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    Late Night Is Appalled by Trump’s Mile-High McDonald’s Feast

    The president-elect dined on his plane with some associates — including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who hates fast food. Jimmy Kimmel called it a “subservience test.”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.Not-So-Happy MealOver the weekend, President-elect Donald Trump shared a photo from his private plane, showing him eating McDonald’s with Elon Musk, Donald Trump Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as Speaker Mike Johnson peeked into the frame.“Only Donald Trump would force his new health czar to eat McDonald’s,” Jimmy Kimmel said, referring to Kennedy. “That’s what he does, these are subservience tests.” “This is like the Last Supper, but everyone is Judas.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I love that they essentially hazed R.F.K. Jr., who rails against processed food and has called fast food poison, by not only making him eat McDonald’s but forcing him to take a picture while doing it.” — SETH MEYERS“You can tell it’s McDonald’s, because that is a grimace.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Look at R.F.K. Jr. He’s holding that McDonald’s the way you hold a bag of weed you found in your kid’s room.” — SETH MEYERS“That is the most powerful assemblage of junk food since the Yalta Conference party sub.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Look, I know Trump has been accused and found guilty of many crimes, but certainly none worse than ‘brings Filet-O-Fish on a plane.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT‘There’s No Monopoly on Stupid’On “Real Time,” Bill Maher chided Democrats for losing touch with the average American, saying the party had become “a ‘Portlandia’ sketch.”“Maybe take the clothespins off your noses and actually converse with the other half of the country. Stop screaming at people to get with the program and instead make a program worth getting with.” — BILL MAHER“You love to speak truth to power, and we always should, but you have completely lost the ability to speak truth to [expletive].” — BILL MAHER“You just lost a crazy contest to an actual crazy person.” — BILL MAHER“Even the one concession I’ve heard a few people on the losing side offer — that liberals should stop saying that Trump voters are stupid — comes with a kind of unspoken parentheses: ‘We know they are stupid, just don’t say it.’ Yeah, I got bad news for you: They don’t have a monopoly on stupid.” — BILL MAHERGreg Gutfeld had similar thoughts about the Democrats on Monday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Shit. Meet. Fan.’ Review: Packed with Stars and Vulgarity

    Neil Patrick Harris, Jane Krakowski, Debra Messing and Constance Wu star in the vulgar and entertaining new work from Robert O’Hara.The script to Robert O’Hara’s new play is prefaced with a trigger warning: “This play is a blistering vulgar satire on Male Toxicity and White Privilege.”Blistering? Yeah. Vulgar? Certainly. And viciously entertaining. But when it comes to the show’s loftier ambitions — the “satire” part of “blistering vulgar satire” — its execution is edgy but not necessarily sharp.“Shit. Meet. Fan.,” which opened Monday at MCC Theater and is based on the 2016 Italian film “Perfect Strangers,” opens in a chic Dumbo condo where Rodger (Neil Patrick Harris) and Eve (Jane Krakowski) live with their teenage daughter, Sam (Genevieve Hannelius). But for all the apartment’s swanky accouterments (including a home bar and spacious terrace, all courtesy of Clint Ramos’s Zillow-perfect set design), there’s no domestic bliss here, especially not between the married couple.But for tonight Rodger and Eve are the hosts of a gladiatorial fight night disguised as a party of friends who’ve come to watch an eclipse. This coterie includes Claire (Debra Messing), a heavy drinker with some mother-in-law issues, and Brett (Garret Dillahunt), her tone-deaf lawyer husband; Frank (Michael Oberholtzer), the bro-iest of the bros, and his new wife, Hannah (Constance Wu, again playing the precious outsider); and Logan (a sharp Tramell Tillman), who shows up sans his new girlfriend. The men are brothers from frat days past, which means alcohol, cocaine, bawdy tales and shared secrets, often dividing the party among gender lines.But the real trouble of the night begins when Eve suggests a game: for an hour everyone must share the texts, emails and calls they get on their phones. The reveals revolve around exes, affairs, hidden sexual preferences, plastic surgery appointments, timeshares in the Swiss Alps, even crimes. It soon becomes clear that, unsurprisingly, these friends are awful in a Whitman’s sampler assortment of ways. O’Hara, who wrote and directed the show, gleefully pokes at these characters’ insecurities, hypocrisies and resentments as a stream of Bravo TV-sized revelations steadily raises the stakes. The direction is brilliantly cued and paced, so the party’s movement (both the movement of the characters in relation to one another in the two-story space, and the flow of the dialogue in each scene) keeps the play going at a taut and lively momentum.And it helps that this is no cast of slouches. The comedic chemistry of the group is palpable, and each actor brings their own delicious affect to their role. Harris shows off his impeccable comic timing with Rodger’s sardonic quips and Krakowski fully inhabits the snide mean girl. A hilariously clowny Messing goes full “Will & Grace” with Claire’s hyperbolic drunken reactions, and Dillahunt takes hearty bites of his character’s casual bigotry.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Morgan Jenness, Whose Artistic Vision Influenced American Theater, Dies at 72

