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    Seth Meyers: Chauvin Verdict Confirms ‘What We Saw With Our Own Eyes’

    “As we’ve explained on this show many times before, the culture and system of policing in this country must be dismantled and reformed,” Meyers said on Wednesday.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.Holding Out for Justice for AllOn Wednesday, as Derek Chauvin’s conviction in the killing of George Floyd continued to reverberate around the country, Seth Meyers said it was “at the very least a relief to have what we saw with our own eyes confirmed by a court of law, even if it’s still a sorrow moment for grief and mourning, because this one verdict alone does not mean justice is done.”“True justice would mean George Floyd would still be alive today. True justice would mean Black people no longer having to live in fear of being killed by police. But there was at least accountability, which is hopefully a comfort to George Floyd’s family, and all those mourning his death, and a first step toward true justice and the reform we so desperately need, because it is undeniably the case that this is not the end of the story. As we’ve explained on this show many times before, the culture and system of policing in this country must be dismantled and reformed.” — SETH MEYERSSamantha Bee and Stephen Colbert also described Chauvin’s conviction on all charges as just a step in the right direction on a long path to righting generations of injustice.“While yesterday’s guilty verdicts are a step toward justice, they don’t change the fact that a man was murdered and Black people are still being killed by police. We have a long way to go to make this a country that, I don’t know, actually treats everybody like human [expletive] beings?” — SAMANTHA BEE“Americans are still emotionally processing yesterday’s verdict by a Minnesota jury that found Derek Chauvin guilty on three counts in the murder of George Floyd. It brings up a lot of complex feelings, because no jury verdict can bring George Floyd back, but the news of this accountability was celebrated across the nation, in Minnesota, New York and across the street from the White House, in Black Lives Matter Plaza, where people were dancing and crying with relief. What a difference 11 months make: Last time they were crying from tear gas and rubber bullets.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, the problem of police violence against people of color is still far from solved. While this is a welcome verdict, it’s like wiping up a spill on the Titanic: Good job, now let’s focus on the water pooling around our ankles.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Yeah, it should not take nine minutes of damning video to get some accountability. There’s a reason the Pledge of Allegiance doesn’t say, ‘With liberty and justice for all who are being filmed on an iPhone. Otherwise, sucks to be you!’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Misleaders Edition)“We can see the injustice with our own eyes, but there’s a whole industry of people, from police unions, to private prisons, to cable pundits, whose very lucrative job is to try to convince us that what we can see and hear with our own eyes and ears is not real. In fact, it’s worth going back and reading the initial police description of Floyd’s murder before the video came out to see just how deeply detached from reality it was. Here’s the official headline: ‘Man dies after medical incident during police interaction.’ It’s shocking. It’s hard to fathom. It’s like writing a book report about ‘Lord of the Flies’ called, ‘Kids successfully cooperate during tropical vacation, remain lifelong friends.’” — SETH MEYERS“Many Americans on Twitter, on various platforms, have spoken passionately, powerfully, about the verdicts and their significance yesterday, but none spoke less eloquently than Tucker Carlson of Fox News.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“After former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty yesterday, Fox News host Tucker Carlson claimed the jury was intimidated into the guilty verdict by the protests and the Black Lives Matter movement, which is frustrating for Carlson, because he put a lot of work into intimidating that jury.” — SETH MEYERSThe Bits Worth WatchingSamantha Bee made the case for federal legalization of marijuana on Wednesday’s “Full Frontal.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe Olympic champion gymnast Simone Biles will join Jimmy Fallon on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutIn “Minari,” Steven Yeun, front, portrays a Korean immigrant who moves with his family to rural Arkansas in the 1980s; Lee Isaac Chung directed.David Bornfriend/A24With more female directors and people of color nominated for Oscars, the coronavirus pandemic seemed to have a positive effect on the diversity of this year’s Academy Awards. More

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    LeVar Burton Will Guest Host ‘Jeopardy!’ Fans Are Over the Rainbow.

