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    Late-Night Shows Are Teaming Up to Tackle Climate Change

    Climate change may not be the easiest subject to laugh about, but a group of late-night hosts are teaming up in hopes of raising awareness about the issue and even finding some humor in it.On Sept. 22, seven of the network and cable late-night shows will take part in Climate Night, during which each of these programs will have a focus on climate change and produce their own original content on the topic.The shows that plan to participate in Climate Night are “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” and “Late Night With Seth Meyers” on NBC; “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” and “The Late Late Show With James Corden” on CBS; “Full Frontal With Samantha Bee” on TBS; “Jimmy Kimmel Live” on ABC; and “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah” on Comedy Central.Samantha Bee said in an interview that she could not recall another occasion during her tenure as a late-night host when so many of programs coordinated their efforts like this.“And really, what’s a more compelling cause to combine forces on than the climate, which we require in order to do our shows?” she said. “We need to not be submerged underwater in order to have successful late-night shows. The need is great.”The initiative is organized by Steve Bodow, a veteran late-night writer and producer and a former showrunner at “The Daily Show” and Netflix’s “Patriot Act With Hasan Minhaj.”Bodow said in a phone interview that the event was organized to coincide with Climate Week NYC, which begins on Monday, and to call attention to the subject by having these shows focus on it simultaneously.“Climate change, obviously, is something we’re all dealing with,” he said. “We’re all talking about it. We all need to be talking about it. What if these shows all talked about it at once? It makes a statement that they’re all willing to do this.”Bodow said that his outreach to the showrunners and producers at these late-night programs was met with a spirit of cooperation, for the most part.As he explained: “Everyone, before committing, wanted to be assured that, really, we’re all jumping into the pool at the same time? If I jump, you’re not going to be standing at the edge of the pool, laughing at me and I’m all wet?”Each program, he said, will address climate change in its own segments and its own voice. “Some of the shows will really dive in all the way,” Bodow said. “They may have other ideas they want to do that night. But they’ll be doing some meaningful part of their show, at a minimum, and others will do even more.”Bodow said his request to each program was: “Please do your show the way that you do your show. The shows have different styles and vibes, and that’s how they’ll approach this. There’s plenty to talk about.”Bee said that, despite the inherently comedic tone of these late-night shows, they could still offer a constructive platform to address such an ominous topic.“It’s a really overwhelming conversation to have because so much has to happen, so urgently,” she said. “I do think that we, individually, each do a great job of breaking down stories in ways that are palatable. Comedy is a great delivery system for actual information.”She added: “And I expect, probably by the end of the show, we will have solved the climate crisis. So that’s exciting.” More

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    Late Night Remembers Norm Macdonald

    Seth Meyers, James Corden and Jimmy Fallon paid tribute to the stand-up comic and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member on Tuesday.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.A Late-Night LegendThe comedian Norm Macdonald died on Tuesday, and a few late-night hosts caught the news in time to honor the frequent guest and former “Saturday Night Live” cast member.Seth Meyers called the loss of Macdonald tragic, saying, “I do not think that Norm would want to hear anything sentimental.” Still, Meyers shared some of his favorite Macdonald quips and what he had learned from watching him anchor “Weekend Update.”“And also, he loved, or I should say he just didn’t care, if he was bombing. If he thought the jokes were good, he had exactly as much fun telling them to a dead audience than to one who appreciated them. And I think for so many of us, we came up watching Norm, and we thought that you were on the inside with him when you were watching him tell these jokes that you thought were great, and no one in the room thought was good and you just felt this connection to him — and that ability to just stare into an audience, unblinkingly telling the jokes that — that you believed in.” — SETH MEYERSJimmy Fallon called Macdonald one of his comedy idols — “a comic’s comic” — reciting a bit from Macdonald’s early stand-up sets he’d memorized.“He’s just one of the greatest comedians ever, and, God, we’re going to miss him. He was a friend of the show — family, really, to us.” — JIMMY FALLONJames Corden hailed Macdonald as “perhaps the single greatest guest in the history of late-night television.”“Norm Macdonald passed away today, far too soon, after a nine-year battle with cancer; a battle Norm never told anybody about, because all Norm ever wanted to do was to make us laugh, and he was absolutely brilliant at it. There was nobody quite like him.” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Side Effects Edition)“After she announced that she has not received the coronavirus vaccine, rapper Nicki Minaj tweeted yesterday that a friend of her cousin received the shot and became impotent after, quote, ‘his testicles became swollen.’ Which is pretty shocking, because when I got the shot, it was in my arm.” — SETH MEYERS“I can’t believe I have to say this, but doctors agree that Covid vaccines do not cause swollen testicles. But to be fair to Dr. Minaj, everyone knows there’s no source more reliable than your extended family’s acquaintances in another country.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Her report comes straight from ‘The New England Journal of my cousin’s friend in Trinidad.’ Just check out this week’s study, ‘I heard his girlfriend got pregnant from a hot tub.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Can we talk a moment about this poor guy. Think about it: He’s minding his own business with his swollen testicles in Trinidad and because his best friend happens to be cousins with Nicki Minaj — now the whole world knows that he’s impotent, he got dumped and he’s got giant testicles. He must be so mad at his friend.” — TREVOR NOAH“I mean that poor guy — single, swollen and everyone is asking them if he can hook them up with Nicki Minaj tickets.” — TREVOR NOAH“And for this friend, hate to say it, if your testicles swell up, the question isn’t ‘Did you get a vaccine recently?’ it’s ‘What have you been doing to your balls?’” — JIMMY KIMMEL“By the way, if anyone can track down this friend of Nicki’s cousin, I would really like to talk to him — I have questions.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth WatchingThe Broadway cast of “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical” performed “Private Dancer” on Tuesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightNew “Dancing With the Stars” cast member Jojo Siwa will be on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutFrom left, Alexia Landeau, Elisabeth Shue, Sarah Jones and Julie Delpy in a scene from “On the Verge.”NetflixThe French actress Julie Delpy created and stars in the new Netflix series “On the Verge,” a comedy following four middle-age friends in Los Angeles. More

