Pandemic tensions led HBO to make a new version of the therapy drama, which stars Uzo Aduba and aims to reduce stigmas about mental health care.The writer Jennifer Schuur (“My Brilliant Friend,” “Unbelievable”) has seen the same therapist every week for 17 years. “It is one of the most significant relationships of my life,” she said. Sometimes friends and family question that longevity. More
Rudy Giuliani’s son, Andrew, announced his candidacy for governor of New York on Tuesday. The “Daily Show” host is surprised that he wants the job.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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More
A familiar face who was especially adept at deadpan comedy, he also appeared on Broadway in “Same Time, Next Year,” wrote books and had his own talk show.Charles Grodin, the versatile actor familiar from “Same Time, Next Year” on Broadway, popular movies like “The Heartbreak Kid,” “Midnight Run” and “Beethoven” and numerous television appearances, died on Tuesday at his home in Wilton, Conn. He was 86.His son, Nicholas, said the cause was bone marrow cancer.With a great sense of deadpan comedy and the kind of Everyman good looks that lend themselves to playing businessmen or curmudgeonly fathers, Mr. Grodin found plenty of work as a supporting player and the occasional lead. He also had his own talk show for a time in the 1990s and was a frequent guest on the talk shows of others, making 36 appearances on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson” and more than 40 on David Letterman’s NBC and CBS shows combined.Mr. Grodin with his co-star, Ellen Burstyn, and his director, Gene Saks, in 1975 at the first rehearsal for the Broadway comedy “Same Time, Next Year.” The play was a hit and a turning point in Mr. Grodin’s career.Bettmann, via Getty ImagesMr. Grodin was a writer as well, with a number of plays and books to his credit. Though he never won a prestige acting award, he did win a writing Emmy for a 1977 Paul Simon television special, sharing it with Mr. Simon and six others.Mr. Grodin, who dropped out of the University of Miami to pursue acting, had managed to land a smattering of stage and television roles when, in 1962, he received his first big break, landing a part in a Broadway comedy called “Tchin-Tchin,” which starred Anthony Quinn and Margaret Leighton.“Walter Kerr called me impeccable,” Mr. Grodin wrote years later, recalling a review of the show that appeared in The New York Times. “It took a trip to the dictionary to understand he meant more than clean.”Another Broadway appearance came in 1964 in “Absence of a Cello.” Mr. Grodin’s next two Broadway credits were as a director, of “Lovers and Other Strangers” in 1968 and “Thieves” in 1974. Then, in 1975, came a breakthrough Broadway role opposite Ellen Burstyn in Bernard Slade’s “Same Time, Next Year,” a durable two-hander about a man and woman, each married to someone else, who meet once a year in the same inn room.“The play needs actors of grace, depth and accomplishment, and has found them in Ellen Burstyn and Charles Grodin,” Clive Barnes wrote in a rave in The Times. “Miss Burstyn is so real, so lovely and so womanly that a man wants to hug her, and you hardly notice the exquisite finesse of her acting. It is underplaying of sheer virtuosity. Mr. Grodin is every bit her equal — a monument to male insecurity, gorgeously inept, and the kind of masculine dunderhead that every decent man aspires to be.”The show ran for three and a half years, with an ever-changing cast; the two original stars left after seven months. Mr. Grodin by that point was in demand in Hollywood. (Ms. Burstyn reprised the role in a 1978 film adaptation, but this time opposite Alan Alda in the Grodin role.)Mr. Grodin with Eddie Albert and Cybill Shepherd in the comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid” (1972), one of his best-known films.20th Century-FoxMr. Grodin had already appeared in Mike Nichols’s “Catch-22” in 1970 and had turned in one of his better-known film performances in the 1972 comic romance “The Heartbreak Kid,” in which he played a self-absorbed sporting goods salesman who marries in haste, immediately loses interest in his bride (Jeannie Berlin), and falls in love with another woman (Cybill Shepherd) on his honeymoon. (Elaine May, Mr. Nichols’s longtime comedy partner and Ms. Berlin’s mother, directed.)In 1978 he had a supporting role in the Warren Beatty vehicle “Heaven Can Wait.” Another signature role was in the action comedy “Midnight Run” in 1988, in which Mr. Grodin played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and is being pursued by a bounty hunter, played by Robert De Niro.Though Mr. Grodin acted opposite stars like Mr. De Niro and Mr. Beatty, what may have been his best-known role found him working with a dog. The film was “Beethoven,” a family-friendly hit in 1992, and the dog was a St. Bernard. Mr. Grodin played a cranky father who did not exactly warm to the new household pet. In one memorable scene, he crawls into bed with what he thinks is his wife and is enjoying having the back of his neck licked until he realizes that the dog, not the wife, is his bedmate.