    After a fervent online campaign to get the “Reading Rainbow” star a slot, it’s finally happening.This is “Jeopardy!” — with your host, LeVar Burton.After a social media campaign to get Burton, a star of “Reading Rainbow” and “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” into a guest-host slot on “Jeopardy!,” the show announced Wednesday that he would indeed step up in the last week of July.“Our goal has been to present a wide variety of guest hosts with different skill sets and backgrounds on our path to finding a permanent host,” the show’s executive producer, Mike Richards, said in a statement. “Our passionate fans are telling us what they like, and we are listening.”Fans were predictably thrilled.“Butterfly in the sky, I’m twice as high about the @levarburton news!” one Twitter post read.But there may have been one person even more excited than Burton’s fans: the actor himself.“THANK YOU… to all y’all for your passionate support!” he tweeted.Since the death of the show’s beloved former host Alex Trebek after a battle with pancreatic cancer last November, “Jeopardy!” has been cycling through a roster of guest hosts that has included celebrities like Katie Couric, Dr. Oz and Aaron Rodgers, and former champions like Ken Jennings.In addition to Burton, the final group will also include the “Good Morning America” anchors George Stephanopoulos and Robin Roberts; the former “Celebrity Jeopardy!” champion David Faber; and the sportscaster Joe Buck, the show announced Wednesday. Each will host a week of episodes this summer, and the show will make a donation in the amount of the cumulative winnings during that host’s week to a charity of their choice.“Jeopardy!” has not yet named a permanent replacement for Trebek, and Anderson Cooper is currently filling the role through the end of April. But Burton is many fans’ choice, and a Change.org petition backing him for the permanent job has more than 246,000 signatures.Burton hosted 21 seasons of the educational PBS series “Reading Rainbow,” from 1983 through 2006, in addition to serving as the program’s executive producer. He also starred as Lt. Cmdr. Geordi LaForge on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” and currently hosts the podcast “LeVar Burton Reads.”For some, Wednesday’s announcement was just the tip of the iceberg of what they hope will soon be even more good news.“We did it everybody!” one fan tweeted. “Now keep doing it until we’re all hearing ‘Welcome to Jeopardy! with your host LeVar Burton’ for the next few decades.” More

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    How a Multimedia Whiz Became the Go-To for Virtual Productions

