“Seems generous until you remember that Biden can’t get anyone else in America to take them, right?” Noah said of the president’s plan to donate 500 million Covid-19 vaccine doses to 100 countries.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. Looking for more to watch? Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More
As throngs of residents watched, the stars of the movie, set in Washington Heights, walked a sunny yellow carpet outside the United Palace.At the Plaza de las Americas in Washington Heights, fruit and vegetable vendors usually sell produce until dusk. But on Wednesday, it was transformed into a replica of any other block in the neighborhood. There was a mock bodega, decorated with three Dominican flags that hung from an awning, a faux fire hydrant and a plastic fruit stand. Underneath the entire set ran a yellow carpet.The reproduction served as a backdrop for the luminaries attending for the premiere of “In the Heights,” the big-screen adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes’s Tony-winning Broadway show. The sunny carpet welcomed the cast and crew back to the Upper Manhattan neighborhood where it was filmed. The premiere, which also served as opening night of the 20th Tribeca Festival, was held at the United Palace, a majestic 91-year-old theater with a projection system that, years earlier, before his success on Broadway, Miranda had helped raise money to buy and then helped install.While the actors, producers and executives streamed down the yellow carpet, pausing for pictures with photographers and interviews with the news media, the real Washington Heights whirred behind them. Waitresses at Malecon, a Dominican restaurant across the street from the plaza, peered outside the windows in between serving heaps of rice, stew chicken and beans, trying to figure out why crowds had formed in front of their restaurant on a sticky 90-degree day.Maritza Luna, left, and Eglis Suarez were among the fans waiting outside the theater for a glimpse of the stars.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesDiners at El Conde Nuevo, another Dominican restaurant across the street, stood on the corner also trying to decipher the rumpus outside. And then, Miranda — wearing a pale blue, long-sleeve chacabana, jeans and the same Nike Air Force 1s, often called Uptowns in the City, that he wore to the Broadway opening of “In the Heights” — arrived with his family, and everyone erupted in cheers.Jorge Peguero, 71, was on his way home when he stopped and became a proud member of the crowd.“I’ve lived here my whole life, and this is fantastic,” said Peguero, a resident of Washington Heights since 1969. “It’s a big deal that Tribeca chose to represent the Dominican community, and it’s the first time ever that we see anything like it.”Miranda, who still lives in Washington Heights, had hoped to premiere the movie where it is set.“All I ever wanted was this neighborhood to be proud of themselves and the way they are portrayed,” said Miranda, who was within walking distance of his home and his parent’s home. “I still walk around here with my headphones on, and everyone is just like well, Lin-Manuel is writing.”“I feel safe here,” he added.Lin-Manuel Miranda, left, who wrote the music and lyrics for “In the Heights,” and Anthony Ramos, who stars in the movie.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMany Washington Heights residents have not yet had their encounter with Miranda in the neighborhood. Eglis Suarez, 48, was hoping to change that.“I want to see Lin,” she said. “We are so proud, this is progress for this community and for the city.”Exuberant and critically adored, “In the Heights,” directed by Jon M. Chu, is a look at the shifts that happen between first- and second-generation immigrants. The elders hope to make it out of the neighborhood they left home for, while their younger counterparts plan to stay in the neighborhood they call home. It is a story that has occurred a million times over in the area and one that Hudes, who also lives there, encountered daily while filming.“This isn’t about a hero or a protagonist, it’s about what happens when a community holds hands together and life kind of pushes those hands apart,” said Hudes, who wore large hoops and a flower-print jumpsuit. “It’s about these blocks and these living rooms where you go after school and do your homework or play bingo during a blackout, it’s all here.”Washington Heights has been home to middle- and working-class Dominicans since the 1960s. In the 1980s, the neighborhood, like many others in the city, was flooded with cocaine and crack, making it unsafe for the community. Those days are past now and some residents say it’s time to move on from a narrative in countless movies and rap songs that no longer fits the neighborhood.“I’m so proud of this movie,” said Sandra Marin Martinez, 67, a lifelong Washington Heights resident. “Who wouldn’t be? At least there’s no shooting.”