random words and see what gets a response — but first, the “Saturday Night Live” opening sketch.This weekend’s broadcast, hosted by the “S.N.L.” alumnus Will Forte and featuring the musical guest Måneskin, began with a parody of the Fox News program “The Ingraham Angle,” with Kate McKinnon as its host, Laura Ingraham.She lamented the first year of the Biden administration, which she said had been a disaster, citing rising inflation, high gas prices and the green M&M’s getting canceled. She added that the nation “is still mourning from the sudden loss of America’s dad, Robert Durst.”McKinnon introduced her first guest, Senator Ted Cruz, played by Aidy Bryant. Bryant explained that her beard was “like Jan. 6: shocking at first, but sadly it’s been normalized.”Bryant’s Cruz went on to deliver a warning to her constituents in Texas: “February’s going to be a cold one, so you might want to book your vacay to Cancún now,” she said. “Live más, everybody.”After offering shout-outs to her remaining sponsors (including Covid Negs, “the Covid test that’s guaranteed to be negative, even if you have it”), McKinnon brought out Pete Davidson as Novak Djokovic, the unvaccinated tennis star who was recently deported from Australia.“People love to tear you off your pedestal, just because you’re really rich or you’re the best at tennis or you go to a charity event with 200 kids even though you’re dripping with Covid,” Davidson said.Ego Nwodim appeared as the conservative commentator Candace Owens (“It’s my greatest honor to continue to fight for African Americans,” she said, “no matter how many times they ask me to stop”), followed by James Austin Johnson in his recurring role as former president Donald J. Trump.“I’m back just like ‘Tiger King 2,’” Johnson said. “You had fun the first time, but now you’re like, how are more people from this not in jail yet?”This time, his Trump-style free associations were accompanied by a round of Wordle, the popular online word game (as well as a boast that he would beat Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida if he opposed him for the presidential nomination). After rambling about the booster shot, John Mayer, Hilary Duff and Jason Momoa, Johnson landed at the correct Wordle answer which turned out to be — what else? — Trump.Opening monologue of the weekForte, who was a “Saturday Night Live” cast member from 2002 to 2010, made his first appearance as a host this weekend. And to hear him tell it, he was not at all bitter that he finally got to do it after hosting duties had previously been handled by his fellow alums Kristen Wiig, Bill Hader, Andy Samberg and Fred Armisen. (Then Wiig again, then Hader again, as well as Jason Sudeikis, Seth Meyers and John Mulaney four times.)But Forte didn’t exactly welcome an onstage appearance from Wiig. (“I flew in for this,” she explained as he shooed her away. “Oh, great, so you know where the airport is,” he replied.) Nor was he pleased to see next week’s host, Willem Dafoe, in the house when the “S.N.L.” boss Lorne Michaels claimed that Forte’s booking had been a mistake: “I texted Willem and, you know, autocorrect,” Michaels said.MacGruber of the weekC’mon, you didn’t think you would get a Forte-hosted episode without a return appearance (or three) from MacGruber, the hapless MacGyver wannabe he originated on “S.N.L.”?It’s been more than a decade since Forte last played MacGruber in an “S.N.L.” sketch (though the character went on to have his own movie and a streaming TV series). But rest assured that MacGruber is still an overconfident blowhard who finds himself trapped in rooms with ticking time bombs that spell his imminent demise.Oh, and now he’s an unrepentant conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. Did we mention he was joined by Wiig and Ryan Phillippe, and he also believes in QAnon?Weekend Update jokes of the weekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on President Biden’s recent news conference and the Senate’s defeat of a voting-rights bill.Jost began:President Biden marked the end of his first year in office with a two-hour press conference. Because that’s how long it took to list everything that’s gone wrong. It was actually the longest presidential press conference in history. But as I’ve been told many times before, just because you went for a long time doesn’t mean you did a good job.Che continued:Senate Republicans lined up to shake Kyrsten Sinema’s hand after she voted against changing the filibuster to pass voting rights. Ah, the U.S. Senate. Keeping Black folks down with a quiet handshake since 1787. Senator Bernie Sanders suggested that he supports replacing fellow Democrats Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema. Damn, Bernie, stab your own co-workers in the back? That’s unforgivable. I would never suggest Colin should be fired, no matter how much better I think Bowen would be. [The screen shows an image of Che anchoring Weekend Update with his “S.N.L.” co-star Bowen Yang]Most important news development of the weekWhat started as a not-so-innocent visit to the Weekend Update desk by Alex Moffat as his recurring character Guy Who Just Bought a Boat turned into a timely opportunity to roast Jost about this week’s news that he and Davidson were among the investors who won an auction for a decommissioned Staten Island Ferry boat.Joining Jost and Moffat at the desk, Davidson declared in a deeply chagrined tone, “We bought a ferry — the windowless van of the sea.”Jost replied: “Yes, it’s very exciting. We thought the whole thing through.”To which Davidson added, in disbelief: “Even the mayor tweeted about it. Which is how I found out we have a new mayor? What happened to Bloomberg?” More

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    Louie Anderson, Genial Stand-Up Comic and Actor, Dies at 68