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    'Hamilton' Reopens on Broadway to Giddy Crowds

    Kristin and Matt Collins, a couple from Annapolis, Md., were standing in line at the Richard Rodgers Theater on the reopening night of “Hamilton” with two extra tickets to give to anyone who wanted them.A few feet away, Chris Graham and Addie Trivers, two musical theater students, were standing watching all the opening-night excitement, wishing they could afford tickets for the show inside.Then Collins approached the two college juniors and asked if they might want to see “Hamilton” tonight. Yes, in fact, they did.“Either he’s telling the truth or we’re being kidnapped,” said Trivers, who used to go from theater to theater asking for cheap tickets before the pandemic, “and either way I’m going with him.”Those two tickets were among the most sought after on Broadway’s night of big reopenings.At the start of the show, the creator of “Hamilton,” Lin-Manuel Miranda, walked onstage to a standing ovation. “I don’t ever want to take live theater for granted ever again, do you?” he said. “You can mouth along, all you like, no one can see your mouth moving.”The musical sensation, which opened on Broadway in 2015, was the industry’s highest grossing show when the pandemic hit. The week before Broadway shut down, “Hamilton” grossed $2.7 million, more than any other show by far. That week, more than 10,700 people scored the sought-after tickets — and then the production, with the rest of live theater, was forced to a sudden halt.The musical, which won 11 Tony Awards and the Pulitzer Prize, managed to find an even wider audience during the pandemic. In July 2020, Disney+ started streaming a film of the musical with Miranda in the title role. Its release reignited interest in the musical and revived debate on some of the controversies it had sparked, including its treatment of slavery.Judging by the energy of the crowd on Tuesday night, “Hamilton” fever seemed ready to pick up right where it left off.The television personality Al Roker stood on the sidewalk pumping up the crowd, shouting, “Are you ready?”“We had just watched Al Roker walk by and I thought that was the peak of the night,” said Graham. The one downside of getting impromptu free tickets to “Hamilton”: He was worried that he was underdressed in his T-shirt and shorts.Farther down the line to enter the theater, Lauren Koranda, 20, was far from underdressed. She was wearing the floor-length shimmering gown that she had worn to senior prom. On the day the “Hamilton” tickets went on sale, she and her best friend, Maura Consedine, had used about six devices to make sure they got a pair.“It’s such a big night for New York City,” Consedine said. “The city truly feels alive again.” More

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    ‘Wicked’ Returns With a Surprise Guest: Kristin Chenoweth

