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    Late Night Recaps This Year’s Congressional Baseball Game

    “It was just baseball, no politics, until the Republican catcher went nuts about having to wear a mask,” Jimmy Fallon said on Thursday night.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.Buy Me Some PeanutsDespite this week’s turmoil in Washington, including the threat of a government shutdown, the annual Congressional Baseball Game went ahead as scheduled, with President Biden and Speaker Nancy Pelosi among the spectators.“It was just baseball, no politics, until the Republican catcher went nuts about having to wear a mask,” Jimmy Fallon joked on Thursday night.“It was a real nail-biter. In the eighth inning, I got a text from Pelosi saying, ‘We’re down by one run and only your donation of $26 can turn this around.’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“But Pelosi had to work the phone instead of watching what I’m sure was a terrible baseball game. You think regular baseball is slow, imagine what it’s like with these bozos.” — SETH MEYERS“President Biden stopped by for the game, although it was a little creepy when he left by disappearing into a cornfield.” — JIMMY FALLON“He also spent some of the game working the phones, and then Biden left the park about an hour after he arrived. That has big absent dad vibes: [imitating Biden] ‘You look great out there, kiddo. Daddy’s just on a work call.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And while he was there, he handed out ice cream bars with the presidential seal on the package. I scream, you scream, we all scream, ‘Can you get back to work, Joe?’” — JAMES CORDEN“The Republicans beat the Democrats 13-12, but only because Kyrsten Sinema refused to tag anyone out.” — SETH MEYERS“The Dems had a chance for a big win, but in the bottom of the ninth, Joe Manchin wrote a letter cautioning that it would be irresponsible to score.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Free Britney Edition)“All right, let’s move on to some news about Britney Spears: formerly a girl, yet currently a woman.” — TREVOR NOAH“Jamie Spears, her father, is vacating his daughter’s conservatorship to focus on his true passion, trying to jump an ATV over his aboveground pool.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“It has been 13 years since a court put her under a conservatorship, which means she can’t spend her own money, she can’t make her own career or medical decisions and she can’t even choose her own fighter in ‘Super Smash Bros.’ She just has to be Diddy Kong every single time!” — TREVOR NOAH“And props to her fans for making this happen. Because you know who really was ahead of the curve? That ‘Leave Britney alone’ person. Yeah, at the time, we were like, ‘Whoa, that’s a little over the top!’ And now we’re like, ‘Yo, let’s put this [expletive] on the Supreme Court.’” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean, Britney Spears is worth $60 million, yes — but she doesn’t need a conservator. You know who does? People with $60 billion. Those people are out of control. I mean, name one thing Britney has done that’s as wasteful and just, like, mindless as going into space in a giant penis.” — TREVOR NOAHThe Bits Worth WatchingChloe Fineman of “Saturday Night Live” performed several spur-of-the-moment impressions on “The Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutDaniel Craig in “No Time to Die,” which was delayed a few times because of the pandemic. “I’m so desperate for people just to see it and hopefully for them to like it,” he said.Nicola Dove/MGMDaniel Craig says goodbye to James Bond with “No Time to Die.” More

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    Revisiting a Post-Apocalyptic Play in the Pandemic