“Everything is dancing, these are my people, I grew up dancing here,” she added as she waited for a glimpse of the cast walking into the theater.“In the Heights” Premiere13 PhotosView Slide Show ›Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesYudelka Rodriguez, 51, was standing with her daughter waiting for the cast to arrive. She was excited to see her hood in the movie and herself represented.“I am so emotional,” Rodriguez said as she leaned on a metal gate. “This is the most beautiful thing, to see that your barrio is involved in this; it’s the best feeling.”That feeling is something Paula Weinstein, an organizer of the Tribeca Festival (which dropped “film” from its name this year), hoped to replicate all over the city with this movie.“This is what we’ve been dreaming of — New York is back,” Weinstein said. “This is a tribute to the Dominican community, this is what is the best of New York. Every generation of immigrants start one place and move into the community, That’s what’s great about New York, that’s what we want to celebrate.”In the theater, Robert De Niro, a founder of the festival, introduced Miranda, who then introduced the rest of the cast. The energy was electric from the stage to the seats. When a title card that read “Washington Heights” appeared on the screen, the crowd whooped and applauded.When the movie’s star, Anthony Ramos, arrived, the makeshift set was surrounded by a small crowd. As he stepped out in black-and-white cheetah-print pants, with a matching shirt and jacket, gingerly placed on his shoulders, the crowd at the corner of 175th and Broadway thundered with applause and cheers.“I didn’t grow up even going to Broadway, and most New York people don’t grow up going to Broadway,” said Ramos, who is a Brooklyn native. “To tell a New York story about a community that’s so familiar and so special to people from New York is particularly special for me.” More
Tim Dolan of Broadway Up Close and his crew of tour guides are back on the sidewalks, catering to a growing number of visitors.On a recent weekday morning, a cluster of 10 masked out-of-towners found themselves in the garish maw of Times Square. Tim Dolan, their tour guide, held up an iPad showing a black-and-white photograph of the area in 1900, when it was filled with horse carriages rather than jumbo LED screens. In the photo, a man is shoveling a pile of manure. “The only thing that hasn’t changed is the smell,” Dolan said with affection.Dolan calls himself “probably the only New Yorker who would ever say they love Times Square.” It’s his neighborhood, he says, even though he lives in an apartment in Hamilton Heights with his French bulldog, Belasco, named after his favorite theater.Archival images of Times Square are incorporated into the tours.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesHe’s also probably one of the few people who can tell you the story of the actor who appeared in 9,382 performances of “The Phantom of the Opera,” or precisely why there were live lions onstage at the Broadhurst Theater for 14 nights in 1921.Dolan is the founder of Broadway Up Close, whose shamrock-green-shirted tour guides have, for 11 years, led one hour-and-45-minute tours of the area between 41st and 54th Streets, from Avenue of the Americas to Eighth Avenue. They talk about the buildings, the business and backstage gossip of the Theater District — including this newspaper, which gave Times Square its name — tracking its history from Oscar Hammerstein I to “Hamilton.” Dolan is also behind one of Times Square’s latter-day landmarks and photo ops, currently stashed away: a typographical jumble of the letters of “Broadway” near a pedestrian plaza, which looks good on Instagram.Last year, when the Great White Way went dark, Dolan’s tours stopped accordingly. (At the time, they were running 10 to 12 tours a week.) The exsanguine atmosphere of the place was especially heartbreaking for him. He missed his adopted community of performers, stage hands, TKTS staff members. “Even the Naked Cowboy,” he said. “I felt like I saw literal tumbleweeds roll down 44th Street.”A pre-pandemic poster for “Sing Street,” which was supposed to start previews at the Lyceum Theater in March 2020. Amy Lombard for The New York Times“Hamilton” will resume performances on Sept. 14 at the Richard Rodgers Theater on West 46th Street.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesA poster for “MJ the Musical,” scheduled to open this winter at the Neil Simon Theater on West 52nd Street.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesBut now, with coronavirus in retreat and reopening dates appearing on theater marquees, Dolan and his Broadway Up Close tour guides are back on the sidewalks nearly every day, catering to a slowly but surely growing number of visitors.It beats giving the tours virtually, though Dolan still conducts a couple of virtual tours a week. “So much of it is reading the audience, engaging with the audience, picking up on what they’re most interested in,” Dolan said. “It’s hard to do that in a webinar.”Visitors joined Dolan for a recent “Shubert Brothers and Beyond” tour.