    A beloved figure in the theatrical community, she redefined the role of dramaturg, influencing playwrights like David Adjmi and David Henry Hwang.Morgan Jenness, a dramaturg, teacher and theatrical agent who nurtured the work of countless playwrights — including Taylor Mac, David Adjmi, David Henry Hwang, Larry Kramer and Maria Irene Fornés — died on Nov. 12. Ms. Jenness, who in recent years began using the pronouns they/them and she interchangeably, was 72.Mx. Mac confirmed the death. “In Act 3 of her life, she was exploring her gender identity,” said Mx. Mac, who went to Ms. Jenness’s apartment in the East Village of Manhattan with two friends after she failed to show up for a class she taught at Columbia University and discovered her body. The cause of death had not yet been determined.Ms. Jenness was a revered and beloved figure in the theater community — particularly the downtown theater community. (In many ways, she was its embodiment.) She had a deep moral seriousness, colleagues said, as well as a fierce artistic integrity and a passion for subversive work that had depth charges in all the right places. She also had “a complete indifference to material success,” said Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of the Public Theater, where Ms. Jenness began her career. “She was frankly repelled by it.”The play was the thing.“She would ask writers, ‘What do you want to inject into the bloodstream of the American theater?’” recalled Beth Blickers, a theatrical agent.“If you said, ‘I just want to tell good stories,’ she would turn to me and say, ‘That was a terrible answer,’” Ms. Blickers continued. “She wanted someone to say, ‘I have a passion for this community or this idea.’ To tell good stories wasn’t enough.”A dramaturg has been defined as a sort of literary and theatrical adviser who helps the actors and director understand the play they’re presenting. “But that was the European model, focused primarily on the classics,” Mr. Eustis said. “Morgan was one of the first generation of people who were defining what a new play dramaturg was: the midwife and support system of a playwright.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ Is a Humanizing Look Into a Great Mind

    Beyond the appropriate awe, this two-part PBS documentary, co-directed by Ken Burns, adds human texture to the hagiography.“Leonardo da Vinci,” a four-hour, two-part documentary airing on PBS on Monday and Tuesday at 8 p.m. (check local listings), is a thorough and engrossing biography that can’t help but feel incomplete, so vast and unusual is its subject. “Leonardo, for his time, possesses the most knowledge in the world,” one expert explains.Narrated by Keith David and directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns and David McMahon, this is a straightforward but still lyrical analysis. We learn about da Vinci’s early life, family, education and lovers, and the doc does an admirable job of explaining not just excellence but innovation. Enumerating the areas of his curiosity alone could take four hours, so the focus here is more on his output, whose scope and impact are singular even now. (Though maybe we could revive a few more aspects of his influence: Painting is cool, but why are there so few weddings in which performers dressed as Greek gods bless the union and cavort around a giant gilded half-egg? Something to consider, party planners; da Vinci orchestrated one such event in 1490.)“For the first time in the history of Western culture, the process becomes the interesting aspect of how art is made,” another expert points out, and “Leonardo da Vinci” follows that path, too.But beyond the appropriate awe, there’s a through line here of half-starts, dead drafts and lemons — flying machines that can never work, hydroarchitecture that fails completely, paintings never realized for reasons unknown. Those efforts are presented here with an endearing “well, nobody bats a thousand” shrug, adding human texture to the hagiography. One of the greatest minds in human history trails off in one of his final mathematic exegeses because, he writes, “the soup is getting cold.” Geniuses: They’re just like us.Also this weekFrom left, Gracie Lawrence, Alyah Chanelle Scott, Pauline Chalamet and Amrit Kaur in a scene from Season 3 of “The Sex Lives of College Girls.”Tina Thorpe/Max“Interior Chinatown,” based on the novel by Charles Yu, arrives Tuesday, on Hulu.“Our Oceans,” narrated by Barack Obama, arrives Wednesday, on Netflix.After many failed attempts over the years, a TV adaptation of “Cruel Intentions” finally arrives Thursday, on Amazon Prime Video.In the vein of “Floor Is Lava” comes “Human vs. Hamster,” a doofy obstacle course series arriving Thursday, on Max.Season 3 of “The Sex Lives of College Girls” begins Thursday at 9 p.m., on Max. More