    Anne Washburn’s phantasmagoric “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play” is getting a timely new run at Theater Wit in Chicago.CHICAGO — One of the most unbearable things about the pandemic is the uncertainty: about what we can and cannot do, and the way our understanding of what is going on gets tangled in conflicting stories or collapses altogether. And then there is the dread about what will happen next.Or at least that is what I was thinking as I watched this pandemic-era production of “Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play,” Anne Washburn’s 2012 apocalyptic phantasmagoria about hope, storytelling and “The Simpsons.” At Theater Wit in Chicago, Jeremy Wechsler, its longtime artistic director, is offering an expressive new staging that leans on the horror of the last 18 months to draw out the work’s fresh urgency. But he has also found new comfort in its meaning.I saw “Mr. Burns” twice in the Before Times — in 2013, at Playwrights Horizons in New York, and, in 2015, which was Wechsler’s previous Theater Wit production. Like many critics, I was won over by Washburn’s agile, boisterous storytelling and her tangled, semi-redemptive vision of how humans would respond to the end of the world as we know it.The plot is ingenious: In Act I, a group of people try to keep it together after a series of nuclear meltdowns by retelling the story of a single “Simpsons” episode: “Cape Feare,” a sendup of the movie “Cape Fear.” Seven years later, in Act II, those same characters, now an itinerant theater troupe, are recreating episodes of “The Simpsons,” commercials and hit songs. But they lose whatever unity they had and, in the closing scene, are gunned down by rivals. The sung-through third act begins 75 years later, with a ritual homage to the meltdown and a fantastical, grisly and surprisingly comedic version of “Cape Feare.”Washburn and the composer Michael Friedman, who died of complications from AIDS in 2017, were trying to examine how pop culture and storytelling might survive after a disaster. To take a line from the play: “What will endure when the cataclysm arrives — when the grid fails, society crumbles and we’re faced with the task of rebuilding?”Wechsler’s new production lands differently. And the pandemic isn’t the only threat it evokes. Take, for instance, climate change and all that comes with it: fire, heavy rain, droughts, people buying blocks of ice in a city with no electricity, gas stations running out of gas, power grid failure. “We have a larger sense of ourselves as being on precarious ground,” Washburn said in an interview.An emblematic moment arrives at the end of Act I, when one character, Maria, crouched around the fire, shares an anecdote about someone she met at Walmart who courageously tried to shut down the plant. But as she goes on telling the story, it begins to seem as if he never made it to the plant at all: “It’s not knowing,” Maria recounts the unnamed character saying. From the safety of a nearby gas station, he dreams himself fleeing the generator, nuked, and dying. But he actually walks in the other direction, away from the plant.Moments like this — as full of vivid, free-floating theories and fears as our current lives — make it fitting that “Mr. Burns,” which opened Sept. 8, was until recently the only Actors’ Equity Association production in Chicago.Theater Wit requires proof of vaccination and masks; the actors, who are unmasked, perform 10 feet away from the audience of the 99-seat house. But the attendees I saw didn’t seem fazed by the restrictions. And one of them, comparing Wechsler’s 2015 “Mr. Burns” with this one, said during a post-show discussion, “What was speculative became realistic.”In an interview, Wechsler agreed. “Back then,” he said, “the play had a funnier, sci-fi spin and a hallucinatory, giddy feeling.”He did not start the pandemic plotting to restage “Mr. Burns.” In March 2020, Theater Wit was presenting “Teenage Dick,” Mike Lew’s take on Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Wechsler took the show online, but then he sank into a depression. “What surprised me was how quickly the profession could vanish,” he said.Once the theater reopened to in-person audiences, Wechsler thought, it would need “something real, big, complicated and recklessly extravagant.” And he wanted that show to ask: What would theater need to provide in a post-lockdown landscape?Tina Muñoz Pandya and Ana Silva in the play, whose Act III costumes are made from materials including Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets.Charles OsgoodHe thought of Washburn’s layered storytelling and how it might hit more closely now. “I became obsessed with it,” he said.Although Wechsler has directed over 50 shows, restaging “Mr. Burns” felt different. He had never done a remounting in which the lives of artists, and culture at large, had changed so much, he said. This run is different from 2015 in many ways: It is the largest production in the theater’s history (with help from a $140,000 Shuttered Venue Operators Grant); and although a few actors reprised their roles, most of the cast was new, including Will Wilhelm, the first nonbinary actor to play Jenny.The design team is mostly intact from the 2015 production, though the set and costumes in Act III are more of, as Wechsler put it, a “fever dream” this time. The clothes worn by “Simpsons” characters are made of comparatively wackier found materials like Amazon packaging and pieces of plastic buckets. Humorous frescoes of Marge Simpson as Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz” and Homer crossing the Potomac River have been moved closer to the audience.But the most marked changes are in the staging. In 2015, Wechsler set Act I in a forest; now, it opens on the characters huddled around a pile of burning chairs in a backyard. It is also set later in the year, with how people passed time during the pandemic in mind. “Act I is really, ‘How We Spent the Winter,’” he said.Earlier productions I saw dragged at times in Act II, but Wechsler’s new staging of it is ragged and brisk. “There is a shared sense of a new normal and managing dreams, the things the characters talk about, like the fires and the grid going down, have already happened,” he said. “I wanted that ‘Let’s put on a show’ spirit in desperate circumstances.” He was inspired in part, he said, by things that he had previously taken for granted, such as friendly visits and birthday parties, becoming difficult during the pandemic.Wechsler also updated the poignant and hilarious “Chart hits” medley, in which the actors perform (and flub) lines from pop songs. He added snippets from Billie Eilish, Lorde and Taylor Swift. Act III, too, has transformed: Its ceremonial theater piece seemed sharper, or maybe I understood better that we need the grandeur of a chanting masked chorus to communicate apocalyptic horror.In that scene, the actors also used details from their lives during the pandemic. Leslie Ann Sheppard, who plays Bart Simpson, said in an interview: “We incorporated a little bit more of the coughing and ‘Stay away from me. We need to cover our faces.’”During one striking moment of Act III, Jenny reads the names of people who have died. “When we first did the show in 2015, we would sing audience members’ names that were there that evening,” Wechsler said. “This was arresting in its way, but too anxiety-producing and flip after the last 18 months.”Now the names include those in the script, as well as theater luminaries who have died — not just from Covid-19 — including the Chicago actor Johnny Lee Davenport and the Organic Theater founder Stuart Gordon.Later in Act III, Mr. Burns brutally murders Homer, Marge and Lisa, and then Bart seems to kill the villain. But when the lights come on, Mr. Burns is not dead. The last moment reveals him pedaling more and more slowly on a stationary bike hooked up to a generator. It’s an image that “is uncertain,” Washburn said. “It can toggle more difficult or more heartening.”In his production, Wechsler wanted to emphasize the positive. “Life is hard, and none of us is going to emerge unscarred,” he said. “How do we heal? The answer is just keep living.”That moment, in 2015, ended with a blackout after a spotlight shone on Mr. Burns pedaling for a long time. Not now: Rather than close with that image, several colorful electric fixtures slowly descend from the ceiling as the house lights come on.“We wanted to bring the audience in,” Wechsler said, “to show them we are in this together.” More