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesGiven that the tours attract musical lovers and theater die-hards, they are also currently serving as a substitute for actual Broadway. “We would definitely be seeing a show a night,” said Carrie Mershon, a visitor from Kansas who was taking the tour. She had booked the family’s New York trip months ago, in the hopes that Broadway productions would be up and running by now. No such luck; their show tickets had been refunded. “This fills the void a little bit.”At least Dolan can be relied upon to put on a show. Befitting the location, the more over-the-top the story, the better: Know the one about a “Follies” girl who found herself riding a runaway ostrich? How about the music director who dove into a watery orchestra pit after a flash flood at “Evita”? Or the theatergoer who fell out of the window onto the marquee of the Lyceum Theater?Dolan delivers colorful anecdotes and his fact-filled soliloquies with the polished enthusiasm of a jobbing actor. He was last onstage three years ago, in a regional production of “Arsenic and Old Lace,” and said he had booked a show in Michigan before the pandemic struck.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesHe has an actor’s knack for the emotional overshare too, pointing out his ex-girlfriend in a photo of the original “Hamilton” cast. “She’s with Daveed Diggs now,” one of the younger members of the tour group said, matter-of-factly.“I am aware!” Dolan replied.He moved to the city in 2003 to train at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy. After graduation, he performed in “Altar Boyz” for two years, and then felt the pressure to get what many in the profession call a “survival job.” He’s still not a fan of the term. “I didn’t want to just get by. I wanted another job that was just as fulfilling as when I’m onstage or in an audition room.”Realizing there was a lack of good Broadway-centric walking tours, he picked up his New York City tour guide license and set out to tell strangers lesser-known stories about his favorite place in the world. He read scores of books and scoured the photo archives of the Museum of the City of New York and New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. Most enjoyable, he relentlessly picked the brains of other industry professionals.The Broadway Up Close kiosk in Times Square.Amy Lombard for The New York TimesIf anything, he had to rein in his passions: The original version of the tour covered all 40 Broadway theaters open at the time, and was seven-and-a-half hours long. Eventually, Dolan divided it into three separate tours, later adding a historical Alexander Hamilton tour and one on Broadway ghost stories, plus an interior tour of the Hudson Theater that’s currently on pause.Dolan’s eyes light up when describing the very earliest days of Times Square, a time when, for example, you might visit a recreation of a Dutch farm, replete with sheep and windmill, on a 42nd Street rooftop. Perhaps more surprisingly, Dolan is a defender of the 21st-century incarnation of the place. “We lament the loss of the old, while loving the new,” he told the group while his “Shubert Brothers and Beyond” tour stopped in the spot where a beautiful French Renaissance-style theatrical complex called the Olympia used to be. (An Old Navy store is there now.)Amy Lombard for The New York Times“You can have commerce, and art, and a safe neighborhood all at the same time,” Dolan told me. “If you’re looking for the nostalgia amid the ‘Disneyification,’ you just have to know where to look. Wanting to find the old among the new is part of why I started this.”Dolan expects Broadway Up Close to be back to prepandemic levels of business later in the year. By then, he hopes, the area will start to feel like its old self again. “I don’t think it’s in September, when we just have a couple of shows open. I think it’s once we hit maybe December, and there’s a handful of shows, and there’s the yellow Playbills in a sea of people in Times Square. Maybe less masks too. I don’t think New York City will fully be reopened until that moment happens.”Tim Dolan calls himself “probably the only New Yorker who would ever say they love Times Square.”Amy Lombard for The New York TimesBefore that, Dolan has a date, on Sept. 14, with the Gershwin Theater — where “Sweeney Todd” had its premiere in 1979 and “Starlight Express” opened in 1987 — for the return of the musical “Wicked.”“I’ll be the grown man in the last row, crying.” More
