Eliana Willis

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    in Television

    ‘S.N.L.’ Cast Makes Its Case to Stay off Trump’s Enemies List

    The show parodied its own history of mawkish self-seriousness in an episode that often avoided the topic of the presidential election.A serious development in current events can sometimes leave “Saturday Night Live” unable to make any satirical comment on it, and that was briefly how it appeared the show might react to the re-election this week of former President Donald J. Trump.This weekend’s broadcast began with seeming solemnity, as a group of “S.N.L.” cast members, including Bowen Yang, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson and Heidi Gardner, took note of Trump’s presidential election victory over Vice President Kamala Harris, who had made a surprise cameo on “S.N.L.” just last week.“To many people,” Nwodim said, “including many people watching this show right now, the results were shocking and even horrifying.”Gardner continued, “Donald Trump, who tried to forcibly overturn the results of the last election, was returned to office by an overwhelming majority.”Thompson said, “This is the same Donald Trump who openly called for vengeance against his political enemies.”Now, said Yang, “thanks to the Supreme Court, there are no guard rails.” Nwodim added that there would be “nothing to protect the people who are brave enough to speak out against him. “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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    in Theater

    Overlooked No More: Go-won-go Mohawk, Trailblazing Indigenous Actress

    In the 1880s, the only roles for Indigenous performers were laden with negative stereotypes. So Mohawk decided to write her own narratives.This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.For a long time, theatrical roles for Indigenous characters were laden with stereotypes: the savage, the tragic martyr, the helpless drunk. And it was rare in stories of any kind, on the page or on the stage, for an Indigenous character to have a starring role.By the late 1880s, the actress Go-won-go Mohawk had had enough. “I grew tired of being cast in uncongenial roles,” like meek princesses or submissive women who were restrained in corsets, she told The Des Moines Register and Leader in 1910. So she decided to write her own roles, ultimately carving out a groundbreaking career in which she told stories onstage about Indigenous people as the heroes of their own lives. She also did it while performing as a man.Mohawk’s primary work was “Wep-ton-no-mah, the Indian Mail Carrier” (1892), which follows the title character, a young Indigenous man, as he saves a young white woman from a stampede, winning her heart and earning the respect of her family.The woman’s father, a colonel, offers Wep-ton-no-mah a position as a mail carrier, which he initially turns down. “I could not start being under the control of anyone but the great Manitou,” Wep-ton-no-mah says, referring to the spiritual power of the Algonquians. “I want to be free–free–free like the birds, the eagles and deers — owning no master but one.”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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    in Theater

    In ‘Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,’ Alina Troyano Explores How Art Can Live Inside Others

    You never can tell where your inheritance will come from, but the playwright Branden Jacobs-Jenkins almost missed out on some of his.In 2007, as a New York University graduate student, he nearly dropped a course on the uses and abuses of sentimentality because it conflicted with a job he had just gotten at The New Yorker. But it was a small class, and he was the only guy. So his instructor — Alina Troyano, the Cuban-born Obie Award winner who teaches under her stage name, Carmelita Tropicana — put up a fight.“He stayed in the class because I begged him to stay,” she said.Thus began an acquaintanceship that turned into a friendship that turned into a collaboration: “Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,” their hallucinatory new play at Soho Rep. It is the last production at the theater’s longtime home, in TriBeCa, before the company moves into temporary accommodations at Playwrights Horizons in Midtown. Written by the two of them, and starring her, it is about creative legacy, generational change and the ways that autobiographically and culturally specific art made by one person can live, and morph, inside others.In the show, Troyano performs as both Alina and her comic alter ego, Carmelita: a feminist, sex-positive lesbian from Havana who borrows stereotypes to send them up, campily ridiculing bigotry, misogyny, machismo, colonialism. Ugo Chukwu plays Branden.The trippy premise is that when Alina threatens to kill Carmelita, an alarmed Branden asks her to sell him the persona instead. How this would work when Carmelita has lived inside Alina since before Branden was born is the mind-bending question at hand.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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    Kaley Cuoco Drifts Off to Episodes of ‘Dateline’

