Eliana Willis

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    Colin Jost Falls Flat at White House Correspondents Dinner

    The White House Correspondents’ Association dinner has occasionally featured some great stand-up comedy. This “S.N.L.” veteran’s set will not join that list.People in the media have long worried about the impact of the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner on journalism. The concern is that it makes the press look too chummy with politicians it’s covering. But what is the impact on comedy?A high-ceilinged hotel ballroom filled with television anchors and network executives is a tough room for stand-up, but no more so than an awards show. Trevor Noah was funnier two years ago at the dinner than he was at this year’s Grammys.A murderer’s row of comics, among them Conan O’Brien, Jimmy Kimmel and Wanda Sykes, has taken this assignment because it’s one of the most high-profile live comedy sets of the year. And there has been one truly great performance (Stephen Colbert), some very good ones (Seth Meyers, Larry Wilmore) and one so thrillingly biting (Michelle Wolf) that the next year they replaced the comic with a historian.Colin Jost’s set this year does not belong in that pantheon. Without his Weekend Update partner Michael Che next to him, he came off muted, vanilla, less assured than usual. With long pauses between jokes, eyes darting side to side, he occasionally took a drink of water and at least once acknowledged the lack of laughter in the room. His jokes leaned on wordplay more than a specific or novel perspective. “Some incredible news organizations here,” began one of his pricklier jokes, finished by: “Also, some credible ones.”He focused much fire on former President Donald J. Trump. “Now that O.J.’s dead, who is the front-runner for V.P.?” he asked. “Diddy?” Like Biden, Jost has always benefited from low expectations. No one that handsome could be funny, right? But he has grown into his role at “Saturday Night Live,” proving to be an especially strong straight man adept at the comedy of embarrassment. You could see his timing in one of the odder moments when he said Robert Kennedy Jr. could be the third Catholic president and the C-SPAN camera cut to President Biden (the second) clapping. Jost retreated on Kennedy’s chances one beat later: “Like his vaccine card says, he doesn’t have a shot.”For the third year in a row, President’s Biden’s age played a big role in the comedy (“Technology wasn’t invented when he was in high school,” Jost said of Biden), even in the president’s own set. Two years ago, Biden joked that he was friends with Calvin Coolidge. Last year, he referred to his “pal Jimmy Madison.” The president took a slightly different and more confrontational approach this time. “Age is an issue,” he said early. “I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old.”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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    ‘Guilt’ Review: When the Lights Go Out in Edinburgh

    The final season of Scotland’s most notable TV drama, on PBS’s “Masterpiece,” is a suitably twisty and sardonic send-off for the battling McCall brothers.Contains spoilers for Seasons 1 and 2 of “Guilt.”“Guilt,” a pioneering series in Scottish television — it was the first drama commissioned by the newly formed BBC Scotland channel in 2019 — has built an audience well beyond its borders. A melancholy tale of family dysfunction presented as a complicated crime thriller, it combines British regionalism with peak TV-style poker-faced comedy in a way that has made it a critical darling around the world.Created and written by Neil Forsyth, “Guilt” has arrived in dense, lively four-episode bursts; the third and final season has its American premiere on PBS’s “Masterpiece” beginning Sunday. Each installment has been organized around a psycho-philosophical theme: first guilt, then revenge in Season 2, and now, as Forsyth described it in a BBC interview, redemption.But the pleasure of the show does not come from diagraming its moral lessons (unless that’s your thing), or from unwinding Forsyth’s sometimes maddeningly convoluted plots, which entangle sons and daughters of Edinburgh’s rough-and-tumble Leith district with the city’s gangsters, cops and politicians.What makes “Guilt” worthwhile is Forsyth’s knack for creating characters who work their way into our affections, less by their actions than by their unconscious, soul-deep responses to life in the grim confines of Leith and the promise of something better in Edinburgh’s more comfortable precincts.At the center of the web are Max and Jake McCall (Mark Bonnar and the marvelous Jamie Sives), brothers with very little use for each other who become bound in a seemingly endless cycle of lies, danger and recrimination. It begins in the opening minutes of Season 1 when Jake, with Max in the car’s passenger seat, accidentally runs into an old man, killing him. Jake, a gentle soul with an encyclopedic knowledge of pop music (he could have wandered in from a Nick Hornby novel), wants to call the police; Max, a rapacious lawyer with a near-sociopathic lack of empathy, says no.This is the original sin for which the brothers are still paying. Covering up their hit-and-run homicide embroils them with the Lynches, a married pair of quietly vicious gangsters whom Max and Jake are both on the run from, and scheming to take down, across the show’s three seasons. While the brothers work together for survival, they are also at each other’s throats, taking turns ruefully betraying each other, leading to imprisonment, exile and worse.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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    ‘Fire Country’ Star Max Thieriot Likes to Watch Things Grow

