Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 150 Shares159 Views

    in Theater

    George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ Sets Broadway Box Office Record

    “Good Night, and Good Luck” grossed $3.3 million last week, breaking a record that was set earlier this month by Denzel Washington’s “Othello.”Broadway box office records are falling like dominoes this season as a handful of starry plays entice fans to pay sky-high ticket prices to see their favorite movie stars up close and emoting.“Good Night, and Good Luck,” a new play starring George Clooney, grossed $3.3 million last week, the most money a nonmusical play has ever made during a single week on Broadway, according to data released Tuesday by the Broadway League. And it did so with just a seven-performance week: It is still in previews, and not yet doing Broadway’s typical eight.It shattered the previous record, which was set just two weeks earlier by a new production of “Othello” starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, which grossed $2.8 million in the week that ended March 9. (Before that, the record had been held by “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which grossed $2.7 million during a holiday week in late 2023.)“Othello” still has higher ticket prices — its top seats were being sold on its website for $921, compared to $799 for “Good Night, and Good Luck” — but “Good Night, and Good Luck” is playing in a larger theater, so it is taking in more money overall.The average ticket price for “Othello” was $303.15 last week — down from previous weeks because of free seats for journalists attending press performances and guests attending opening night. The average price for “Good Night, and Good Luck” was $302.07. But “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which is adapted from the 2005 movie about the broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow, is playing in the 1,545-seat Winter Garden Theater, while “Othello” is in the 1,043-seat Ethel Barrymore.Broadway’s box office has traditionally been dominated by musicals, which tend to be more popular, to play longer, and to run in larger theaters than plays. The record for the most money made by a Broadway musical was set late last year, when “Wicked” grossed $5 million during a Christmas week when there were nine performances.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

  • 100 Shares119 Views

    in Theater

    ‘Wine in the Wilderness’ Review: Beauty in Blackness

    Written by Alice Childress in 1969, the play feels just as revelatory more than 50 years later in a new production from Classic Stage Company.The subject of the painting is stunning — a regal Black woman in tiger print, her Afro crowning her head like a dandelion. She basks in a halo of warm yellows and oranges that give her the appearance of a walking sunset, or a wild flame. She is the vision of “perfect Black womanhood,” according to the artist who painted her in “Wine in the Wilderness,” Classic Stage Company’s new production that opened Monday. This show, like the painting, is beautiful. It is also essential for the complexity beneath its surface.The creator of this perfect Black woman is Bill (Grantham Coleman), who’s working in his one-room apartment while outside the streets of Harlem are awake with riots. It’s the summer of 1964, and Bill is spending the riots painting when he gets an unwelcome visit by Oldtimer (a charming Milton Craig Nealy), who’s dropped by with some loot. Bill’s working on a triptych called “Wine in the Wilderness” for an upcoming exhibition. The first two parts — a painting of an angelic young Black girl and the second of “Mother Africa,” his perfect Black woman — are done. The final piece, he explains to Oldtimer, will be a painting of a “messed-up chick,” a Black woman who’s “ignorant, unfeminine, coarse, rude, vulgar.” He just hasn’t found his subject yet.Conveniently, Bill’s married neighbor-friends, Sonny-man (Brooks Brantly) and Cynthia (Lakisha May), are on their way to his place after some mid-riot drinks with the perfect model to complete his work. That would be the rambunctious Tommy (Olivia Washington), and Bill is pleased to discover that she’s exactly the kind of “messed-up chick” he needs to paint.Written in 1969 by Alice Childress, one of the great but underappreciated Black playwrights, “Wine in the Wilderness” is set over the course of just a few hours, from the evening riots into the morning. It’s a lean parable (the production runs a fleet 85 minutes) about what progress truly looks like — and where the seeds of change can begin — in a revolution.We’re fortunate to be in the midst of a rediscovery of Childress’s work, including the recent Broadway production of “Trouble in Mind” and an Off Broadway production of “Wedding Band.” “Wine in the Wilderness,” like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s equally compelling “Purpose,” depicts something we don’t see often enough onstage: cross sections of gender, class and sexuality within the Black experience. It reveals the conflicting values and complex expectations that must come with any well-drawn portrait of a community of people.Nealy, left, and Coleman. “Wine in the Wilderness” takes place over a few hours in 1964.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe 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

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    ‘The Studio’ Review: Seth Rogen Is Way Too Late for His Close-Up