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    Positive Coronavirus Cases Halt ‘Aladdin’ a Day After It Reopened

    The Broadway show had just returned to the stage on Tuesday with several understudies.On Tuesday, “Aladdin” held its first performance since Broadway closed for the pandemic. On Wednesday, the show was canceled because of several positive coronavirus tests.Disney Theatrical Productions announced the cancellation just a half-hour before curtain, saying “through our rigorous testing protocols, breakthrough COVID-19 cases have been detected within the company of ‘Aladdin’ at the New Amsterdam Theater.”Disney said it was refunding purchased tickets, and did not yet know whether or how future performances might be affected.“We will continue to provide support to the affected ‘Aladdin’ company members as they recover,” the company said in a statement.The cancellation is the first missed performance of a Broadway show for Covid-related reasons since theaters started reopening in late June.But there have been missed shows Off Broadway — Second Stage canceled several performances of Rajiv Joseph’s “Letters of Suresh,” citing “an exposure of COVID-19,” and then postponed that play’s opening after resuming performances with an understudy. And in Atlanta, a touring production of “Hamilton” had to cancel a performance because of positive coronavirus tests.All Broadway companies — cast and crew — are required to be fully vaccinated, as are all Broadway audiences. When breakthrough cases occur, some productions have been able to keep going with a combination of backstage testing and understudies. For example, “Waitress” had a positive test in its cast before its first performance, but was able to use testing to determine that the rest of the cast was OK, and then to keep going with an understudy.“Aladdin” had been dealing with coronavirus complications in the run-up to its reopening performance. The raucous first night performance, with an audience that included Kristin Chenoweth and the show’s composer, Alan Menken, and librettist, Chad Beguelin, featured three understudies. The crowd didn’t seem to mind — “Friend Like Me,” the Genie’s big production number, brought the audience to its feet. Michael James Scott, the actor playing the Genie, stood to the side of the stage, breathless, before shouting to the audience, by way of explanation, “18 months, people! 18 months!” More

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    Young Women Set the Tone for a Paris Theater Season