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    in Theater

    Broadway Shows to See This Fall: ‘Our Town,’ ‘Gypsy’ and More

    Broadway Shows to See This Fall: ‘Our Town,’ ‘Gypsy’ and MoreA guide to every show on Broadway, including new musicals, Tony winning-dramas, quirky hits and veterans like “Hamilton” and “Chicago.”Jim Parsons, at left, as the Stage Manager in “Our Town,” which runs through Jan. 19 at the Barrymore Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMusicals to Leave You HummingCabaret“Willkommen, bienvenue, welcome” — but for real this time. With a sinuous, sensuous Adam Lambert now starring as the Emcee, Rebecca Frecknall’s darkly seductive take on the Kander and Ebb classic has acquired a much more human feel. Inside Tom Scutt’s Tony-winning immersive design of the Weimar-era Kit Kat Club, the show is newly rebalanced for the better with Auliʻi Cravalho as Sally Bowles and Calvin Leon Smith as Clifford Bradshaw, while Bebe Neuwirth as Fräulein Schneider and Steven Skybell as Herr Schultz will still charm your heart, then break it. (At the August Wilson Theater.) Read the review.The Great GatsbyEva Noblezada (“Hadestown”) stars as Daisy opposite Jeremy Jordan (“Newsies”), who plays his final performance as Gatsby on Jan. 19. This musical adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age novel has a book by Kait Kerrigan (“The Mad Ones”), with music by Jason Howland and lyrics by Nathan Tysen (both of “Paradise Square”). Marc Bruni (“Beautiful: The Carole King Musical”) directs. Linda Cho’s luxurious 1920s costumes won the show a Tony. (At the Broadway Theater.) Read the review.GypsyGrabbing the baton first handed off by Ethel Merman, Audra McDonald plays the formidable Momma Rose in the fifth Broadway revival of Arthur Laurents, Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim’s exalted 1959 musical about a vaudeville stage mother and her daughters: June, the favorite child, and Louise, who becomes the burlesque stripper Gypsy Rose Lee. Directed by George C. Wolfe, with choreography by Camille A. Brown, the cast includes Danny Burstein, Joy Woods, Jordan Tyson and Lesli Margherita. (Starts previews Nov. 21 at the Majestic Theater; opens Dec. 19.) Read more about the production.Hell’s KitchenAlicia Keys’s own coming-of-age is the inspiration for this jukebox musical stocked with her songs. With numbers including “Girl on Fire,” “Fallin’” and “Empire State of Mind,” it’s the story of a 17-year-old (Maleah Joi Moon, a newly minted Tony winner making her Broadway debut) in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood of Manhattan, growing into an artist. Shoshana Bean (through Dec. 1) and Brandon Victor Dixon play her parents, and Kecia Lewis plays her piano teacher in a Tony-winning performance. Directed by Michael Greif, the show has a book by Kristoffer Diaz and choreography by Camille A. Brown. (At the Shubert Theater.) Read the review.Maybe Happy EndingRobot neighbors in Seoul, nearing obsolescence, tumble into odd-couple friendship in this wistfully romantic charmer of a musical comedy by Will Aronson and Hue Park, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen. Michael Arden (“Parade”) directs. At the Belasco Theater. Read the review.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    The ‘Death Becomes Her’ Frenemies Take Their Youth Potion to Broadway

    The campy supernatural movie comes to Broadway as a big, bawdy musical starring Megan Hilty and Jennifer Simard.To be a marquee name after the ingénue years and to feel validated in a cutthroat business: For many actresses on Broadway or anywhere, those can be constant cravings. For Megan Hilty, one of the stars of the new Broadway musical “Death Becomes Her,” they’re urgent themes.“I have this number in the show that’s quite funny,” Hilty said during a recent interview. “But also it taps into something unbearably honest about the lengths to which women, mostly, can torture themselves thinking: How far am I willing to go to be what this world and industry wants and needs me to be in order to feel relevant?”But this isn’t the earnest-minded “Suffs,” not by a long shot.“Death Becomes Her” is a big, bawdy musical of to-the-rafters power ballads, va-va-voom costumes, zippy one-liners and vogueing chorus boys. It’s based on Robert Zemeckis’s supernatural horror comedy, from 1992, about two women — Madeline Ashton, a pompous actress played by Meryl Streep, and Helen Sharp, an unhinged novelist played by Goldie Hawn — who become frenemy immortals after they drink a potion that a mysterious glamourpuss named Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini) assures them will impart eternal youth.No spoiler alert: It does, but it’s not pretty. Rotting flesh never is.Forever young: Hilty as the pompous Madeline Ashton and Simard as the unhinged Helen Sharp, roles made famous by Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe show comes to Broadway after a Chicago run last spring that received mostly good reviews, with much of the praise saved for Hilty and her co-star, Jennifer Simard, who plays Helen to Hilty’s Madeline. As with any Broadway transfer, the show’s creative team, led by its director-choreographer Christopher Gattelli, has spent months futzing — finessing new illusions, adding a new second-act song, redesigning costumes.What hasn’t changed is that Madeline seduces and marries Helen’s husband, Ernest, played by Christopher Sieber (Bruce Willis in the film). And the show still has, as Simard put it, its “nougaty center”: A story about two women who make a ghastly but farcical Faustian bargain that’s rooted in private shame and universal heartache over youth, beauty and self-worth.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    7 Days in the Cultural Life of a Broadway Stage Manager