    The “Fire Country” star talks about the road trips, the farm equipment and the family time that keep him grounded.For Max Thieriot, one of the creators and the star of the CBS series “Fire Country,” all roads lead back to his roots.He was raised on a vineyard off the coast of Sonoma in Northern California. And for a while, he lived nearby on 90 acres of his own with his wife and two sons.But “Fire Country” — about prison inmates joining elite firefighters to battle the region’s blazes in exchange for shorter sentences — shoots near Vancouver, British Columbia. So Thieriot, 35, moved his family to rural Washington, where his kids could continue to run around with the chickens and the goats.“I wanted to try and keep the same lifestyle for my wife and my boys, and not to totally upend their world,” he said.Alas, Thieriot still has wine in his blood.About 14 years ago, he and a couple of childhood friends started their own vineyard. The big lesson?“It’s much faster to do, and makes a lot more sense, when you have an entire crew,” he admitted before discussing the tractors, the road trips and the grapevines that keep him grounded.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 Comfortable Problem of Mid TV

    A few years ago, “Atlanta” and “PEN15” were teaching TV new tricks.In “Atlanta,” Donald Glover sketched a funhouse-mirror image of Black experience in America (and outside it), telling stories set in and around the hip-hop business with an unsettling, comic-surreal language. In “PEN15,” Maya Erskine and Anna Konkle created a minutely observed, universal-yet-specific picture of adolescent awkwardness.In February, Glover and Erskine returned in the action thriller “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” on Amazon Prime Video. It’s … fine? A takeoff on the 2005 film, it updates the story of a married duo of spies by imagining the espionage business as gig work. The stars have chemistry and charisma; the series avails itself of an impressive cast of guest stars and delectable Italian shooting locations. It’s breezy and goes down easy. I watched several episodes on a recent long-haul flight and they helped the hours pass.But I would never have wasted an episode of “Atlanta” or “PEN15” on in-flight entertainment. The work was too good, the nuances too fine, to lose a line of dialogue to engine noise.I do not mean to single out Glover and Erskine here. They are not alone — far from it. Keri Russell, a ruthless and complicated Russian spy in “The Americans,” is now in “The Diplomat,” a forgettably fun dramedy. Natasha Lyonne, of the provocative “Orange Is the New Black” and the psychotropic “Russian Doll,” now plays a retro-revamped Columbo figure in “Poker Face.” Idris Elba, once the macroeconomics-student gangster Stringer Bell in “The Wire,” more recently starred in “Hijack,” a by-the-numbers airplane thriller.I’ve watched all of these shows. They’re not bad. They’re simply … mid. Which is what makes them, frustratingly, as emblematic of the current moment in TV as their stars’ previous shows were of the ambitions of the past.What we have now is a profusion of well-cast, sleekly produced competence. We have tasteful remakes of familiar titles. We have the evidence of healthy budgets spent on impressive locations. We have good-enough new shows that resemble great old ones.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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    ‘Forbidden Broadway’ Scraps Summer Broadway Run, Citing Crowded Season