    The directors staging the most ambitious premieres are all female millennials.PARIS — In March last year, Pauline Bayle’s “Lost Illusions” closed after just two performances, the day before France’s first coronavirus lockdown came into force. Eighteen months later, the Théâtre de la Bastille was chock-full once more for the production’s return to the stage — and the mood in Paris appeared to have finally lifted.Sure, proof of full vaccination or a recent negative test is required at the door, and masks remain mandatory in theaters. But the fear of shutdowns has receded along with the infection rate in the country, now that 75 percent of the population has received at least one dose of vaccine. Nearly all the country’s playhouses have reopened, with hopes now high for a “normal” season.And the directors setting the tone with ambitious premieres this September have all been millennial women. Like Bayle, Pauline Bureau, currently at the Théâtre de la Colline with “Surrogate” (“Pour Autrui”), and Maëlle Poésy, who just made her debut at the Comédie-Française, were on the cusp of national prominence when the pandemic hit.It is a relief to see them back. For emerging artists, the risk of running down funding or losing key opportunities has been especially acute over the past 18 months. The odds for women are arguably even tougher: Earlier this year, a World Economic Forum report suggested that the pandemic would delay gender equality by a generation. In France, an open letter published in the newspaper Libération last March pointed out the continued dearth of female leaders in the country’s arts world.The talent is there to change the narrative, and these millennial directors are maturing. While Bayle, Bureau and Poésy are far from alike, they all shun the highly conceptual approach that is often confused in France for a strong directorial voice. Instead, “Lost Illusions,” “Surrogate” and Poésy’s “7 Minutes” are all examples of confident, clear storytelling, complete with a few twists.“Lost Illusions” is in many ways a follow-up to Bayle’s Homer-inspired “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” two shows that toured widely in France from 2017 to 2020. Once again, Bayle has adapted an epic, character-heavy tale — Honoré de Balzac’s novel of the same name, published in installments between 1837 and 1843 — with just five actors on a bare stage. Four of them play multiple characters, men and women; the fifth, Jenna Thiam, takes the gender-swapped role of Lucien, an ambitious young writer from Angoulême who strives to make it in Parisian society.Significant cuts have been required to keep “Lost Illusions” under the two-and-a-half-hour mark. Still, Bayle and her cast manage to clearly delineate no fewer than 17 characters, sometimes with seconds to change costumes and transition from one to the next.Marie Nicolle and Nicolas Chupin in Pauline Bureau’s “Surrogate” at the Théâtre de la Colline.Christophe Raynaud de LageWhile Bayle relies on the audience’s imagination to fill in some gaps, Bureau’s instincts are closer to documentary theater. In 2019, she tackled the legalization of abortion in France in the 1970s for the Comédie-Française, in a play that drew on real-life events; “Surrogate,” at La Colline, returns to the theme of women’s reproductive rights through fiction.While legal in many countries and in some U.S. states, surrogacy remains forbidden by French law, regardless of the parents’ circumstances. “Surrogate,” which Bureau wrote and directed, openly acts as an advocate for change by telling the story of a heterosexual couple who can’t conceive after the prospective mother was treated for cancer.It’s a tricky proposition for a play, because creating characters in service of a clear cause can leave them feeling one-dimensional. When we meet Liz (Marie Nicolle), a construction manager, and Alexandre (Nicolas Chupin), a puppeteer, it soon becomes obvious — if only because of the play’s title — that they will fall in love and struggle to have a child. Yet in a neat, fast-paced series of vignettes, Bureau manages to introduce them both and stage a believable meet-cute at an airport. Their budding love story is told through intimate text messages flashed over the elaborate two-tier set.Some shortcuts are more frustrating. After Liz undergoes a hysterectomy, the play nudges them quickly toward surrogacy. Liz’s sister just happens to work at an American maternity hospital, and to have a colleague who dreams of becoming a surrogate. The staggering cost — over $100,000 — is mentioned only in passing, along with the vague prospect of a loan.Yet Bureau is brilliantly imaginative when it comes to revealing character in small, concise touches. As the American surrogate Rose, who seems too perfect on paper, she cast Maria Mc Clurg, a trained dancer who luxuriates in languid, expansive steps while heavily pregnant, as Liz watches, still — an eloquent metaphor for the relish Rose says she experiences when carrying a child, as well as Liz’s frustration with her own body.As Liz’s mother, Martine Chevallier is another highlight, insensitively deadpan, even as her daughter struggles. The only major mishap in “Surrogate” is the final scene, which sees Liz and Alexandre’s daughter appear as a teenager. Her studied weirdness, as well as repeated allusions to her high intellectual potential, undermine the rest of the play: Wouldn’t an average child be a gift, too, after infertility?The cast of “7 Minutes,” directed by Maëlle Poésy.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseNotably, both Bayle and Bureau benefited from commissions from the venerable Comédie-Française in 2019. Under its current director, Éric Ruf, the storied company has implemented a roughly equal split between female and male directors every season. This year, the two productions that opened the season were staged by women.After directing a Chekhov double bill for the troupe in 2016, Poésy returned with “7 Minutes,” a play by the Italian author Stefano Massini. It is set in a French textile factory, whose workers fear for their jobs after a change of ownership. Instead, the new management makes them a surprising offer: Eleven women elected to represent their peers are asked to voluntarily give up seven minutes out of the workforce’s daily 15-minute breaks.“7 Minutes” works like a courtroom drama. The characters have 80 minutes to decide whether or not to accept the proposal, and never leave the stage. While it initially seems like a no-brainer — seven minutes, they reason, is nothing compared with layoffs in a declining sector — one dissenting voice, that of Véronique Vella, raises the possibility that it is the first step in a rollback of hard-earned rights. As blue-collar jobs disappear, she asks with understated defiance, should those who remain accept worse working conditions just to remain employed?The play makes a superb addition to the Comédie-Française repertoire, which isn’t exactly replete with working-class stories, and brings every generation of the company together, from the company’s doyenne, Claude Mathieu, to Ruf’s latest hire, Séphora Pondi, 29.From left, Gaël Kamilindi, Sylvia Bergé, Gilles David, Claïna Clavaron and Birane Ba in Rose Martine’s “Hansel and Gretel” at the Comédie-Française.Vincent Pontet/Comédie-FrançaiseAnd there are already new names in the wings. “Hansel and Gretel,” a family-friendly production on the Comédie-Française’s smallest stage, the Studio-Théâtre, introduces Rose Martine, a 27-year-old director born in Haiti and raised in the overseas department of French Guiana.“Hansel and Gretel” lacks a little finesse in the acting choices, yet it’s a joy to see Martine bring elements of Black culture to the Comédie-Française stage, including call-and-response interactions with the audience borrowed from Haitian folk tales. Hansel, Gretel and the narrator are all played by young Black members of the company, with Birane Ba especially convincing as Hansel. Postpandemic, the future looks bright.Lost Illusions. Directed by Pauline Bayle. Théâtre de la Bastille, through Oct. 16.Surrogate. Directed by Pauline Bureau. Théâtre de la Colline, through Oct. 17.7 Minutes. Directed by Maëlle Poésy. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 17.Hansel & Gretel. Directed by Rose Martine. Comédie-Française, through Oct. 24. More