    He won an Emmy Award for his work on the series “Baskets” and two Daytime Emmys for his animated children’s show, “Life With Louie.”Louie Anderson, the genial stand-up comedian, actor and television host who won an Emmy Award for his work on the series “Baskets” and two Daytime Emmys for his animated children’s show, “Life With Louie,” died on Friday in Las Vegas. He was 68.His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his longtime publicist, Glenn Schwartz, who said the cause was complications of diffuse large B cell lymphoma, a form of blood cancer.In an entertainment career that spanned more than four decades, Mr. Anderson had a self-deprecating style that won him legions of fans, among them Henny Youngman and Johnny Carson, whose early support catapulted him to stardom.In 1981, Mr. Anderson was among the top finishers in a comedy competition hosted by Mr. Youngman, who subsequently hired him as a writer.Mr. Anderson made his national television debut in 1984 on “The Tonight Show.” After his set, Johnny Carson brought him out for a second bow, a rarity for comics and especially for ones making their debut.Joseph Del Valle/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMr. Anderson made his national television debut on “The Tonight Show” with Mr. Carson in 1984, and, as comedians say, he killed. The routine was heavy on jokes about his own weight (which topped 300 pounds at times), and he had the audience roaring from his opening deadpan line: “I can’t stay long. I’m in between meals.”Afterward, Mr. Carson brought him out for a second bow, a rarity for comics and especially for ones making his debut. As Mr. Anderson told it, Mr. Carson later paid him another high compliment.“He came by my dressing room on the way to his, stuck his head in and said, ‘Great shot, Louie,’” he told The St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2002. “Because comics call that a ‘shot’ on ‘The Tonight Show.’ And that was huge for me.”Mr. Anderson went from earning $500 a week for his stand-up work to making twice that in one night, he said. And film and television work started coming his way, including small roles in “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” (1986) and “Coming to America” (1988). In 1987, Showtime broadcast a comedy special that captured him in performance at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.Reviewing the show for The New York Times, John J. O’Connor wrote, “In an age when comedians rely on desperation measures to establish a performing identity — think of Howie Mandel indulging in infantile screaming or Sam Kinison feigning a nervous breakdown — Mr. Anderson has developed a low-keyed act that could fit comfortably into the category of family entertainment.”He added, “At a time when stand-up comedy is trafficking heavily in insult, hysteria and sexual obsessions, Mr. Anderson seems to have come up with something truly different — old-fashioned, heartwarming humor.”That would be his bread and butter for his whole career, although he took it in interesting directions. “Life With Louie,” which ran from 1994 to 1998 and won him Daytime Emmys in 1997 and 1998 as outstanding performer in an animated program, was a savvy children’s show that also had an adult following; its title character, a child, dealt with an assortment of problems at home and on the playground.Mr. Anderson won an Emmy for his performance as Zach Galifianakis’s mother on the comic drama “Baskets.”Colleen Hayes/FXOn “Baskets,” an acclaimed comic drama that ran from 2016 to 2019 and starred Zach Galifianakis, Mr. Anderson, in drag, played the mother of twin brothers played by Mr. Galifianakis. Mr. Anderson was nominated for the supporting actor Emmy for the role three times, winning in 2016.In a 1996 interview with The Orlando Sentinel, he reflected on his appeal.“People are comfortable with me onstage,” he said. “There’s nothing hateful about my comedy. I look at it from the humanity standpoint. I’m just kind of like ‘Hey, we’re all in this together,’ and so they feel comfortable inviting me into their living rooms.”Louis Perry Anderson was born on March 24, 1953, in St. Paul, Minn. His mother, Zella, was a homemaker, and his father, Louis, was a jazz musician.He graduated from high school in St. Paul and had a job counseling troubled youths when his career path changed as a result of a dare.“I went out one night with some guys from work and we saw a couple of comedians,” he recounted in a 1987 interview with The Post-Standard of Syracuse, N.Y. “I remarked that neither one of them was very funny, and everybody began telling me to get up there myself if I thought I could do it better.“The joke kind of escalated over time,” he continued, “and finally one night, I did get up onstage. Once I did, I discovered that I liked it a lot. I have been doing it ever since.”He began working comedy clubs in Minnesota, then branched out to Chicago and other mid-American cities. At the 1981 Midwest Comedy Competition in St. Louis he did well enough to impress the show’s host, Mr. Youngman, who hired him as a writer and boosted his confidence.“He helped me learn to write really good material, and he encouraged me to stay in comedy,” Mr. Anderson said of Mr. Youngman. “I was at that point where I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do next.”The Carson appearance in 1984 helped make him a headliner, and he worked regularly in Las Vegas and other top comedy cities, touring for a time with Roseanne Barr. A 1996 sitcom, “The Louie Show,” on which he played a psychotherapist. lasted only six episodes despite a supporting cast that included Bryan Cranston, but Mr. Anderson frequently played guest roles on other series and was a fixture on late-night talk shows. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, he was host of the game show “Family Feud.”He was also an author. His stand-up comedy drew heavily on his family in lighthearted ways, but his books had a more serious element. “Dear Dad: Letters From an Adult Child” (1989) was a series of letters addressed to his father that dealt with, among other things, his father’s alcoholism.“I can remember coming home from school and knowing when I walked in the door whether or not you had been drinking — without even seeing anyone,” he wrote. “That’s how sensitive I think I became.”As his stand-up career progressed, Mr. Anderson dialed back on the jokes about his weight, and his book “Goodbye Jumbo … Hello Cruel World,” published in 1993, was an honest look at his food addiction. “The F Word: How to Survive Your Family” (2002) and “Hey Mom: Stories for My Mother, but You Can Read Them Too” (2018) also had serious intent.Mr. Anderson was one of 11 children. His survivors include his sisters Lisa and Shanna Anderson, Mr. Schwartz said. Mr. Anderson said he based parts of his “Baskets” character on his mother. In “Hey Mom,” he addressed her directly.“I guess I must believe in the afterlife if I’m writing to you and I talk to you and my face is always turned up to the sky,” he wrote. “If there is an afterlife, I hope there’s a big comfortable chair, because I know you like that, and good creamer for your coffee, and a TV showing old reruns.”Neil Vigdor contributed reporting. More