“You’ve ruined my life,” he growls at the beast. “You’ve ruined my furniture. You’ve ruined my clothes. My family likes you more than they like me. Why? All you do is drool and shed and eat.”The next year he reprised the role in “Beethoven’s 2nd.” If he was frequently upstaged by the title character in these films, he took it in stride.“I don’t complain when the editor chooses my worst take because it’s the dog’s best take,” he told The Kansas City Star when the sequel came out.Charles Sidney Grodin was born on April 21, 1935, in Pittsburgh. His father, Ted, was a merchant who dealt in sewing notions, and his mother, Lena (Singer) Grodin, was a homemaker.He grew up in Pittsburgh and tried the University of Pittsburgh, thinking he might want to be a journalist. But he soon rejected that idea.“I imagined that someday an editor might tell me to ask someone who had lost a loved one how they felt,” he wrote in a 2011 essay for Backstage magazine. “I see that all the time on the news now. Not for me.”He often said that the 1951 movie “A Place in the Sun,” which starred Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift, caused him to shift his focus to acting.“It was two things,” he told the Television Academy Foundation in an oral history. “One is I think I developed an overwhelming crush on Elizabeth Taylor. And two, Montgomery Clift made acting look like, ‘Gee, well that looks pretty easy — just a guy talking.’”Mr. Grodin had a signature role in “Midnight Run” (1988), in which he played an accountant who has embezzled a fortune from the mob and Robert De Niro played the bounty hunter who pursued him.City Light FilmsAfter six months at the University of Miami, he worked at the Pittsburgh Playhouse for a year and a half, then found his way to New York. From 1956 to 1959 he studied with Uta Hagen, though he often found himself questioning her methods, which he said annoyed her.Mr. Grodin made guest appearances on “Shane,” “The Virginian” and other 1960s TV series before landing his first significant film role, as an obstetrician, in the 1968 horror hit “Rosemary’s Baby.”In 1976 he played an unlikable oilman in a remake of “King Kong,” with some reluctance.“I wanted to play the love interest with Jessica Lange,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the guy responsible for the death of the most beloved animal outside of Bambi. But they wanted me for the bad guy.”By popular demand, his character meets a gruesome end.“The only thing they changed after the first screening, I was told, is when Kong got loose and tried to step on me and kill me and missed,” he said. “The audience was so disappointed that they had to recut it.”Mr. Grodin in 2000, not long after his CNBC talk show ended its run. “They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues.”Suzanne DeChillo/The New York TimesMr. Grodin showed a different side in the mid-1990s when he hosted “The Charles Grodin Show” on the cable channel CNBC.“They brought me in there to be a humorist,” he said in the oral history, “but pretty quickly I got caught up in social issues, and the show became just as much that, if not dominantly that. Some people like it better when you’re funny, and some people prefer that you’re taking cameras up to prisons and trying to help people who shouldn’t be in prison.”Nicholas Grodin said his father had particularly been proud of his work for the Innocence Project, the prison justice organization, and related causes, and his work for groups that help homeless people.After his talk show ended in 1998, Mr. Grodin largely stepped away from show business for a dozen years. Then he began to take roles again, including a recurring one on “Louie,” the comedian Louis C.K.’s series.Mr. Grodin wrote several memoirs full of anecdotes from his career, including “It Would Be So Nice if You Weren’t Here: My Journey Through Show Business” (1989) and “We’re Ready for You, Mr. Grodin: Behind the Scenes at Talk Shows, Movies and