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    Stephen Colbert Channels Willy Wonka to Explain Congress

    The “Late Show” host broke into song to tell viewers about budget reconciliation and other works of “legislative wonder.”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.Yet Another Armageddon“I hope everyone in America is using protection, because it is very possible that we are all screwed,” Stephen Colbert said on Wednesday night. The “Late Show” host was referring to the potential for a government shutdown and the possibility of the U.S. hitting the debt ceiling. (He also explained the arcane process known as budget reconciliation, putting on a Willy Wonka hat to do so.)“It would be what one economist called ‘financial Armageddon.’ That’s bad news and even worse timing, because America’s already scheduled a plague Armageddon, a climate Armageddon and a democracy Armageddon.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yes, for one magical vote a year, senators leave the mortal world behind and enter an enchanted land of reconciliation. [singing to the tune of ‘Pure Imagination’ from ‘Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory’] Come with me, and you’ll be / In a world of reconciliation / It’s our sole remedy / Except for pure intoxication.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Reconciliation is a phantasmagorical place of legislative wonder, where anything can happen. Who knows — maybe even something!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Congress — that’s the only workplace less productive than Dunder Mifflin’s Scranton branch.” — TREVOR NOAH“It’s almost like shoving everything you want into one gigantic $4 trillion package doesn’t work.” — JAMES CORDEN“Republicans aren’t making it any easier, of course. They’ve already deployed their go-to weapon that always stops the Democrats from getting things done: other Democrats.” — JAMES CORDEN“Wait, wait — maybe we should inject the budget with horse paste.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Whac-a-Mole Edition)“YouTube just announced that it is blocking all anti-vaccine content. Blocked it. But don’t worry, if you want anti-vaccine content, just check out the comment section of literally any video.” — JIMMY FALLON“Better 18 months late than never, I guess.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“TikTok explicitly prohibits misinformation related to Covid. Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped videos from spreading faster than the disease that makes people listen to Joe Rogan.” — SAMANTHA BEE“This is all thanks to the TikTok algorithm that uses machine learning to keep users addicted. And if that machine has to learn quick, it dumps Adderall into its USB drive.” — SAMANTHA BEE“While TikTok has removed 62 million videos in the first three months of this year, it’s nearly impossible to remove every problematic post. It’s like playing TikTok Whac-a-Mole, except the moles believe the vaccines will give you an 11th toe.” — SAMANTHA BEEThe Bits Worth WatchingThis week’s hashtags segment on “The Tonight Show” challenged viewers to create fall-themed parodies.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightCharlize Theron, star of “The Old Guard 2,” will appear on Thursday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live.”Also, Check This OutJon Stewart’s new show is about “trying to figure out how to diagnose what’s really, actually going on here,” he told the crowd at a recent taping.Apple TV +Jon Stewart’s new talk show, “The Problem With Jon Stewart,” will examine social issues through the personal stories of guests. More

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    ‘Squid Game’: Wondering if You Would Survive? Here’s What to Read