    Seth Rogen plays a stressed-out movie bigwig in a satire of an industry in decline.Midway through the first season of “The Studio,” Matt Remick (Seth Rogen), a big wheel in the movie industry, finds himself at a dinner table of civilians. Though he’s used to impressing people with his job, his companions are unmoved. “If you want art, you watch TV,” one says. “Have you seen ‘The Bear’?”To borrow a line from “The Sopranos,” one of the first big series to muscle in on the movies’ territory, Matt is feeling like a guy who came in at the end of something. When the 10-episode satire begins on Apple TV+, he gets his dream job, as he is tapped to head the fictional Continental Studios when its storied leader (Catherine O’Hara) is defenestrated after a string of flops.Matt, a movie guy’s movie guy whose vintage-car collection embodies his love for an earlier showbiz era, is ready to live his Hollywood fantasy. He will lavish money on auteurs and let them shoot on actual film. He will be known as a “talent-friendly” executive. He will make art.Or maybe he won’t. Seconds into his welcome-aboard talk with the company’s C.E.O., Griffin Mill (a deliciously batty Bryan Cranston), he gets his first mandate: Continental has landed the rights to the Kool-Aid Man, a crass ploy to copy the success of “Barbie,” and Matt is expected to turn the I.P. into a billion-dollar hit. He dreamed of a life in the pictures; now he’s breathing life into a pitcher.“The Studio,” which premieres on Wednesday, is its own kind of formula project, another in that long-lived monster-movie franchise “Art vs. Commerce.” But the series is timely enough to be a little distinctive, and it knows its business well enough to be blisteringly entertaining.Past Hollywood stories have cast the industry as a culturally powerful meat grinder (Cranston’s character name is an allusion to “The Player,” one of many classic-film references in the series), or as affluent but brainless, as in “Entourage.” But in “The Studio,” Hollywood is in deep decline.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

  • 150 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    ‘Severance’ Fans Celebrate Season 2 Finale With Lumon Industries Cosplay and Waffles

    The sci-fi thriller “Severance” is about an enigmatic, cultlike company and its “severed” employees, whose brains have been surgically divided into an “innie” work consciousness and an “outie” home one. The show itself has a kind of bifurcated existence, becoming Apple TV+’s most popular series ever while inspiring fans in the non-TV world to spin fanciful theories — some of which have been borne out — and otherwise wallow in its imagery and mysteries.One of the most colorful examples of this happened at a venue in Kingston, N.Y., on Friday, as the series closed out its second season. The owners of two area restaurants that served as filming locations in the series, Phoenicia Diner and Eng’s, a Chinese restaurant in downtown Kingston, co-hosted a watch party for the season finale that included costumes, dance-offs, themed snacks and other “Severance”-related festivities.An unsevered photographer was inside to document all the choreography and merriment for The New York Times. Please try to enjoy each photo equally, and not show preference for any over the others.Held at Assembly, a venue in Kingston, the event included costume and dance contests and “Severance” souvenirs, like finger traps and Lumon Industries badges.Phoenicia Diner, seen in the show as a restaurant called Pip’s, offered attendees their own waffle parties.Goats, one of the most beloved bits of “Severance” iconography, were well-represented.Attendees paid tribute to characters including Lorne, the goat minder, and Miss Huang, the young deputy manager.Unlike in “Severance,” attendees were allowed to remember their innies’ experiences.Audience Report is a series that looks at people looking. Produced by Jolie Ruben and Amanda Webster. More

  • 150 Shares199 Views

    in Television

    Jon Stewart Thinks He May Be in the ‘Bomb Yemen’ Chat Group

    The “Daily Show” host suspects that he, too, might have been invited to a discussion of secret war plans by a bumbling official in the Trump administration.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.Invite OnlyTop officials in the Trump administration discussed secret plans to bomb Yemen on Signal, unaware that one of them had mistakenly added a journalist to the chat group.On Monday’s “Daily Show,” Jon Stewart applauded the administration for “once again carrying out its plans with competence and professionalism.”“You know, back in my day, if you were a journalist who wanted leaked war documents, you had to work the sources: meet them in a dark garage, earn their trust, pound the pavement. Now? You just wait for the national security adviser to be distracted by ‘White Lotus’ while he’s setting up his ‘Bomb Yemen’ group chat.” — JON STEWART“By the way, I might be in this group chat, I don’t know. I don’t check my group chats.” — JON STEWART“This is not helping Pete Hegseth’s reputation as a guy who is always drunk. I mean, this is a drunk guy mistake. This is the national security equivalent of airdropping a [expletive] pic to everyone in the office.” — TAYLOR TOMLINSON“I thought top-secret war meetings were held in a vault on top of a mountain. I didn’t know we were just droppin’ ’em in the chat. Turns out Hegseth was planning wars like a mom in a busy grocery store talking on speakerphone.” — TAYLOR TOMLINSON“Worst of all, now that journalist knows they’re all hanging out at Buffalo Wild Wings tonight, and they can’t uninvite him or it would be so awkward.” — TAYLOR TOMLINSON“He thought it was disinformation. Turned out it was just a bunch of fools, because the strikes started happening exactly as described in the texts. In other words, our national security is being guarded by a bunch of doofs you wouldn’t trust to throw your cousin a surprise party.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“No one on the chain thought to ask, ‘Who is JG? What are these initials?’ For all — they could have been leaking secrets to Jeff Goldblum, for all they know.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Skin-Colored Skin Edition)“Donald Trump truly is focused on the issues that matter most — to him, specifically.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yesterday, he posted — this is real — ‘Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the governor, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before.’ He doesn’t like this painting of him that they hung in the State Capitol building in Colorado. This is the portrait. I have to be honest: I agree with him on this one. It’s not a very good likeness. I mean, look how inaccurate the skin color is. His skin is the color of skin.” — JIMMY KIMMELWe 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