Elsewhere” (1994).His first marriage, to Julie Ferguson, ended in divorce. In 1983 he married Elissa Durwood, who survives him, along with his son, who is from his second marriage; a daughter from his first marriage, the comedian Marion Grodin; and a granddaughter.After more than a decade away from show business, Mr. Grodin began to take roles again. He’s seen here in his recurring role as a doctor in a 2014 episode of the comedian Louis C.K.’s series “Louie.”K.C. Bailey/FXA 1985 anecdote Mr. Grodin related on Mr. Letterman’s show was typical of the breath of fresh, if offbeat, air he brought to those appearances. He told Mr. Letterman that he had been gratified when, walking through the lobby on his way to the studio, the crowd that had lined up to get into the show burst into applause.“I turned around to smile,” he said, “and they weren’t applauding me. There was a duck in a tuxedo walking by, and they were applauding the duck.“But,” he added, “for the moment that I thought they were applauding me, it was a lovely, lovely moment.”He offered no explanation for the presence of the duck. More
On May 17, after two failed tries, London’s theaters hope to reopen for good. Meet a director, a producer, an actor and a costumer, nervously raring to go.LONDON — At 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Maureen Lyon will be murdered at St. Martin’s Theater in London, her screams piercing the air.Her death is a moment many in London’s theater industry will welcome for one simple reason: It’s the opening of “The Mousetrap,” Agatha Christie’s long-running whodunit, and it will signal that the West End is finally back.For the last 427 days, the coronavirus pandemic has effectively shut London’s theaters. Some tried to reopen in the fall, only for England to plunge into a new lockdown before they even got to rehearsals.They tried again in December, and several musicals, including “Six,” about the wives of Henry VIII, reopened to ecstatic audiences. But just days later, the shows were forced closed once more.This time, the comeback is meant to be for good. Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said theaters can reopen with social distancing on Monday and without it on June 21, provided coronavirus cases stay low, thanks to the country’s rapid vaccination drive. Vaccine passports might be required by then — a measure many major theater owners back.A host of shows are scheduled to reopen this month, with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new “Cinderella” musical coming June 25 and a deluge of others soon after. “Hamilton” reopens in August. What happens to these shows will likely be a bellwether for Broadway’s reopening in September.But what’s it actually like for the theatermakers who are starting work again after 15 months? Has the pandemic shaped the way they think about theater? We visited four to find out.Ian RicksonDirector, ‘Walden’“Work that engages with who we are now.”The director Ian Rickson, right, rehearsing the new play “Walden” with the actors Lydia Wilson, left, and Gemma Arterton.Johan PerssonWhen Ian Rickson walked into a London rehearsal room in April — to start rehearsals for the play “Walden” — he decided he had to perform a ritual to show just how grateful he was to be back in work.So he got some palo santo — a wood shamans use to cleanse evil spirits — and burned it in front of his cast. He’d only performed a ritual like that once before, he said, as he’d been afraid of “feeling like an idiot.”But the actors also wanted to mark the occasion. “Every day now they’re saying, ‘Can we burn some more?’” Rickson said.One of Britain’s most in-demand directors, Rickson’s Broadway triumphs include “Jerusalem” and the 2008 revival of “The Seagull.” (“The finest and most fully involving production of Chekhov that I have ever known,” wrote Ben Brantley in The New York Times.)The night the shutdown hit, he was in a dress rehearsal for the play “All of Us” at the National Theater, while his revival of “Uncle Vanya” was attracting sellout crowds in the West End. Suddenly, he was without work or a sense of purpose. During lockdown last spring, he walked round the West End and cried while looking at all the shut theaters.He kept himself busy by filming “Uncle Vanya,” but said he spent most of the time reflecting on what he wanted theater to be when it returned. His answer: “New work, work that engages with who we are now, courageous work.”“Walden,” by the largely unknown American playwright Amy Berryman, is the first example of that. He came across the play — about two sisters with contrasting views on how humanity should deal with climate change — last summer, while searching for scripts with the producer Sonia Friedman.