    “Squid Game” just took over the world (and social media). Here are some of the best takes and trivia.Yet another unheralded Netflix series has become a surprise hit. Seemingly out of nowhere (although it’s actually out of South Korea), the brutal nine-part survival drama “Squid Game” has struck a pop-culture nerve with its dark twist on cheery childhood games like tug of war and Red Light, Green Light — which, in the show, are played to the death for huge cash prizes.Think “Battle Royale,” “The Hunger Games” and “Saw” rolled together with “Parasite”: an exercise in class warfare in which the losers (i.e., the poor people desperate enough to compete) are summarily executed.Noting that “Squid Game,” which debuted on Sept. 17, was the No. 1 Netflix show in the world, Ted Sarandos, the Netflix co-chief executive, said on Monday that there was “a very good chance it’s going to be our biggest show ever.”Wondering whether to dive in? Already tried the show’s Dalgona cookie challenge? Either way, we’ve gathered what’s worth reading from the oceans of ink about the show. Excerpts and links, below:‘How Netflix’s Brutal “Squid Game” Is Already Wreaking Havoc Around the World’ [New York Post]“More than 14 billion videos with the hashtag #SquidGame have appeared on TikTok since the show premiered Sept. 17 on Netflix. Now it’s being hyped as the platform’s top streaming series in the US and dozens of other countries — quickly becoming a time-sucking trending topic on Twitter and Instagram, too.”‘“Squid Game”: How a Hyper-Violent Korean Series became Netflix’s Biggest Hit’ [The Age]“Dr Sung-Ae Lee, an expert in Korean film and television from Macquarie University, says the show’s focus on the ever-increasing gap between rich and poor has perhaps proved timely for audiences. ‘It’s about Homo economicus, rather than Homo sapiens — these are people who only think about money,’ she says of the show’s characters. ‘We’re living in an era where people follow neoliberal ideology without even knowing, so I think the audience identifies themselves in the story.’”‘Who Is Gong Yoo?’ [Marie Claire]“Yoo is a familiar face to fans of Korean content. The 41-year-old actor has starred in some of the biggest k-dramas and films of the past 20 years, all while maintaining a private life off of social media. If this is your first time seeing Yoo, here’s what we know about him and which of his projects to watch next.”‘This “Squid Game” TikTok Uncovers A Major Clue Hidden Behind the Beds in Episode 1’ [Bustle]“A shrewd TikTok user noticed that hints to survive the deadly games were inside the bunker ever since they woke up in it in Episode 1. “THE CLUES WAS IN FRONT OF THEM ALL ALONG,” TikTok user @lucy.what1 wrote on her short clip. The video zooms in on the empty bunker, from a scene later in the series when the number of players had dwindled, clearly showing wall paintings that depict all six games played throughout the season.”‘“Squid Game” Knockoffs Are The Latest Sensation to Take Over Roblox’ [Polygon]“These knockoffs are able to proliferate across the Roblox platform because it’s hard to issue a claim against a children’s game, and also, knockoffs and parody games often go unnoticed. In fact, it’s common for on-platform developers to copy original IP, using nonlicensed characters from shows like ‘Dragon Ball Z’ and ‘Demon Slayer.’ Whether these developers get caught depends on how aggressively the I.P. owners protect their content.”‘I Tried the Dalgona Candy Challenge to See If I Would Survive “Squid Game”’ [Delish]“I was curious about how difficult this might be, so I decided to try it out myself. I followed this recipe from Korean Bapsang, but improvised with a few tools. I heated 6 tablespoons of sugar over low heat in a pot I held on its side. Once it all melted, I turned off the heat and added ¼ teaspoon of baking soda. What then ensued was the most chaotic two minutes of my life.”‘Why Are ‘Squid Game’’s English-Language Actors So Bad?’ [Den of Geek]“Given the V.I.P.s’ role in the narrative, the stilted performances of the English-language actors kind of work. The V.I.P.s are a group of disgusting wealthy men so out of touch with humanity that they bet on human life for fun. This is reflected in the manner of their speech. […] To call them monsters would be letting them off the hook for their lack of humanity, which is a choice they make everyday, but to have that separation between the contestants and the V.I.P.s marked not only by a language barrier, but by a style of performance, is an interesting narrative decision, if it was one.”‘The Chekhov’s Gun in “Squid Game” That Has Fans Theorizing About Season 2’ [Looper]“Redditor u/Atlantic789 gets credit for noticing the Chekhov’s gun moment, which happens about 31 minutes into the fifth episode of Season 1, “A Fair World.” The undercover police officer Hwang Joon-ho has infiltrated the island’s unit of red-suited guards, and he’s climbing down a ladder inside a secret passage […]”‘The Ending to “Squid Game” Depicts a Moral Battle Between Egoism and Altruism’ [Men’s Health]“The moral beliefs of the extremely wealthy, ‘Squid Game’ leads us to believe, are essentially egoistic. They also believe that everyone shares this ethic, making it acceptable to prey on others.” More

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    ‘The Many Saints of Newark’ Review: The Best Really Is Over