    “Ladies and gentleman,” a disembodied voice announced from the stage, bringing the crowd, which had gathered for the reopening of “Wicked,” to its feet: “Kristin Chenoweth.”That brought an even louder roar from the audience, as Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda when the show opened on Broadway in 2003, strode out onto the stage of the Gershwin Theater.“Things like this don’t just happen,” Chenoweth, wearing a glittering dress, said. “It takes a lot of people.”“My personal favorite relationship is probably between the actors and the audience,” she continued, “which is probably why I’m in therapy.”The audience burst into laughter.Chenoweth brought a little star power to the return of “Wicked,” which chronicles the frenemy-ship between Glinda the Good Witch and Elphaba, the Wicked Witch of the West. It is a revisionist back story for “The Wizard of Oz.”Even witches needed to show proof of vaccination. Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesThe musical, which opened on Broadway in 2003, has been seen by more than 60 million people in 100 cities around the world. It also became the first touring Broadway production to reopen since the pandemic, beginning on Aug. 7 in Dallas. More

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    Ruben Santiago-Hudson Brings ‘Lackawanna Blues’ to Broadway

    About six months ago, Ruben Santiago-Hudson, the creator of the play “Lackawanna Blues,” asked a friend to open a vacant theater for him.“I just needed that — to sit in the seats, to walk on the stage,” Santiago-Hudson said in an interview this week. “For the past 50 or so years, I’ve had some time every year in the theater: to see a play, to be in a play, to direct a play, to write a play. All of a sudden that was taken away.”On Tuesday, Santiago-Hudson got to return to theater in a big way: “Lackawanna Blues” — which he wrote and directed, and in which he plays every part — began previews on Broadway, in a Manhattan Theater Club production at the Samuel J. Friedman Theater on West 47th Street.The play, which was first presented Off Broadway in 2001, and adapted into a television movie in 2005, is a reminiscence of Santiago-Hudson’s youth near Buffalo, and is centered on the character of Nanny, who ran a boardinghouse and imparted strength and morality to generations around her.At a ribbon ceremony outside the theater on West 47th Street, where ticketholders and gawkers dodged rush-hour traffic, Representative Carolyn Maloney offered an unabashed New Yorker’s defense of Broadway. “What would New York be without Broadway?” she asked. “Seriously, it’s what makes the city feel so great. If we didn’t have Broadway we might as well be in Chicago or some other big city.”S. Epatha Merkerson, who played Nanny in the television movie of “Lackawanna Blues” (and was a longtime fixture on “Law & Order”), was on hand for the preshow festivities.“We’re baaaack!” she said, referring to Broadway.A Broadway production of “Lackawanna Blues” by Manhattan Theater Club had been planned for a couple of years. Lynne Meadow, the company’s longtime artistic director, said in an interview she saw it as a celebration of “heroism,” which she said is even more apt now. The play was presented with music by Bill Sims Jr., as performed by the blues guitarist Junior Mack.“This is a play about healing,” Santiago-Hudson said. “This is a play about community, about how we help each other, about what generosity means. This is what we need.” More

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    Norm Macdonald, ‘Saturday Night Live’ Comedian, Dies at 61