“It’s kind of dazzling in its imaginative scope,” Rickson said. “It’s like a play by a writer who’s written 20 plays, not a debut.”In the rehearsal room one recent Thursday, the three actors — Gemma Arterton, Fehinti Balogun and Lydia Wilson — lounged and laughed on a sofa together. They all had regular coronavirus tests, so they didn’t have to distance from each other or wear masks. It was almost as if the pandemic never happened.Near them sat piles of props, while the walls were covered with inspirational quotes (“When one does not have what one wants, one must want what one has,” read one).Rickson smiled happily as he took in the scene. He had an almost religious calm to him; the main difference between rehearsing now and before the pandemic, he said, was just how thankful everyone was to be there.At one point, Rickson recalled, he asked the actors to dance, to explore how their characters would behave at their most exuberant. Halfway through, Arterton stopped. “God, I’ve missed this, sweating and dancing with other people,” she said.Rickson said he appreciated that moment, but hoped to see bigger changes to London theater than grateful rehearsals.“The pause has allowed us all to think, ‘How do we want to work?’ ‘Who’s the work for?’ and ‘Who’s part of it?’” he said. “Perhaps even the West End, which can sometimes be the more traditional end of theater, can also be progressive and be pioneering.”“It hasn’t been like that for a while, has it?” he added.Nica BurnsChief executive, Nimax Theaters“We’re not going to make a profit but we’re better off than closed.”A leading British theater newspaper named Nica Burns “producer of the year” for her efforts to reopen West End theaters.Suzanne Plunkett for The New York Times“This time, we feel it’s for real,” Nica Burns said recently, leaning over a table in her West End office, widening her eyes as if to prove it.Britain’s vaccine rollout was “fast by any measure,” she said. “Of course, if we weren’t selling any tickets, I wouldn’t feel so jolly.”Burns, the chief executive of Nimax Theaters, is one of the unsung heroes of the West End’s comeback. Over the past year, many figures in Britain’s theaterland have grabbed headlines for trying to support workers during the pandemic.Lloyd Webber continually harangued the British government to let theaters reopen, even hosting a government-sanctioned experiment in July to prove it could happen safely. The “Fleabag” star Phoebe Waller-Bridge set up a fund to support freelance theatermakers, as did the director Sam Mendes.But Burns did something else: She tried, repeatedly, to open her six theaters with social distancing and mask mandates.In October, she managed to open the Apollo for 14 performances by Adam Kay, a comedian and former doctor, before England went into a second lockdown. In December, she opened several more for just over a weekend, before England went into lockdown again.Her moves were “a landmark moment of genuine hope for the industry,” The Stage, Britain’s theater newspaper, said when naming her its producer of the year. “In the face of overwhelming odds this year, she has consistently tried to make it happen, when some other established commercial producers didn’t.”Now, she’s planning to open them all once more. “Six,” the musical about the wives of Henry VIII, will play at the Lyric. “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” a musical about a boy dreaming of being a drag queen, will be right next door at the Apollo.“Six” and “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” are reopening in Nimax theaters in May.Suzanne Plunkett for The New York Times“We’re not going to make a profit, but we’re better off than closed,” Burns said. “And on the human side, we’re a million times better.”She is bringing back 150 staff members to run the front of house operations. “I can’t wait for the first payday,” she said. “They’ve had to wait a long time for it.”Burns said a key moment in her decision to reopen came in August when she saw a concert version of Lloyd Webber’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” in a park. The night was such a joyful, communal experience, she said; it rammed home what makes theater special. “I sat watching and went, ‘I’ve got to get my theaters open. If he can do it, I bloody can,’” she added.Burns is looking for other ways to help this city’s theater industry. In April, she announced a Rising Stars festival, letting 23 