    The projection designer Jared Mezzocchi has become a go-to guy for ambitious virtual productions. Next up: Starring in his own haunted house play.In March 2020, live venues closed, and the theater industry was shocked into numbness. But for the multimedia designer and director Jared Mezzocchi, the moment felt like a ringing alarm.Mezzocchi warmed up in early May by co-directing a livestreamed student production of the Qui Nguyen play “She Kills Monsters” at the University of Maryland, where he is associate professor of dance and theater design and production. The show made imaginative use of filters in Zoom. Who knew that you could generate creature features in an app conceived for office meetings?Numerous projects of diverse sizes and genres followed, playing to strengths Mezzocchi had developed as a projection designer, the person making new images or fashioning existing footage to be shown onstage. He is comfortable in the digital realm, can create a visual environment to tell a story, and has the technical know-how to handle virtual live performances — he is a whiz with Isadora, a software that allows users to mix and edit Zoom on the spot.Highlights have included Sarah Gancher’s acclaimed “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi directed with Elizabeth Williamson; video and web design for “The Manic Monologues”; and multimedia design and direction on Mélisande Short-Colomb’s recent “Here I Am.”Next, Mezzocchi is starring in his own interactive virtual play, “Someone Else’s House,” which starts previews Friday at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.To be sure, Mezzocchi, 35, didn’t wait for March 2020 to get busy. In 2017, for example, he won Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards for his projection design on the Manhattan Theater Club production of Nguyen’s “Vietgone.”But his workload and influence have exploded over the past 13 months. Last September, he further extended his reach by creating the Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo), a think tank, networking hub and problem-solving resource (watch it in action during the live event “Word. Sound. Power. 2021” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday).“He’s unafraid to ask bigger questions and push what’s really possible theatrically,” May Adrales, the “Vietgone” director, said over video.“Someone Else’s House,” produced in association with ViDCo, is yet another experiment for Mezzocchi, who is stepping in front of the camera to recount a haunting story that happened to his family in their home state of New Hampshire.“I’ve never seen myself as a tech person,” he said in an email. “Hell, I was an actor my whole childhood and through grad school. Multimedia became an extension of myself as a storyteller — not the other way around. So this is a really thrilling moment of convergence for me.”Based in Silver Spring, Md., Mezzocchi maintains strong ties to New Hampshire: Since 2015, he has been the producing artistic director at Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, which he attended as a kid and where he now implements many of his ideas about the interconnection of community, art and technology.He discussed them and more in a pair of conversations conducted on — what else? — Zoom.Mezzocchi described the chance to perform “Someone Else’s House,” an interactive play about his family, as a “thrilling moment of convergence for me.” Greg Kahn for The New York TimesDo you think the disappearance of live theater has changed the way we approach storytelling?Without getting into better or worse, I think this period has allowed for more strategies to emerge. Think of TikTok or Snapchat: We hear words with visuals in a way that we weren’t 10 years ago — we’re now telling full stories with a series of memes online. The most successful works I’ve seen this year had technology as a scene partner, not as lipstick and blush. I hope that remains when we get back to in-person.Ideally, what should happen when in-person performances return?First, everyone’s like, “I can’t wait for theater to be back.” I don’t want to nitpick, but I would love us to say: “I can’t wait for in-person theater to allow us to create story inside of a venue again.” People are making performance right now, and we need to embrace that. A lot of theaters are not going to stop the digital marketplace because they’ve seen great value in the accessibility to it. I’m excited for where that takes us when digital performance is a choice rather than survival.Haskell King in “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi co-directed.via TheaterWorks HartfordYou were a video projectionist at the Manhattan nightclub Santos Party House for a few years starting in 2008. How did that influence your theater work?I would spend hours making the perfect thing, and no one would care, and then I would put up a cat video and everyone would cheer! Learning pop culture, learning how to engage with an audience, how to listen to a D.J., how to engage with a band — it became much more musical to me. Sarah Gancher comes from a musical background, and on “Russian Troll Farm” we found ourselves talking about cadence, tempo, percussiveness. It’s not about, “This is what it’s going to look like,” but, “Here’s the energy we’re trying to generate.”In an essay for Howlround Theater Commons, you wrote that “theater must stop making films during the pandemic.” Ouch! Do you think being live defines theater?Absolutely, and that’s unchangeable for me. You make different decisions when you have to make them in the moment, and I think it has to do with audience engagement. If an audience feels like it’s important that they’re there and listening, they’re going to listen differently. And if the performer knows there’s an audience listening in a particular way, it’s going to be different. Is it perfect? Totally not [laughs]. Digital technology’s value system, for whatever reason, is married to spectacle and a different kind of quality. I’ve noticed a lot of people running from liveness so they can get a higher spectacle at a higher quality. I’d rather be rough and dirty and maintain liveness.You often talk about community-building, which has included instituting talkbacks at Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Why is that important to you?It’s important to leverage localism so that we can really understand communities. Right now the only way into a community is often a national tragedy, and that’s too late. How can art help? Well, there’s no tragedy involved when you’re creating something. I love Andy’s because it reminds people that debate is important, and that kids can and should lead a lot of conversations in local environments. They are the reminder that change is beautiful and necessary. More

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    ‘Skate Kitchen,’ ‘Night Moves’ and More Streaming Gems