    Acerbic and sometimes controversial, he became familiar to millions as the show’s “Weekend Update” anchor from 1994 to 1998.Norm Macdonald, the acerbic, sometimes controversial comedian familiar to millions as the “Weekend Update” anchor on “Saturday Night Live” from 1994 to 1998, died on Tuesday in Los Angeles. He was 61.His manager, Marc Gurvitz, confirmed the death. Lori Jo Hoekstra, his longtime producing partner, told the entertainment news outlet Deadline that the cause was cancer, something he had been dealing with for some time but had kept largely private.Mr. Macdonald had a deadpan style honed on the stand-up circuit, first in his native Canada and then in the United States. By 1990 he was doing his routine on “Late Night With David Letterman” and other shows. Then, in 1993, came his big break: an interview with Lorne Michaels, a fellow Canadian, for a job on “Saturday Night Live.”“I knew that even though we hailed from the same nation, we were worlds apart,” Mr. Macdonald wrote in “Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir” (2016), a fictional work with occasional hints of biography mixed in. “He was a cosmopolite from Toronto, worldly, the kinda guy who’d be comfortable around the Queen of England herself. Me, I was a hick, born to the barren, rocky soil of the Ottawa Valley, where the richest man in town was the barber.”In any case, he got the job, and by the next year he was in the anchor chair for the “Weekend Update” segment. In sketches, he impersonated Burt Reynolds and Bob Dole and played other characters.Mr. Michaels, in a telephone interview on Tuesday, said that Jim Downey, the show’s head writer at the time, had first brought Mr. Macdonald to his attention.“Jim just liked the intelligence behind the jokes,” he recalled.And Mr. Michaels saw it, too.“There’s something in his comedy — there’s just a toughness to it,” he said. “Also, he’s incredibly patient. He can wait” — that is, wait for a punchline.That, Mr. Michaels said, made Mr. Macdonald different stylistically from other “Weekend Update” anchors.“I think it took some getting used to for the audience,” Mr. Michaels said. “It wasn’t instantly a hit. But he just grew on them.”In early 1998, however, Mr. Macdonald was booted from the anchor chair, reportedly at the behest of Don Ohlmeyer, president of NBC Entertainment, West Coast, who was said to have been annoyed by Mr. Macdonald’s relentless mocking of his friend O.J. Simpson.Mr. Macdonald as the anchor of “Weekend Update” in 1995. He got the anchor job 1994, a year after joining “Saturday Night Live,” and lost it in 1998.Al Levine/NBCUniversal via Getty ImagesMr. Macdonald stayed on for a few more episodes but didn’t return for the 1998-99 season. His post-“S.N.L.” television ventures were a mixed bag. “Norm” (originally called “The Norm Show”), a comedy about a former hockey player, ran from 1999 to 2001 on ABC. “Sports Show With Norm Macdonald,” on Comedy Central, lasted only a few months, in 2011. “The dedicated fan will identify two patterns in his television work,” Dan Brooks wrote in a 2018 article about him in The New York Times Magazine. “It is invariably funny, and it is invariably canceled.”But Mr. Macdonald said he didn’t think of himself first as a TV performer, and he continued to work as a comedian throughout his career.“In my mind, I’m just a stand-up,” he told Mr. Brooks. “But other people don’t think that. They go, oh, the guy from ‘S.N.L.’ is doing stand-up now.”Though known for “Weekend Update,” Mr. Macdonald did not do much topical material in his own routines. He liked jokes that would still be funny years in the future. Among his most famous is one he told on “The Tonight Show With Conan O’Brien” in 2009, about a moth that goes to a podiatrist. After a setup that rambled on for minutes, in which the moth pours out various emotional troubles, the podiatrist asks the insect why it came to a podiatrist rather than a psychiatrist. Mr. Macdonald’s punchline: “And then the moth said, ‘Because the light was on.’”Mr. Macdonald’s sense of humor sometimes got him in hot water. In 2018, for instance, he drew criticism for remarks that seemed to defend the comedian Louis C.K., who had been accused of sexual misconduct, and Roseanne Barr, who was under fire for a racist Twitter post. (Louis C.K. had written the foreword to Mr. Macdonald’s 2016 book, and Ms. Barr had hired him as a writer on her 1990s sitcom, “Roseanne.”) In apologizing for those comments, Mr. Macdonald made a remark that mocked people with Down syndrome.Missteps aside, Mr. Macdonald was always good for an unpredictable few minutes, or more, on a late-night talk show.“I’ve been interviewing Norm for 18 years, and he has consistently broken every talk-show rule,” Mr. O’Brien told The Times in 2011. “He tells anecdotes that are blatantly false. His stories have always been repurposed farmer’s daughter routines that he swears happened to him.”Mr. O’Brien added, “When Norm steps out from behind the curtain, I honestly don’t know what is going to happen, and that electrical charge comes through the television.”Mr. Macdonald in a scene from his sitcom “The Norm Show” (later called simply “Norm) in 1999. With him were Laurie Metcalf and Max Wright.Robert Votes/ABCNorman Gene Macdonald was born on Oct. 17, 1959, in Quebec City, according to IMDB.In 1998, his brother Neil told The Record of Ontario that Norm had had a flirtation with the newspaper business as a young man but that he had deliberately botched an interview for a job as a copyboy because he wasn’t that serious about the profession.“He once said he was interested in discovering the truth, but he hoped it would be within walking distance,” Neil Macdonald told the newspaper.He also recalled finding his brother hyperventilating in the washroom at Yuk Yuk’s, an Ottawa comedy club, before going onstage for his first stand-up gig. But he got it together and, as comedians say, killed.By 1984, Mr. Macdonald was skilled enough to spend four months opening for the comedian Sam Kinison. He eventually made his way to Los Angeles, and in 1992 he was hired as a writer on “The Dennis Miller Show” and then “Roseanne.”“I never wanted fame at all, I just wanted to do stand-up,” he told The Ottawa Citizen in 2010. “I found when I came to Los Angeles to do more stand-up comedy that people wanted me to do other things, which I really didn’t want to.”“Stand-up,” he added, “is an odd kind of job where, if you’re good at it, they figure you’ll be good at other stuff in show business, which is usually not the case.”Mr. Macdonald wrote the 1998 film “Dirty Work,” in which he starred with Don Rickles, Chevy Chase and others. Among his other credits were the “Dr. Doolittle” movies, in which he provided the voice of a dog named Lucky.His survivors include his mother, a son and two brothers, his manager said. “He was an original,” Mr. Michaels said, “and he didn’t compromise in a business that’s based on compromise — show business.”Dave Itzkoff More