Jodie Turner-Smith portrays the ill-fated wife of Henry VIII in a new mini-series. The show has stirred debate in Britain, which is sort of the point.LONDON — Britain’s most recent rendering of the story of Anne Boleyn, the second of Henry VIII’s six wives, begins at the end. When the new mini-series “Anne Boleyn” opens, it’s 1536, the queen is pregnant and powerful — and has five months left to live.Anne’s story, which occupies a special place in the British collective imagination, has spawned an abundance of fictionalized depictions onscreen (“The Tudors”) and in literature (“Wolf Hall”). It is generally told as a morally dubious young woman seducing an older king into leaving his wife and his church, before she is executed for failing to give birth to a male heir.But the new mini-series, which premiered last week on Channel 5, one of Britain’s public service broadcasters, attempts to reframe Anne’s story, instead focusing on her final months and how she tried to maintain power in a system that guaranteed her very little.In the three episode-long series, Anne is played by Jodie Turner-Smith, best-known for her role in the film “Queen & Slim.” It is the first time a Black actress has portrayed the Tudor queen onscreen.“We wanted to find someone who could really inhabit her but also be surprising to an audience,” Faye Ward, one of the show’s executive producers, said in an interview. Since there were already so many depictions of Anne Boleyn, the show’s creators “wanted to reset people’s expectations of her,” Ward said.Turner-Smith’s Anne Boleyn, center, desperately tries to maintain power in a system that guarantees her very little.Sony Pictures TelevisionAnne (Turner-Smith) and her brother George (Paapa Essiedu).Sony Pictures TelevisionMadge Shelton (Thalissa Teixeira), Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Sony Pictures TelevisionThe series employs a diverse casting playbook, in a similar vein to the Regency-era Netflix drama “Bridgerton.” But whereas that show’s characters are fictional, in “Anne Boleyn” actors of color play several white historical figures: The British-Ghanian actor Paapa Essiedu plays Anne’s brother George Boleyn, and the British-Brazillian actress Thalissa Teixeira portrays Madge Shelton, Anne’s cousin and lady-in-waiting.Although race does not figure overtly in the show’s plot, the program makers adopted an approach known as “identity-conscious casting,” which allows actors to bring “all those factors of yourself to a role,” Ward said.For Turner-Smith, that meant connecting her experiences with the ways in which Anne, who was raised in the French court, was an outsider and suffered at Henry’s court.“As a Black woman, I can understand being marginalized. I have a lived experience of what limitation and marginalization feel like,” Turner-Smith, 34, said in an interview. “I thought it was interesting to bring the freshness of a Black body telling that story.”Casting Turner-Smith as one of Britain’s best-known royal consorts has caused debate in the press and particularly on social media in Britain, with “Anne Boleyn” trending on Twitter the day after the series premiere.In the newspaper The Daily Telegraph, the writer Marianka Swain called Turner-Smith’s casting “pretty cynical” and wrote that it was designed to have “Twitter frothing rather than adding anything to our understanding of an era.”Others, though, have welcomed the show’s perspective. Olivette Otele, a professor of the history of slavery and memory of enslavement at the University of Bristol, noted in The Independent newspaper that the series arrived at a time when Britain was “soul searching” about how to understand its colonial past. “The past is only a safe space if it becomes a learning space open to all,” she wrote in praise of the series.It was important to the show’s creators to center the narrative around Anne’s perspective, rather than Henry’s (played by Mark Stanley).Sony Pictures TelevisionDuring the show’s press run, Turner-Smith’s comments about the royal family’s treatment of Meghan, Duchess of Sussex — including that having her in the family was “a missed opportunity” for the monarchy — made headlines in Britain.Meghan’s treatment by the palace — which she told Oprah Winfrey in a bombshell March interview had driven her to thoughts of suicide — is representative of “just how far we have not come with patriarchal values,” Turner-Smith said.“It represents how far we have not come in terms of the monarchy and in terms of somebody being an outsider and being different, and being able to navigate that space,” she said, adding that “you can draw so many parallels if you look for them” between Anne and Meghan’s attempts to figure out life within a British palace.