    The actress returns for Season 2 of the dark comedy “Based on a True Story” as the true-crime aficionado Ava.When Kaley Cuoco learned she was pregnant before shooting began on the first season of the dark comedy “Based on a True Story,” her character, Ava — a true-crime aficionado on the trail of a serial killer — was given a quick rewrite and became an expectant mother, too.Not surprisingly, when Cuoco chafed at the rituals of new motherhood, that wound up in the story line for Season 2 (out Nov. 21 on Peacock), which finds Ava on the scent of a copycat murderer.“A lot of this came from my own actual experiences of the first six months of being with my kid and despising some of the Mommy and Me classes,” said Cuoco, who had never worked with a baby on camera. “It was new for Ava, it was new for Kaley.”She lives in Thousand Oaks, Calif., with her partner, the actor Tom Pelphrey, and their daughter Matilda. Motherhood has required Cuoco to re-evaluate and compartmentalize.“This is the first time in my whole life that I’ve thought about anyone else but myself when it comes to work,” said Cuoco, who for 12 seasons played Penny on “The Big Bang Theory,” and appeared as Cassie for two on “The Flight Attendant,” earning three Emmy nominations. “You think of it as these kind of mini-moments,” she said of the three months of shooting “Based on a True Story,” during which she saw Matilda mostly on weekends.“But that’s part of it. You commit to that moment in time,” Cuoco added before elaborating on her devotion to rescue animals, Sharky’s rice and bean burritos, and “Dateline.”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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    in Theater

    Jonathan Haze, Star of ‘The Little Shop of Horrors,’ Dies at 95

    Best known for his star turn in the cult film about a flesh-eating plant, he was a go-to member of the low-budget auteur Roger Corman’s repertory company.Jonathan Haze, a prince of the B-movie who appeared in nearly 20 pulp cinema popcorn munchers by the king of the B-movie, the low-budget auteur Roger Corman — most notably as Seymour, the sniveling flower shop assistant in the original “The Little Shop of Horrors” — died on Saturday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95.His death was confirmed by his daughter Rebecca Haze.Mr. Haze, a fledgling actor who had hitchhiked to Los Angeles to chase his screen dreams, was working at a Hollywood gas station in 1952 when he was discovered by Wyott Ordung, a young actor and aspiring director affiliated with Mr. Corman.Mr. Corman at that point was just starting a career in which he would produce more than 300 exploitation films and direct roughly 50, with titles like “The Beast With a Million Eyes” and “Teenage Cave Man.” He was also known for his eye for talent: He gave early opportunities to Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and Jack Nicholson, among many others.Mr. Corman cast Mr. Haze in two movies in 1954: “Monster From the Ocean Floor,” directed by Mr. Ordung, and “The Fast and the Furious,” whose title would be licensed decades later for the Vin Diesel car-frenzy franchise, in which he had an uncredited role.Among the many other Corman movies in which Mr. Haze appeared was “Not of This Earth” (1957), with Paul Birch, center, and Beverly Garland.MGMMr. Haze, left, and Ms. Garland were also in Mr. Corman’s “Gunslinger” (1956), along with Chris Alcaide, center, and Martin Kingsley.MGMAs the Tumblr site Know Your B Movie Actors observed: “Haze was a small, slight man with boyish good looks, and it was a virtual certainty that he would never be a leading man, even in Corman’s universe. Instead, he devoted himself to playing an assortment of oddballs and losers.”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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    in Theater

    Broadway’s ‘Maybe Happy Ending’ Asks: Can Robots Fall in Love?

    “Maybe Happy Ending” had an initial Korean-language production in Seoul in 2016. Here are five things to know about the show.Hue Park was sitting in a Brooklyn coffee shop in the spring of 2014 when “Everyday Robots,” an indie pop ballad by Damon Albarn, floated over the speakers: “We are everyday robots on our phones / In the process of getting home.”What if, Park thought, there were a whole world filled with robots who looked just look humans?The result: a one-act Korean-language musical about a pair of abandoned robots who fall in love in Seoul in 2064. The show, which Park wrote with Will Aronson, a former New York University classmate, found success with its premiere in Seoul in 2016, and five subsequent commercial productions there.The New York Times critic Jesse Green, who saw an English-language production at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater in 2020, called it “charming” and “Broadway-ready.” Now that version will open at Broadway’s Belasco Theater on Nov. 12, starring Darren Criss and Helen J Shen.The story is about two outcast helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and build a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence, and Park thinks it is especially relatable after the coronavirus pandemic. “People have become so comfortable staying alone in their rooms and connecting to each other through a screen,” he said in a recent interview in Midtown Manhattan.Shortly after previews began last month, Park, 41, a former K-pop lyricist who wrote the show’s lyrics, and Aronson, 43, who wrote the music — both collaborated on the book — talked about their inspirations and the different approaches to developing the show’s Korean and English versions. In a separate video call, Criss, 37, and Shen, 24, discussed the challenges of playing robots who look like humans.Here are five things to know.Shen and Criss star alongside two other actors in the musical, which is at the Belasco Theater in Manhattan.Jeenah Moon for 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

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    ‘Dune: Prophecy’ Faced a Pitiless Terrain: Adapting Anything ‘Dune’