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    Lin-Manuel Miranda Sings ‘New York, New York’ Outside ‘Hamilton’ Theater

    Three hours before showtime, Lin-Manuel Miranda — the “Hamilton” creator who wrote the music, book and lyrics for the hit musical — burst out of the front doors of the Richard Rodgers Theater with a bullhorn and was met with the shrieks and applause of a crowd gathered on West 46th Street.He was there to lead a group of Broadway performers in a rendition of Frank Sinatra’s “Theme From ‘New York, New York,’” creating a sort of mood-setting overture for the night ahead.New York New York!!!! pic.twitter.com/iEW3tUxL0H— Luis A. Miranda, Jr. (@Vegalteno) September 14, 2021
    “Get a mask, get vaccinated and come see live theater!” said Miranda, who also played Alexander Hamilton in the original Broadway cast.The appearance was not publicized until about 4 p.m., when Miranda tweeted a photo from inside the theater and announced a so-called Ham4Ham, which, before the pandemic, was a performance by “Hamilton” cast members outside the theater that accompanied a lottery for tickets to see the show. (There would be no free tickets today, Miranda said.)Passers-by and Broadway superfans rushed to the scene as soon as they saw the social media announcement.Eva Ferreira, a 10-year-old “Hamilton” fan who has memorized nearly every word of the musical, watched with her parents, who had taken her to New York City for her birthday.Four teenagers — all aspiring Broadway performers who had spent the day in class at Steps Conservatory — sprinted to the theater from the subway after they saw Miranda’s tweet. They stood in the crowd in awe of the group of performers — the kind that they hoped to be one day.Jessica Payne and her husband ran down from their hotel room to catch Miranda and the other performers. Their spring 2020 trip was canceled because of the pandemic, so they had flown in from Colorado recently to see eight Broadway shows in six days after “a year and a half of heartbreak” while the industry was on pause.“We both cried when the plane landed,” Jessica Payne said, listing the shows the couple was planning to see (“Wicked” is on the schedule tonight). “We’re so happy to be here.” More

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    ‘Chicago’ Polishes Its Razzle-Dazzle Right Until Showtime

    It was six hours before showtime for “Chicago,” which was reopening after an 18-month hiatus, and the cast was gathered onstage at the Ambassador Theater to hear a choreographer and director’s notes from the final dress rehearsal. After this many months offstage, a few details still needed polishing, even after weeks of rehearsals.“Act Two: Bianca, you are early with your ‘Hello, suckers,’” Greg Butler, the associate choreographer, said to Bianca Marroquín, who was playing Velma Kelly. He asked her to walk offstage and try the entrance again.“Hello, suckers!” Marroquín said a moment later.“Fierce, that’s how we do it,” Butler responded.And with that, the cast of “Chicago,” the long-running musical by John Kander and Fred Ebb, got back to business.“Eighteen months is a lot,” Marroquín, who had played Roxie Hart before playing Velma, said in interview, coming off the stage to sit in the empty auditorium. “Everyone went through a lot of trauma and anxiety, and it wasn’t easy for us. Life goes boom-boom and takes the stage away. That was tough.”She spoke of the emotions of being back. “This is what we do,” she said. “Without this, our life sort of dimmed.”Now “Chicago,” which is celebrating its 25th anniversary on Broadway this year, is waiting to see what its next chapter will look like. Tourists, who make up two-thirds of the overall Broadway audience, are especially important to “Chicago.” One of the big lingering questions is when (or if) they will start flocking back.“We are certainly a tourist-driven show,” said Walter Bobbie, the show’s director. “We are going to find out. When you get to be past 10 years old, the New Yorkers who want to see the show have seen it.”One of the people on hand for Tuesday’s opening performance was a lifelong New Yorker, Peter Massaro, who paid $250 for a premium package from Mastercard that included dinner and a meeting with members of the cast. (“I’m still shaking,” he said afterward.)Massaro first saw “Chicago” 20 years ago. “I haven’t seen it since,” he said. “I’m a huge Bob Fosse fan. It’s a great show from start to finish. The dancing alone.”Massaro, who wore a rhinestone bow tie for Broadway’s return, said he had no concern about seeing a show in the midst of a pandemic. “They check for vaccines and masks,” he said. “People are respectful of that, especially in the Broadway community.” More