  • 100 Shares179 Views

    in Television

    Why Netflix’s ‘Adolescence’ Has Parents Talking About Phones

    The Netflix hit has touched off debates about smartphone use by children and, in Britain, fed into calls for a social media ban.The British screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne has written several TV dramas that he hoped would stir political debate. Until last week, they never quite took off.Then, his new show, “Adolescence,” appeared on Netflix.In the days since its March 13 release, the four-part drama about a 13-year-old boy who murders a girl from his school after potentially being exposed to misogynist ideas online has become Netflix’s latest hit. According to the streamer, it was the most watched show on the platform in dozens of countries after it debuted, including the United States.In Britain, the show has been more than a topic of workplace chatter. It has reignited discussion about whether the government should restrict children’s access to smartphones to stop them from accessing harmful content.Newspapers here have published dozens of articles about “Adolescence,” which Thorne wrote with the actor Stephen Graham. A Times of London headline called it “The TV Drama That Every Parent Should Watch,” and campaigners for a phone ban in schools have reported a surge in support.In Britain’s parliament, too, lawmakers have used the show to make political points. Last week Prime Minister Keir Starmer told the House of Commons that he was watching “Adolescence” with his two children, and said that action was needed to address the “fatal consequences” of young men and boys viewing harmful content online.In the show, Ashley Walters, center left, plays a police officer whose son has to instruct him on the meaning of emojis online.Netflix, via Associated PressWe 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

  • 100 Shares189 Views

    in Television

    Lionizing Mark Twain, Conan O’Brien Subtly Skewers Trump

    In accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, the comedian mounted a bristling political attack artfully disguised as a tribute.Conan O’Brien faced a thorny question when accepting the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor on Sunday night.In the headlining speech for the most-high-profile event at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts since President Trump purged Democrats from its board, cashiered its leaders and made himself chairman, how political should he be? Considering artists like Lin-Manuel Miranda and Issa Rae have said they are boycotting the Kennedy Center in protest, should he even show up?Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, the puppet voiced by Robert Smigel, who was on the original writing staff of “Late Night With Conan O’Brien,” captured the dilemma of his position when he welcomed the audience in a gravelly voice: “Thank you for coming and shame on you for being here.”The assignment was especially tricky for O’Brien, because unlike past recipients like Jon Stewart or Dave Chappelle, his comedy has always steered clear of ideological fervor. But moving out of his comfort zone, O’Brien delivered what amounted to a bristling attack on the current administration artfully disguised as a tribute to Mark Twain.“Twain was suspicious of populism, jingoism, imperialism, the money-obsessed mania of the Gilded Age and any expression of mindless American might or self-importance,” O’Brien said, steadily, soberly. “Above all, Twain was a patriot in the best sense of the word. He loved America, but knew it was deeply flawed. Twain wrote: ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all of the time and your government when it deserves it.’”O’Brien’s speech, which along with the rest of the show, will air on Netflix on May 4, followed a murderers’ row of comedians — who put on the best Twain Awards in recent memory. Among those gushing about O’Brien were father figures (David Letterman), peers (Adam Sandler, Will Ferrell, Stephen Colbert) and his comedic children (Nikki Glaser, Kumail Nanjiani, John Mulaney).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

  • 63 Shares159 Views

    in Theater

    The Price of a Show

    Tickets for the hottest Broadway plays are now out of reach for many. There’s a starry production of “Othello” opening on Broadway tonight. And if you’re among the many people who really, really want to see Denzel Washington as a jealous general, opposite Jake Gyllenhaal as a scheming Iago, it’s going to cost you: Most of the center orchestra seats, as well as a few rows in the mezzanine, are being sold for $921 apiece.The high prices for this Shakespeare classic are setting records. During its second week of previews, “Othello” grossed more at the box office than any other nonmusical play had ever grossed on Broadway.Tickets for the hottest Broadway shows are now out of reach for many. And the same is true for other sought-after live events, such as pop concerts (which now cost hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per ticket) and big sports games. (A few weeks before the Super Bowl, the cheapest available tickets were reselling for more than the average monthly mortgage payment.)In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how Broadway seats became so eye-poppingly pricey.Trying to break evenProducing Broadway shows has become more expensive since the pandemic, and a vast majority of them lose money. So producers have been staging more short runs of plays with stars in lead roles — the stars attract ticket buyers, and the short runs allow those stars to more quickly return to filmmaking, which pays better than Broadway. Limited runs also seem to incentivize potential ticket buyers, because people find the now-or-never aspect motivating.There is, of course, a tension between profitability and accessibility. These prices are preventing some potential theatergoers from seeing high-profile productions of important work.Investors who spend money to bring shows to Broadway embrace high ticket prices because they want at least a shot at recouping their expenses. But many theater lovers, as they reminded me in a rollicking comments thread on the story I wrote about this subject last week, find these prices upsetting, because they want to see the shows they want to see at price points they consider reasonable.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