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” said Turner-Smith — who, upon being cast as Anne, fully expected the move to draw criticism in the country.For the actress, that presented even more reason to push back against people’s assumptions about Anne. “Art is supposed to challenge you,” she said. “The whole point of making it this way was for a different perspective. What is going to resonate with somebody by putting a different face to this and seeing it in a different way?”Dr. Stephanie Russo, the author of “The Afterlife of Anne Boleyn: Representations of Anne Boleyn in Fiction and on the Screen,” said there were many reasons for Britain’s fascination with and attachment to the Tudors, and Anne specifically. The “soap opera” of a younger woman disrupting a long-term marriage remains fascinating, she said, as does the rise and fall of a powerful woman.There is also a patriotic element, Russo said: Anne’s daughter was Elizabeth I, the monarch who oversaw Britain’s “golden age,” when William Shakespeare was writing his plays and many historians credit the British Empire as having been born.The series was conceived as a feminist exercise, unpacking what Eve Hedderwick Turner, the show’s writer, called “those big, insulting and detrimental terms” attached to Anne, which at the time included accusations of treason, adultery and an incestuous relationship with her brother.“There is very little room for someone brown to touch the monarchy,” Turner-Smith said.Sony Pictures TelevisionIn the mini-series, Anne falls out of favor with Henry after a stillbirth. No matter how nominally powerful or ambitious she is, she is no match for the forces that seek to extinguish her, which come to include her husband, his advisers and the country’s legal system. All the while, she tries not to show vulnerability in public.It was important, Hedderwick Turner said, for the creators to put “Anne back in the center of her story, making her the protagonist, seeing everything from her perspective.”The political machinations of Henry VIII and his advisers, his internal life and his motivations are largely obscured in the series. Instead, viewers are privy to Anne’s state of mind and her relationship with her household’s ladies-in-waiting.“Henry is spoken about as this great man, because he had all of these wives” and killed some of them, Turner-Smith said. “It’s just like: Actually, there’s a woman at the center of this story who is so dynamic and fascinating and interesting.”Hilary Mantel, the author of the “Wolf Hall” trilogy charting Thomas Cromwell’s life serving Henry VIII, wrote in a 2013 piece for the London Review of Books about how fictionalized accounts of Anne’s life communicate society’s contemporary attitudes toward women.“Popular fiction about the Tudors has also been a form of moral teaching about women’s lives, though what is taught varies with moral fashion,” she said.What, then, does this “Anne Boleyn” say about today’s world?“We’re finally getting to a place where we’re allowing women to become more than just a trope,” Turner-Smith said.Traditionally, when playing a female character, “you’re either the Madonna or you’re the whore, right?” she said. But in this series, “We’re saying we’re unafraid to show different sides of a woman.” More
You streamed it. Now you can buy it at Netflix.shop, a new site that will offer everything from a “Lupin” side table to a “Yasuke” clock.There will be “Lupin” pillows and Netflix-branded boxer shorts.There will be caps, necklaces, charms and hoodies, all of it for sale at Netflix.shop, a site that goes live on Thursday, when the world’s biggest streaming company plants a flag in the territory of e-commerce. More
The production also has a new management team to replace Scott Rudin, who stepped aside after allegations of abusive behavior.Aaron Sorkin’s stage adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which before the pandemic was the rare play to have a long and lucrative Broadway run, will resume performances on Oct. 5.It will reopen with a pair of familiar faces onstage: Jeff Daniels, who starred as the righteous lawyer Atticus Finch during the show’s first year, will return to lead the cast, and Celia Keenan-Bolger, who won a Tony Award for her portrayal of Finch’s daughter, Scout, in the original cast, will return to that role. They are planning to remain in the cast until Jan. 2.Offstage, there is more change.This is the first of Scott Rudin’s shows to announce a plan to move on without its lead producer. In April, Rudin said he would step back from producing after facing scrutiny of his bullying behavior.The production will now be overseen by Orin Wolf, who was the lead producer of the Tony-winning musical “The Band’s Visit,” and who is the president of a touring company, NETworks, that before the pandemic had been engaged by Rudin to supervise a “Mockingbird” tour. Wolf’s title will be executive producer, and he will be responsible for the show’s operations, reporting to Barry Diller, a lead producer who will be the producers’ managing member with ultimate responsibility for its financing.“The show was positioned in a strong and beautiful way, and I don’t think my job is to come in and fix anything, but to honor what’s there,” Wolf said in an interview. “I’m not coming in to make artistic decisions.”Wolf said Rudin would not have any role with the production, adding that he has had no recent communication with Rudin. Wolf’s agreement was negotiated with Diller, he said, and a condition of his employment was that Rudin would have no voice in the production.