    The parody show was scheduled to begin performances in July at the Helen Hayes Theater.In a sign that there are not enough investors and ticket buyers to sustain all of the Broadway shows now onstage and in the works, the producers of “Forbidden Broadway” said Friday that they were canceling a planned summer run.The scrapped production, “Forbidden Broadway on Broadway: Merrily We Stole a Song,” was announced in February and was to be the first Broadway venture for the satirical revue, which has been performed periodically since 1982, mostly Off Broadway but also on tour. The show, consisting of comedic sketches that parody Broadway hits (and misses), has been frequently rewritten to remain reasonably timely and topical; the Broadway run was to feature a number of Sondheim spoofs, reflecting the heightened interest in his work since his death.In a statement, the producers, Ryan Bogner, Victoria Lang and Tracey Stroock McFarland, called the move a postponement, and cited the volume of offerings on Broadway — there are currently 36 shows running, 12 of which opened in a nine-day stretch before the Tony-eligibility season ended Thursday night.“The Broadway landscape is enormously crowded at this moment,” the producers’ statement said, “and while we adore Forbidden Broadway, we are disappointed that the show will not open at the Hayes on Broadway this summer.”The show, written by Gerard Alessandrini, was to begin previews July 15 and to open Aug. 5 at the Helen Hayes Theater, and was to be capitalized for $3.2 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It is not clear if the producers had successfully raised all that money, and ticket sales, which began earlier this month, had been slow.“Without getting into the details of the financials or sales, it is self evident by looking at the current offerings on Broadway and their sales that in this incredibly crowded environment without recent precedent, the title would not have been served by launching at this time,” the producers said in a written answer to questions about the show’s economics.This is the second show to cancel a Broadway production this year; in February, the producers of a planned run of Rob Madge’s “My Son’s a Queer (But What Can You Do?)” announced that they were postponing that production less than three weeks before previews were to begin.As for Madge, the performer is planning to take “My Son’s a Queer” back to the Edinburgh Fringe, this summer. But first, next month Madge is planning a show in London, reflecting on the Broadway disappointment. The title, of course, is “Regards to Broadway.” More

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    ‘Harlequin, Refined by Love’ Review: A French Showman’s First Steps

    The revival of a 2006 work by Thomas Jolly, the director masterminding the opening ceremony at the Paris Olympics, shows his gift for visual flamboyance.In three months, the French theater director Thomas Jolly will oversee the most monumental show in the world: the opening bash for the Olympic Games, set for July 26. But for now, his work is entertaining Paris audiences on a more modest scale.At the Maison des Arts in Créteil, an eastern suburb of the city, his work is not even playing on the biggest stage. On Thursday, an audience of around 250 people filed into the playhouse’s second, smaller auditorium to watch “Harlequin, Refined by Love” (“Arlequin poli par l’amour”), Jolly’s very first stage production, created in 2006.At the time, Jolly was a young graduate from the drama school attached to the National Theater of Brittany. “Harlequin, Refined by Love” was an unlikely choice of play for a budding director: Written in 1720 by Pierre de Marivaux, a master of romantic comedy, it taps heavily into the commedia dell’arte, a genre few current French theatermakers have explored.Yet “Harlequin, Refined by Love” became a box-office hit, touring for four years with its initial cast, followed by frequent revivals. (In 2014, a Russian-language version even joined the repertoire of the Gogol Center, in Moscow.) In Créteil, the production’s success is easy to understand. Even with minimal sets and props, the building blocks of Jolly’s style — visually flamboyant, brightly paced yet with a touch of dark satire — are already there.Marivaux’s compact play is built around stock comic characters. The hapless hero, Harlequin (Rémi Dessenoix), has been kidnapped by a fairy who fell for his beauty. She tries to educate him, yet Harlequin remains something of a slob — until he meets his match, the shepherdess Silvia (played with spot-on candor by Ophélie Trichard).Falling for her suddenly “refines” his manners, as the play’s title makes clear. Love, in Marivaux’s world, is a civilizing force — much to the fairy’s fury.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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    ‘Mary Jane,’ ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ and More New Broadway Shows