    When he’s not herding performers at “Once Upon a Mattress,” Cody Renard Richard is bowling, catching up with theater friends and, to his surprise, bumping into Beyoncé.Cody Renard Richard is backstage at the Hudson Theater eight performances a week, wrangling actors and calling cues at “Once Upon a Mattress.”When he has free time, he crams in as many fashion shows, museum visits, board meetings, teaching gigs and other cultural events as possible.“My entire journey in New York is about trying new things and expanding my reach,” Richard, 36, who grew up in Waller, Texas, said in a phone conversation on a Monday, the one day of the week he isn’t working on “Mattress.”Richard has been stage managing since his teenage years, when he was a self-described “troublemaker” before his high school’s theater director, Carrie Wood, encouraged him to channel that energy into a role backstage.Richard at the Hudson Theater, the current home of “Once Upon a Mattress.” “Sometimes people wonder if it gets boring working on the same show every night, but I never do,” he said.Graham Dickie/The New York TimesHe’s now managed nearly 50 television, opera and stage productions in New York, including the MTV Video Music Awards, the Broadway productions of “Lempicka” and “Sweeney Todd,” and “Ragtime” at New York City Center earlier this month. He’s next headed to Los Angeles, where he’ll oversee a monthlong “Mattress” run.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘The Sex Lives of College Girls,’ Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    Catch up with the group from Essex College, go behind the scenes of Ridley Scott’s new movie and get your Bravo fill.Things in college are heating up.Before Reneé Rapp toured sold-out shows or performed songs from her new album on “Saturday Night Live,” she played Leighton Murray, a mean-girl-turned-softy in “The Sex Lives of College Girls.” The show is returning this week for its third season, but Rapp will be absent from most of it — she renegotiated her contract from a series regular to a guest star. It will continue to follow the roommates Kimberly (Pauline Chalamet), Bela (Amrit Kaur) and Whitney (Alyah Chanelle Scott), who left things on rocky footing at the end of the last season. Available to stream at 9 p.m. on Thursday on Max.From left, Sara Silva, Sarah Catherine Hook and Zac Burgess in “Cruel Intentions.”Jasper Savage/Prime VideoThe 1999 film “Cruel Intentions,” about a stepsibling duo who set their sights on the same girl as a power play, is now getting a modern television reboot. In this show, it is the Vice President’s daughter the stepsiblings are after, and instead of a prep school, it takes place at a college where a hazing scandal moves the plot along. Fitting for “Gossip Girl” rewatch season (a.k.a. fall), this show gives the same high-society cutthroat vibes. Streaming on Thursday on Prime Video.A blast of Bravo.There’s a whiff of designer purchases, mansions and good old fashion screaming in the air — and that can only mean one thing: “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” is back on our small screens. Kyle Richards, Dorit Kemsley and the other housewives navigate their friendships with each other but also deal with marital issues and work drama. Tuesday at 8 p.m. on Bravo.Bravo’s longest-running franchise, “The Real Housewives of Orange County,” is wrapping up its three-part reunion this week. And the women have not been holding back — calling for certain castmates to be fired, accusing each other of “throwing venom” and generally squabbling. Thursday at 9 p.m. on Bravo.Though “Housewives” is Bravo’s bread and butter, I also love the network’s stand-alone shows (I am looking at you “Summer House” and “Below Deck.”) This one, “Married to Medicine,” follows women in Atlanta who are either doctors themselves or married to doctors. This season is back with a few new faces, as Dr. Jacqueline Walters takes on the role of mediator. Sunday at 9 p.m. on Bravo.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More