“The Broadway company will no longer pay any compensation to Scott as a producer, and he’ll no longer have any managerial or decision-making role of any kind,” Wolf said. “He does have a small investment position, which is passive.”“To Kill a Mockingbird,” adapted from the 1960 Harper Lee novel, opened on Broadway in December 2018. It has consistently played to full houses; over the course of the play’s prepandemic run, it had an audience of 810,000 people and grossed $120 million, according to the Broadway League. The show recouped its $7.5 million capitalization — the amount of money it took to bring it to Broadway — 19 weeks after opening.Wolf, who has collaborated several times with the director of “Mockingbird,” Bartlett Sher, said he agreed to manage the production in order to try to protect both the show and its 182 employees. “We’re going into uncharted territory,” he said, “but my job is to make sure we’re creating an environment for the artists to do their jobs, to make sure we’re putting the production back up that people loved, and once we’ve done that job, my job is to keep trying to discover what this post-pandemic audience is.”Wolf will also continue to oversee the national tour of “Mockingbird,” which is scheduled to start performances in Buffalo, N.Y., next March and to open in Boston next April, starring Richard Thomas. The British producer Sonia Friedman will oversee a London production, starring Rafe Spall, that is scheduled to begin performances in March. More
LOS ANGELES — Amanda Kloots is not surprised that she’s famous.You don’t move to New York from Ohio at 18, go to countless thanks-but-no-thanks auditions, dust yourself off again and again, or practice tap dance nightly on your small apartment bathroom floor in case a spot in the ensemble for “42nd Street” or the Rockettes opens because you think you are best suited to a life of quiet anonymity. More
After more than two months of occupation by arts workers, the Odéon Theater returned to business with a prepandemic production that feels out of step with the current moment.PARIS — When the Odéon Theater reopened to audiences here with a staging of “The Glass Menagerie” at the end of May, its familiar columns looked somewhat naked. For two-and-a-half months, they had been adorned with large protest signs made by the arts workers occupying the theater. Shortly before they left, one sign read: “Reopening: The Great Comedy.”Inside occupied theaters around France, the situation grew increasingly tense in May after the government announced plans to allow performances to resume. On the one hand, a key goal of the protesters — the return of cultural life — was met. On the other, the occupations had morphed by then into a larger social movement with demands beyond the arts, including the withdrawal of coming changes to unemployment benefits.That set protesters on a collision course with frustrated theater administrators. Yet as fast as they had spread in early March, the occupations stopped. Students at the Colline and T2G theaters left during the first week of June, while some elsewhere were forced out. The Odéon’s occupiers moved to a friendlier Paris venue, the Centquatre.While watching “The Glass Menagerie,” though, it was hard to forget them. The Odéon didn’t help its case by reopening with a prepandemic, star-led production that felt worlds away from everything that has happened over the past year.With the prominent director Ivo van Hove in the driver’s seat, “The Glass Menagerie” premiered shortly before the first French lockdown in March 2020. Its main selling point was the presence of Isabelle Huppert, taking the role of Amanda Wingfield, the former Southern belle teetering on the edge of reality, for the first time.Huppert with Justine Bachelet as her daughter in “The Glass Menagerie.”Jan VersweyveldIt was a work in progress when I saw it then, but it now looks as aimless as Amanda herself. The drab sets, by Jan Versweyveld, trap the cast inside brown walls decorated with the silhouette of Mr. Wingfield, Amanda’s absent husband, who abandoned the family years before.The play’s characters are appropriately miserable in that décor, yet the actors often appear to be playing from different scores, in part because Huppert is an idiosyncratic stage presence these days. As Amanda, she is restless, even funny, as she repeatedly attempts to keep her son, Tom, from leaving by clinging to his legs. Van Hove feeds her over-the-top moments, including a scene in which she appears to masturbate on the kitchen counter while reminiscing about her youth.Yet the performance often makes the production seem overly conscious of her aura, of her sheer Huppert-ness, to the point that her partners