    This past week has been jam-packed with openings. Our reviewers think these new shows are worth knowing about even if you’re not planning to see them.critic’s pickA ‘heartbreaker for anyone human.’Rachel McAdams as a mother struggling with her own moral agony in Manhattan Theater Club’s production of “Mary Jane” at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater in Manhattan.Richard Termine for The New York Times‘Mary Jane’Rachel McAdams makes her Broadway debut in Amy Herzog’s play about an impossibly upbeat mother caring for a gravely ill child and navigating the byzantine health care system.From our review:[Herzog] is not interested in locking down meaning. Like all great plays, “Mary Jane” catches light from different directions at different times, revealing different ideas. On the other side of the worst of Covid, “Mary Jane” feels less like a parent’s cry for more life than an inquest into the meaning of death.Through June 16 at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater. Read the full review.Critic’s PickA family drama that ‘feels like it’s a healing.’Jessica Lange, center, is the titular mother in “Mother Play,” at the Helen Hayes Theater in Manhattan, with Celia Keenan-Bolger, left, and Jim Parsons playing her children.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Mother Play’Paula Vogel’s tragicomedy is a showcase for Jessica Lange, who plays a ferocious matriarch to a sister and brother played by Celia Keenan-Bolger and Jim Parsons.From our review:Nearly parodic in her feminine grace, [Lange’s Phyllis] is also as hard as buffed, polished nails. Phyllis is in some ways a monster, but Vogel doesn’t traffic in monsters. As a writer, she understands that people do terrible things for unterrible reasons — out of love, out of fear, out of loneliness.Through June 16 at the Helen Hayes Theater. Read the full review.critic’s pickA show that all the critics love.From left, Sarah Pidgeon, Juliana Canfield and Tom Pecinka as members of an increasingly fractured 1970s band in David Adjmi’s “Stereophonic” at the Golden Theater in Manhattan.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘Stereophonic’David Adjmi’s rock drama, with songs by a real rocker (Will Butler), follows a 1970s band (not unlike Fleetwood Mac) on the cusp of fame through the prolonged, drug-fueled process of making a new album.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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    Review: ‘Jordans’ Tackles Race at Work at the Public Theater

    Alternating between funny and bleak, the Public Theater’s latest production tackles race and the modern workplace.The workplace in “Jordans,” an ambitious but unwieldy new play at the Public Theater, is so white that it’s a bit alarming. I don’t mean to say it’s full of white people (though it certainly is that, too), but rather that the aesthetic of the space itself catches your attention: minimalist, modern, white screens and walls. By the end of the play, however, those bright white spaces will be covered with blood.Jordan (Naomi Lorrain) is the only Black employee at Atlas Studios, a “full-service rental studio and production facility,” as she says to a potential client. She’s the one who answers the phones; she also gets the lunches, collects receipts and calls maintenance. When her boss, Hailey (Kate Walsh), decides the company’s new path to revenue involves appealing to a more “diverse” demographic, she hires a director of culture: a young Black man also named Jordan (Toby Onwumere).Though their white colleagues somehow can’t seem to tell them apart, the two Jordans find themselves at odds: She knows how to “play the game,” even if that means compromising her integrity. He (dubbed “1. Jordan” in the script) imagines another path to success — a Jay-Z level of achievement that he will then put back into the neighborhood. But as Jordan sees an opportunity to advance, the team takes on a brand launch event for a rapper that transforms into a grisly horror-movie scenario.Written by the playwright Ife Olujobi (she/they) in their Off Broadway debut, and directed by Whitney White, “Jordans” feels a little “The Other Black Girl” and a little “American Psycho.” The play tries to make a satire about race in the workplace and then, within that, gender — the differences in how Black men and Black women might act and be treated in a predominantly white workplace. But it’s also largely a grim parable about the terrors of consumer culture, including the commodification and appropriation of Black people.Lorrain, far right, gives a sharp performance as Jordan, an employee so overworked she even does most of the show’s set and prop arrangements. The cast also features, from left, Matthew Russell, Brontë England-Nelson and Walsh.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesMany of the targets of the satire feel too obvious: hip influencers, like a twerking white pop star and super-masc energy drink bros; the white boss fumbling through hollow corporate-speak about diversity; the white female colleagues bonding over how unfairly hard they work while their Black female colleague endlessly bustles around in the background.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