young producers host shows in her venues this summer. The shows include “Cruise,” a one-man tale of gay life in London, as well as an evening of magic acts.She’s also setting up a coronavirus-testing hub for actors and crew at the Palace Theater, normally home to “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” which has not yet announced its reopening date.In an hourlong interview, she didn’t dwell on fears that anything, like a new variant of the virus, could jeopardize these plans and plunge Britain into a fourth lockdown. That might partly be because she’s in the West End for the long haul.Stuck to the walls of her office are architectural plans for a new theater — the seventh with Max Weitzenhoffer, her business partner — that’s meant to be built down the road from the Palace.It doesn’t have a name yet, she said. How about the Burns Theater? “No, no, no, no, no,” she replied. She’s naming a bar inside after herself. “That’s enough,” she said.Noah ThomasLead Actor, ‘Everybody’s Talking About Jamie’“I’ve learned that I don’t need to change to please anyone”Thomas, right, had only two months in the title role of “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie” before London locked down.Matt CrockettLast year was meant be Noah Thomas’s big break.In January, he made his West End debut as the lead in “Everybody’s Talking About Jamie,” a hit musical about a gay teenager who dreams of becoming a drag queen.His dressing room was adorned with art from fans, and months after dropping out of drama school to take the role, he had become used to seeing his face plastered on London’s buses. Then the pandemic forced his theater shut, and he found himself at home with his mum, dad and sister.“I went through every stage of emotion,” Thomas said in a video interview. “Frustration, boredom, appreciation for having a rest because I legit haven’t had one since I was five. Then frustration again, then boredom again.”Last June was a particularly low point. He tweeted a picture of a full airplane, alongside one of an empty theater. “It just made me think, ‘Why’s that one OK, and the other isn’t?’” he said. “Every other industry was talking about getting back to work, and we were all sitting at home.”During lockdown, he read a host of scripts and learned to cook pasta dishes and curries (“I’m going to be the meal-prep queen when we go back”). And he spent a lot of time reflecting on who he wanted to be as an actor.“I see the world through a different gaze now,” he said. “I’ve learned that I don’t need to change to please anyone.”Thomas said he thought that attitude would help when the musical returns May 20. Jamie “is so unapologetically himself, and he’s calling for the world to adapt to him and his fabulousness and his queerness,” Thomas said. “He’s not changing.”The show, which has a cast of 26 and a nine-person band, is the largest to reopen next month, thanks to a government grant. Thomas said he knows what to expect in terms of coronavirus precautions, as his show was one of the few to briefly reopen in December.“It was weird,” he said, “but the rules and the mitigations and masks are such a small sacrifice in order to be able to do our jobs.”He had one more task before rehearsals started: to dye his hair blonde. “A lot of people flirt with you when you’re blonde,” he reported. That doesn’t stop even with social distancing.Janet Hudson-HoltHead of wardrobe, “The Mousetrap”“We’ve been going so long. If we can survive this, others can.”Janet Hudson-Holt, the head of wardrobe for “The Mousetrap,” at the St. Martins Theater. She has worked on the long-running show for 20 years.Suzanne Plunkett for The New York TimesJanet Hudson-Holt, the long-serving head of wardrobe at “The Mousetrap,” was trying to do a costume fitting for the actor Sarah Moss — without touching her.It started well. Inside a cramped room at the St. Martin’s Theater, Hudson-Holt handed Moss a heavy black wool coat, then stood back to admire the fit. But within seconds, she had leapt forward, grabbed the rumpled collar and adjusted it.“Sorry!” she said, realizing she’d broken the rules. “It’s just instinct.”“The Mousetrap,” which has been running in the West End since 1952, is scheduled to reopen on May 17, the first play here to do so.