    In the movie prequel to “The Sopranos,” Tony returns as a child who learns to navigate his families on a difficult road to mob power.Tony Soprano, the mob boss in “The Sopranos,” was many things: husband, father, animal lover, lady-killer, sociopathic capitalist, pop-culture sensation. Americans like their villains on the soft side, and Tony famously suffered from inner turmoil, manifested in panic attacks, to go with the blood on his hands. A mobster in therapy — with a sexy female shrink, no less — generated bountiful narrative tension, as did his overlapping gangland and extended families. All told, Tony was a perfect distillation of two great American passions: self-improvement and getting away with murder.Created by David Chase, “The Sopranos” faded to enigmatic black in 2007, though it endures, including on HBO, its original home for six seasons. As a rule, we use the present tense when writing about fiction: Characters exist in the eternal now, or that’s the idea. But the death of James Gandolfini, who played Tony, complicates this because he and the show were interchangeable. With his lucid, quicksilver expressivity and a hulking, powerfully threatening physicality, Gandolfini made flesh Tony’s internal struggle, filling a potential cartoon with soul and, by extension, giving greater depth to the show. His absence is why I think of his signature character in the past tense.It’s also a reason the movie spinoff “The Many Saints of Newark,” a busy, unnecessary, disappointingly ordinary origin story, doesn’t work. The movie certainly has pedigree. It was written by Chase with Lawrence Konner, who wrote a few episodes of “The Sopranos,” and directed by Alan Taylor, another series veteran. Jumping between time periods, it tracks the sentimental education (moral and emotional) of the young Tony, who in 1967 is an 11-year-old pipsqueak played by William Ludwig. After a lot of introductions and plot developments, the story jumps to Tony at 16, now played by Gandolfini’s son, Michael, who bears a striking resemblance to his father.The movie means to show how and why the child became the man we never see but who casts a deep shadow. Following along with this evolutionary journey will be easier for those who watched “The Sopranos,” week after week, for 86 episodes of detailed, intimate, explanatory character development. Whatever your familiarity with the series, you may soon find yourself wondering why the filmmakers decided the way to fill in Tony’s past was to delve into his early relationship with a dreary, clichéd surrogate father rather than, say, his monstrous mother, Livia (immortalized in the show by Nancy Marchand and played here by Vera Farmiga with a prodigious prosthetic nose).Tony’s symbolic dad in “Saints” is Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola, who can’t hold the center), a midlevel mob guy and father to the adult Tony’s mentee, Christopher, the drug-addled distant cousin and screw-up played by Michael Imperioli. Dickie never appeared onscreen in “The Sopranos,” but in the movie he takes on crucial twinned roles as Tony’s champion and as a progenitor of the violent, emotionally addled mobster Tony later becomes. It’s never clear why Dickie has a soft spot for the kid, other than it gives Tony a narratively convenient, relatively benign replacement for his more floridly violent, often absent dad. Mostly Dickie is a new toy that the filmmakers can play with.Too bad he’s right off the shelf. An amalgam of wiseguy clichés wrapped in a period-appropriate package, Dickie enters a crowded field of movie mob guys who are rarely as interesting as their makers believe. He has all the prerequisites, from the slick car to the sleek suits, and comes burdened with the usual work and women problems. Some of these headaches produce tension and promising interest, most notably Dickie’s relationship with a restless Black employee, Harold McBrayer (a nuanced, bristling Leslie Odom Jr.), whose discontent is mirrored, or is meant to be, by unrest that is based on what happened in Newark in 1967 after the arrest of a Black man.Both Harold’s prominence and the relatively few racist slurs dropped here are an index of the different cultural climates in which the movie and the show opened. Mobsters are going to mobster (bada-bing), but the language they use and the barbarisms they commit have been attenuated. And while the movie tries to engage race, its efforts are wan, cautious. By contrast, the women remain pretty much the same nagging wives, dutiful daughters and hot girlfriends, a.k.a. goomahs (bada-boom). The most important of these is a beauty, Giuseppina (Michela De Rossi), who’s brought from Italy by Dickie’s father (Ray Liotta) to be his wife; mostly, she’s around to flash booty and stir up Oedipal trouble.Movie spinoffs can be tough to pull off. Nothing felt at stake when I watched, oh, the first “Brady Bunch” movie, but its source material wasn’t a critical fetish, something that inspired excited discussions on masculinity, the latest golden age of television and the effect on the industry. “The Sopranos,” though, was too good, too memorable, and its hold on the popular imagination remains unshakable. It still casts a spell, and the movie knows it, which is why it sticks to the tired template of a boy’s own story rather than taking a radical turn, like revisiting Tony’s world from Giuseppina’s or Livia’s or Harold’s points of view. In the end, the best thing about “The Many Saints of Newark” is that it makes you think about “The Sopranos,” but that’s also the worst thing about it.The Many Saints of NewarkRated R for Mafia violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters and on HBO Max. More

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    Review: Tracy Letts Brings Out the Long Knives in Short Plays