adjust to her energy when she is onstage.The best scenes actually come when Laura, Amanda’s fragile daughter, is left alone with Jim, her old high-school crush. Cyril Gueï makes a kind, gentle Jim, and van Hove’s choice of a Black actor for the role reinforces the racial dynamics implicit in Amanda’s rose-tinted vision of the Old South. Gueï’s connection with Justine Bachelet’s Laura is genuine enough that for a second, a happy denouement seems within reach.Laura, played as touchingly muted by Bachelet, briefly comes alive before resigning herself. Van Hove has given her a classic French song to sing as she gives Jim her glass unicorn as an adieu: Barbara’s 1970 “L’Aigle Noir” (“The Black Eagle”), about a traumatic childhood memory that feels exactly right for Laura’s character.While capacity remained limited until this week to 35 percent of seats, a number of other theaters here rushed to reopen as soon as it became possible. At the tiny À La Folie Theater, the actress and director Laetitia Lebacq debuted a rare production of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 play, “The Respectful Whore,” which is set, like “The Glass Menagerie,” in the American South.Laetitia Lebacq and Bertrand Skol in “The Respectful Whore,” directed by Lebacq at the tiny À La Folie Theater.Instant en suspendWhile Sartre wrote a number of plays, they have mostly fallen out of fashion on the French stage. It’s a shame, because “The Respectful Whore,” while occasionally over-explanatory, sets up its central conflict in a compact, efficient manner. It takes place entirely at the home of a prostitute, Lizzie, who is caught up in a case of blatant racial discrimination. Two Black men are accused of raping her as a way of exculpating the white son of a senator, who shot one of them.Lizzie herself is overtly racist, yet refuses to falsely testify that she was raped — until the senator and his son force her hand. Lebacq navigates the role of Lizzie without smoothing over her contradictions and occasional foolishness, and Baudouin Jackson brings pathos to the resignation one of the nameless accused in the face of normalized racism. Philippe Godin, as the smooth-talking senator, and Bertrand Skol, who plays his repressed son, also make an excellent case for Sartre’s character development.As summer nears, some venues have also turned to alfresco theater to draw audiences. At the Théâtre de la Tempête, Thomas Quillardet brought two shows adapted from movies by the Nouvelle Vague filmmaker Éric Rohmer. He was renowned for the quality of his dialogue, and both “Where Hearts Meet” (inspired by two films, 1984’s “Full Moon in Paris” and 1986’s “The Green Ray”) and “The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque” flow and fizz like good champagne.Florent Cheippe and Anne-Laure Tondu in “Where Hearts Meet,” directed by Thomas Quillardet at the Théâtre de la Tempête.Pierre Grosbois“The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque,” based on the 1993 film of the same name and performed in a park just behind the venue, also stands out for its political relevance. This story of a small-town mayor whose plans to build a multimedia library run into opposition from green activists might unfold similarly today, down to its left-wing divisions on climate issues. It even features a song praising the joys of working from home — three decades before Covid-19 made that a widespread necessity.Plays like this are a reminder of what we’ve gained as cultural institutions reopen in France, yet the experience remains in some ways bittersweet. For over two months, from March to May, occupiers essentially reclaimed venues, like the Odéon, that usually play host to a small subset of the French population.According to the latest large-scale study of cultural habits in the country, in 2018, only 12 percent of France’s working class had attended a theater performance in the previous year. The audience for prestige productions such as van Hove’s “Glass Menagerie,” especially, is hardly representative of French society at large.After a year of upheaval, more imaginative offerings would have been welcome. What if directors around the country had given occupiers a chance to hold their own on the stages they spent so much time around? It’s not the social revolution protesters were gunning for, but it might have been a start.From left, Nans Laborde Jourdàa, Florent Cheippe, Malvina Plégat and Clémentine Baert in “The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque” at the Théâtre de la Tempête.Pierre GrosboisThe Glass Menagerie. Directed by Ivo van Hove. Odéon – Théâtre de l’Europe. Further performances planned in Tokyo, Athens and Amsterdam from September through November.The Respectful Whore. Directed by Laetitia Lebacq. A La Folie Théâtre, through June 20.Where Hearts Meet / The Tree, the Mayor and the Mediatheque. Directed by Thomas Quillardet. Théâtre de la Tempête, through June 20. More