“We’ve been going so long,” Hudson-Holt said. “If we can survive this, others can,” she added.Hudson-Holt, who’s been with the show for almost 20 years, had spent most of the past year at home. “We were lucky, as the very good management kept us furloughed,” she said, meaning the government paid a chunk of her salary. “But for a lot of freelancers — costume makers, propmakers, actors — it’s been just devastating.”To lessen coronavirus risks, two casts will now alternate in the eight roles. The show’s website makes that move sound like a canny piece of marketing, encouraging audiences to see both sets of actors. In reality, it’s in case illness strikes; if one cast has to isolate, the other can step in.The extra cast members means Hudson-Holt had spent her first days back sourcing hats, coats and cardigans for them all. Shop closures had impacted that effort, she said. One of her favorite sources for old-fashioned men’s wear is Debenham’s — all its stores have closed.Her daily routine changed in other ways. Rather than taking measurements in person, she called the actors, politely inquiring if they’d gained weight or muscle in lockdown and would be needing a bigger size.“I was having to ask people, ‘Oh, have you been doing any sport lately? Or maybe some baking?’” she said.Despite the no-touching rule, the fittings went according to plan. Hudson-Holt had found a hat for Moss, new to the role of Miss Casewell, one of many potential murderers stuck in an English guesthouse after a snowstorm.Only a lime green silk scarf caused problems. Hudson-Holt tried showing Moss how to fold, then tie it, but Moss was flummoxed. “Can you slow down a bit and show me again?” she said.“Today’s a fun test for everyone,” Hudson-Holt said.Once the fitting was over, Hudson-Holt put Moss’s outfit aside. It would be steamed later to kill any potential viruses. “I know it seems hyper vigilant,” she said, “but who wants to be the one that mucks this up?” More
“Joe Biden has a Venmo account? How? The dude is, like, 150 years old,” Noah joked, saying he assumed Biden “paid for everything with silver dollars.”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. We’re all stuck at home at the moment, so here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now. More
Michel Marc Bouchard’s melodrama, about an illicit gay love affair in 1912, displays a lot of kookiness and little self-awareness.“Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; And he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.”So says Genesis 19. And so goes a recitation by a devout young man traumatized by his repressed homosexuality in “Lilies, or the Revival of a Romantic Drama.” Staged at the Theater Center with a limited audience, this aimless production by the Drama Company NYC depicts a confrontation between two men that reveals how an illicit gay love affair of decades past brought hellfire — and literal fire — to a small Canadian town.It’s the spring of 1952, and an ex-inmate named Simon Doucet (J.J. Miller) has requested a meeting with Bishop Jean Bilodeau (Marc Verzatt). They’re former schoolmates, but this is no cordial reunion; threatening Bilodeau with a knife, Doucet forces him to sit through a staging of the past, watching younger versions of themselves act out something that happened when they were teenagers in the fall of 1912.Bilodeau scoffs and occasionally interjects with protests of the performance, which shows the ill-fated love between young Doucet (a well-cast Hartley Parker) and his best friend, Count Vallier De Tilly (a sensationally anguished Florimond Le Goupil-Maier). Bilodeau uneasily witnesses the sins committed by his younger self (Grant Hale, sanctimonious and perfectly weaselly), a closeted God-fearing boy whose obsession with and jealousy of the couple ultimately destroys them.Under Andrew Benvenuti’s unsteady direction, the majority of the play, written by Michel Marc Bouchard in French and translated by Linda Gaboriau, takes place as a flashback. First performed in 1987, “Lilies” quickly sloughs off realism to present the play not as a true performance but as a kind of living memory. (The simple set, dressed with nine chairs and occasionally tables, leaves it all to our imagination, though Benvenuti’s ungraceful blocking obscures even that view.)It’s a different approach from the director John Greyson’s in the pulpy 1996 Canadian film adaptation, in which Bilodeau visits Doucet in prison and all the actors in Doucet’s play are gay fellow inmates. There, we had a clear perspective and consistent stakes: Though the film’s cinematography blurs the line between the performance in the jail and a fluid recollection of the past, the action is anchored in the present, with the camera alternatively following and mimicking Bilodeau’s gaze.This “Lilies” lacks a clear perspective. It’s less interested in the present-day confrontation between