    It takes 15 minutes or less in each segment of “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts” for the bard of male moral decrepitude to skewer his subjects.Tracy Letts, though always funny, has never been jolly.You wouldn’t, after all, expect bonhomie from a writer whose earliest plays were called “Killer Joe” and “Bug.” Even now, in dark memory, those Off Broadway hits feel somehow infested, buzzing with sociopathy.Nor did “August: Osage County,” his 2007 Broadway breakthrough, do much to advertise the charms of humanity, featuring as it did a hellish family that by the final curtain made the opening suicide seem inevitable.Since then, despite the increased restraint of middle age, he has periodically released his swarms of psychic cicadas; “Linda Vista,” his 2019 Broadway outing, basically pinned American maleness to a museum wall, letting it writhe there, and us with it.Now welcome to Letts 2021, the streaming edition, as Steppenwolf Theater Company, his longtime Chicago home, unveils a virtual Letts sampler. In three heartbreaking, brutally short plays — an anthology if not of horror then of angst — the fury may be fully internalized, but it is nevertheless poisonous, and seeps.I at first thought the pandemic might be a factor in the tone of the triptych, which carries the omnibus title “Three Short Plays by Tracy Letts,” but as it happens all three were written in the Before Times. They first appeared, live, at the Gift Theater, another Chicago institution, during annual evenings of original short works by various writers. I can only imagine that on those occasions, they came off like the creepy guy at the corner of a party.That’s a compliment, by the way, or at least a job description for Rainn Wilson. In “Night Safari,” first performed in January 2018, Wilson plays Gary, the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever. Certainly it’s the most unusual, containing only animals whose characteristics mirror those of their guide. Take, for instance, the Panamanian night monkey, monogamous in captivity but not, Gary emphasizes, in the wild.Rainn Wilson, as the sad sack leader of what may be the most pathetic animal tour ever, in “Night Safari.”Liberace Cruzuee“There’s a lesson there somewhere,” he says, “but you’re going to have to figure it out for yourself.”Between stops at the aardwolf (“physically unattractive, and what is with this attitude?”); the boreal owl (“unsociable”); and the reverse-growing paradoxical frog (“Imagine that, if you can … dwindling as you mature”), Gary can’t help but display his own problems, too. These mostly involve Rhonda, who works in the gift shop and has so far responded unfavorably to his khaki plumage.Wilson is terrific in the 12-minute monologue, managing (much as he did as Dwight Schrute on “The Office”) to make boorishness and hostility human if not sympathetic. In the director Patrick Zakem’s merciless close-ups, he looks as if he’s actively curdling. Even so, “Night Safari,” with its slightly over-clever conceit, is not much more than a lark — perhaps a foxy lark, characterized (I read) by its quick, high-pitched song.“The Old Country,” written in 2015, is no less foxy; what seems at first like a simple lunchtime conversation between two codgers embodied by papier-mâché puppets moves quickly but without comment into another realm as you realize the men are talking at cross-purposes. Ted (voiced by William Petersen) is the spryer of the pair, and basically compos mentis; he praises the diner’s sandwiches, recalls the Russian waitresses who used to work there and waxes sexist on the topic of past conquests.But Landy (the great Mike Nussbaum, who is 97) seems to have let go of his moorings, drifting on a sea of random and often inappropriate thoughts. When Ted says of a previous visit, “We sat in a booth right there,” Landy responds: “You sawed a lady in half.”As his non sequiturs (or at least I hope they’re non sequiturs) get ever more so, you realize that he is not in fact responding; rather, he is making pronouncements, as perhaps we all do, from a locked-down world of his own.That impression is deepened by the choice (the director, again, is Zakem) to stage the piece, written for humans, with the puppets, which as rendered by Grace Needlman seem to generalize human experience instead of specifying it the way live actors do. Their sad gorgeousness and apt materiality — Ted’s stringy white hair looks like Scotch tape, as if it alone were holding him together — give “The Old Country” the weight of universal tragedy, in just eight minutes.Or perhaps I mean the lightness of universal tragedy. There’s no shrieking or bellowing in these plays; the theatrical format does all the dramatic work, and only by implication. The gap between what’s being said and what’s being shown is where the pain lies.Letts in “The Stretch,” which at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers.Anna D. ShapiroIn that sense “Night Safari” and “The Old Country” are warm-ups for “The Stretch,” a 15-minute monologue, performed by Letts himself, that at first seems to be nothing more than a satire of the breakneck spiels delivered by racetrack announcers. You barely have time to laugh as the names of the horses flying by get weirder: Architect, Daddys Lil Dumplin, My Enormous Ego, Scrod.Perhaps the most telling name is A Horse Called Man, which gives away the game. In the guise of “calling” the 108th running of the (fictional) El Dorado Stakes, “The Stretch” is actually calling the uncountable zillionth — and yet always roughly the same — running of a man’s life. I say “man” because it is from a man’s perspective that the story unfolds, at least as written; in the script, from 2015, the announcer’s monologue is “illustrated” onstage by human dioramas of a boy’s birth, then maturation, marriage, fatherhood, infidelity and decline.But the version now streaming — directed by Anna D. Shapiro, who stepped down as Steppenwolf’s artistic director in August — does away with the illustrations, which strike me in any case as banal. Instead, Shapiro trusts the words (abetted by Allen Cordell’s thundering hooves soundscape) to score the play’s points in passing, and in Letts’s imperturbably dense performance they do. You don’t need to see a man getting married stage right to feel the punch of a line like “My Enormous Ego has stumbled badly and taken a terrific fall!”Nor do you have to be a man, though Letts now seems to be our leading contender for bard of male moral decrepitude. He was always in the running, of course; check out the revival of “Bug” at Steppenwolf in November. For new Letts, there’s also “The Minutes,” scheduled to open on Broadway in April, two years after the pandemic shut it down in previews.But now, taking on smaller slices of humankind, and leaving the big bad themes to speak for themselves, his vision seems funnier, deeper, bigger. Call him the paradoxical frog of playwriting: He’s growing as he shrinks.Three Short Plays by Tracy LettsThrough Oct. 24; steppenwolf.org. More