    The novels were famously tough to adapt until Denis Villeneuve came along. Can an HBO prequel about the origins of the Bene Gesserit follow suit?For over 50 years, Frank Herbert’s best-selling science-fiction novel “Dune” was a puzzle no one in show business seemed able to solve. Published in 1965, the book had inspired a shelf full of sequels and prequels — along with scores of imitators — yet it defied every attempt to turn it into a blockbuster film or TV series.In the 1970s, the beloved avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky spent two years and millions of dollars developing a movie and never shot a single frame. David Lynch tried next, but the resulting film, released in 1984, was a personal and box-office catastrophe. The story’s vastness and exoticism proved as perilous to storytellers as the fictional planet Arrakis, whose hostile deserts inspired the franchise’s name.When the HBO series “Dune: Prophecy” was announced, in 2019, its prospects seemed just as murky. Indeed the production struggled to find its footing. By the premiere, it will have seen four showrunners, three lead directors and high-level cast changes — not to mention a pandemic and two crippling industry strikes.But then in 2021, the French Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, who was set to direct the pilot, released Part 1 of his two-part adaptation of “Dune.” Critics were ecstatic, and the film grossed over $400 million worldwide. Suddenly a “Dune” franchise looked viable. Villeneuve’s team had offered a blueprint for other creators to work from, tonally, aesthetically and narratively. (The studios behind the film, Legendary and Warner, which owns HBO, are also behind the series.)Perhaps more important, there was now a huge audience that had never read Herbert’s famously dense novels but had become invested in the story and characters. The resounding critical and financial success of “Dune: Part Two,” released in February, indicates viewers are still invested in the franchise.“I think Denis really unlocked this universe for people in a way that was relatable,” said Alison Schapker, a “Westworld” veteran who took over as the sole showrunner of “Dune: Prophecy” in 2022. “He grounded it. We wanted to tell a story that takes place in that universe.”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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    in Theater

    Don’t Say ‘Macbeth’ and Other Strange Rituals of the Theater World

    Pulling back the curtain on the peculiar customs and enduring superstitions that help define life backstage.You may not have realized it, but there’s little chance you’ve heard anyone whistle inside a theater. In the old days, sailors often worked the ropes backstage, bringing to show business codes like command whistles. So a whistle meant as a compliment, or to get a person’s attention, might have landed a piece of scenery on someone’s head.Theater is full of these customs — many arising, like most rituals, from hazy origins. Still, show people hold on to them. In an industry that hopes to conjure the same wonder every night (with wildly different results), there’s comfort in tradition, especially if it reaches back decades or even centuries. Some, as the 56-year-old Broadway wardrobe supervisor and costume designer Patrick Bevilacqua says, are “rituals of consistency” — the private fist bumps or helpful Listerine sprays during a backstage quick change, which must be “choreographed within an inch of its life” to keep the show running smoothly. Others are spiritual; according to the actress Lea Salonga, 53, “any practice where everyone can see each other as human” is necessarily grounding.Some are individual: The actor Hugh Jackman, 56, last seen as the lead in “The Music Man” on Broadway in 2023, buys scratch-off lottery tickets for each production member every Friday; occasionally, someone wins a few hundred dollars. Some are secretive, like stealing costumes after a show closes, while others are blared through the house, as when stage managers announce on loudspeakers before a performance, “It’s Saturday night on Broadway,” a reminder that the wearying workweek is almost over.The curio cabinet that the actress Patti LuPone keeps at her Connecticut home filled with gifts from her shows over the years, including an “Evita” (1979) doll, an egg made by an “Anything Goes” (1987) crew member on top of a music box and a Mrs. Lovett bobblehead from when she appeared in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” (2005).Daniel TernaLength dictates quantity: Longer-running productions are more likely to develop more idiosyncratic traditions. This means that in New York, Broadway is more ritualistic than Off, and musicals outmatch straight plays for the same reason. The 64-year-old actress Amra-Faye Wright, for example, has for about a decade been painting murals each season backstage for “Chicago,” the second-longest-running musical in Broadway history, which opened in 1975 and has been up since its 1996 revival. All agree that London is more laid-back, despite having some quirks, such as everyone in the cast and crew banging on the windows facing the National Theatre’s interior courtyard on opening night; or the Baddeley cake, an intricately decorated and frosted dessert that varies from show to show but has been served with punch at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, every Jan. 6 since 1795. It’s named after Robert Baddeley, an actor who played minor roles there and who in his will bequeathed funds for the annual festivity.As the 43-year-old British director Michael Longhurst says, most are “a mix of the practical and superstitious.” Actors tell one another to break a leg — maybe because “good luck” is gauche; maybe because they’re an understudy wishing a principal would just bow out; maybe because a theater’s “legs” are the thin drapes that frame the stage, which you’d cross if receiving an ovation; or maybe just because they know it’s a phrase they ought to keep alive.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