Doucet and Bilodeau and even loses its focus on Bilodeau altogether. The adult Bilodeau spends 90 percent of the play silently sitting in the audience watching his younger self — a waste of an actor and character who is at the center of the tale.It’s a shame, too, that Bilodeau remains so removed because moralistic characters are often candy for performers, who can play with the contradictions that often come with the holier-than-thou archetypes hoping to pray away the skeletons in their own closets. The script doesn’t allow for much introspection. In fact, the writing feels gleaned from a mix of gay fan fiction and daytime soaps. At one point, a Parisian baroness magically appears via hot-air balloon; there are also two murders, a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style escape and a whole lot of arson.Then there’s the all-male cast of 11. Like the film, the men perform the female roles in drag. The move is intentionally subversive, as a way to normalize queer relationships within a story setting where such relationships are taboo. The effect is campy, à la Edna Turnblad, but how much of that is overtly drawing from the performative tradition of camp and how much the production is stumbling headfirst into hyperaffected melodrama is unclear.Bill Morton, left, as the delightfully odd Countess Marie-Laure de Tilly, with Le Goupil-Maier. The roles of women are performed by men in drag. Andrew Daniel DickThere is a parade of queer tropes that seems to escape critique or interrogation: the Christian boys’ school with the obviously closeted priests; the self-hating gay boy; a homophobic father; a fiancée who is actually a beard; a tragic queer death.Bill Morton as Vallier’s mother, the Countess Marie-Laure de Tilly, is a delightful wise fool, floating across the stage with a performance as flowery and bonkers — and occasionally knowing — as a Canadian Blanche DuBois. But this performance is an uncomfortable contrast with Miller’s stiff and unconvincingly threatening Doucet, as though they’re characters taken from two totally different plays. At what point does a crazy countess play too closely to the tired role of the histrionic gay diva? And when does J.P. Ross’s snooty Baroness Lydie-Anne de Rozier, with her arch purrs and snide remarks, become a performance of the catty gay man stereotype?In this way and others, “Lilies” seems to be attempting a balancing act without consciously knowing it. In one scene, a character is given a pearly white clawfoot tub for his birthday, and two boys end up in the bathtub kissing and embracing. The scene feels objectifying, and a cheesy piano accompaniment exacerbates that impression; it isn’t as much about the love between the boys as it is about the novelty of their sex, which would be fine if the scene — and the rest of the play — were more clearly filtered through the shame and desire of Bilodeau’s gaze, but as it is, there’s just a clumsy bit of fully naked splash time.How seriously does “Lilies” take its melodrama, how earnestly does it wear its clichés? The baroque turns and flourishes of the script indicate some level of self-awareness (as when one character theatrically crashes an engagement party dressed as Julius Caesar), yet the deadpan declarations and rebuttals of love suggest austere intentions.Once “Lilies” reaches its conclusion — which is so predictable and pat, and in this production so abrupt that there was an unsure beat before the audience’s applause — the impression it leaves is of an old theme with a few flamboyant variations. Doucet’s play within the play ultimately persuades Bilodeau to confess his misdeeds — but the play I saw? Much less persuasive.Lilies or The Revival of a Romantic DramaThrough June 14 at the Theater Center, Manhattan; tdcnyc.org More
AT&T’s WarnerMedia group is merging with the reality programmer Discovery. What does that mean for your favorite shows?It’s as if Logan Roy, the fictional patriarch of the Waystar Royco media empire on HBO’s popular series “Succession,” masterminded the deal himself: AT&T has thrown in the towel on its media business and decided to spin it off into a new company that will merge with Discovery Inc. More
The new Netflix series tapped years of scholarship and the life experience of its creators to chart how African Americans have shaped the country’s cuisine.There is a breathtaking moment near the end of the first episode of “High on the Hog: How African American Cuisine Transformed America,” a new four-part Netflix documentary based on the 2011 book by the scholar Jessica B. Harris. More