    Enjoy these options that are off the beaten path.This month’s under-the-radar streaming picks include clever riffs on the police procedural and the crime thriller; a handful of relationship stories, in keys both comic and tragic; and a pair of memorable (and upsetting) documentaries.‘The Wailing’ (2016)Stream it on Amazon.What begins as a “Memories of Murder”-style police procedural veers into darker, wilder territory in this unnerving and occasionally stomach-churning horror thriller from the writer and director Na Hong-jin. Jong-goo (Kwak Do-won) is a policeman whose investigation of a string of grisly killings is influenced by the gossip around him: “All this happened,” he is told, “after that Japanese man arrived.” When his family is drawn into the investigation, Jong-goo discovers exactly what he’s capable of — and then, things get really horrifying. The expansive 156-minute running time allows leisurely detours into character drama and bleak humor, but the picture never goes slack; there is something sinister in the air of this village, and Na builds that sense of inescapable dread with patience and power.‘Night Moves’ (2014)Stream it on Amazon.Many of Kelly Reichardt’s acolytes consider this eco-thriller to be among the director’s lesser efforts, and when placed against “Wendy and Lucy” or “First Cow,” perhaps that’s true. But Reichardt on her worst day surpasses most of her contemporaries on their best, and there’s much to recommend in this morally thorny story of a trio of radical environmentalists (Jesse Eisenberg, Dakota Fanning and Peter Sarsgaard) as they meticulously plot and execute a dangerous act of protest. Reichardt hits the thriller beats, but casually and modestly; her emphasis, as ever, is on character, and she finds as much suspense in interactions as in the action itself.‘Skate Kitchen’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.A preview of the film.The filmmaker Crystal Moselle’s roots are in documentary — she directed the 2015 Sundance sensation “The Wolfpack” — and that ear for the rhythms and routines of real life are apparent in this hybrid feature, in which a group of female New York City skateboarders play fictionalized versions of themselves. Rachelle Vinberg stars as the outsider looking in, a would-be skater who idolizes this all-girl crew from social media, and works her way into their midst. The details are contemporary (and keenly observed), but “Skate Kitchen” is a good old-fashioned coming-of-age story, in which norms are challenged, lessons are learned and young people must decide which version of their possible selves they want to be.‘Pink Wall’ (2019)Stream it on Hulu.The writer and director Tom Cullen lays out the methodology for his relationship drama clearly and early with a loose two-shot of the couple at its center, in the fourth year of their union, out with family and making little jokes about very real issues between them. This predictably escalates into a knock-down-drag-out fight when the two are alone together. Cullen’s wise and observant script is, in many ways, about that divergence: the difference between a couple’s actions in public and in private. And the narrative structure — skipping throughout the six years of their relationship, with signaling shifts in film stock and aspect ratio — allows Cullen to maximize that contrast. He’ll go from their first night together to their last, but not as a gimmick; he seems fascinated by the fact that two people who share such hope can eventually cause each other such pain. It’s a tough, perceptive movie, and also a funny, sexy one.‘Man Up’ (2015)Stream it on HBO Max.Countless contemporary romantic comedies have built their plots on deceptions, secret motives, false identities and so on, carried out long past the point of anything resembling plausibility. This London-set boy-meets-girl tale from the director Ben Palmer and the writer Tess Morris sets up that sort of duplicity. When Nancy (Lake Bell) is mistaken by Jack (Simon Pegg) for his blind date, she chooses to go along with his error. What’s ingenious is how the film unexpectedly implodes the chicanery early on, and then watches the fireworks. The result is both a winking critique of the genre and a fine example of it. Bell and Pegg puncture conventions while still generating genuine chemistry and comic byplay.‘The Boy Downstairs’ (2018)Stream it on Hulu.Zosia Mamet was the scene-stealer supreme of the HBO comedy “Girls,” her side plots often more compelling than the main narrative, so it’s no surprise that this starring vehicle is such a charmer. She is Diana, an intelligent but insecure young woman trying to piece her life together; the title character is her ex-boyfriend (Matthew Shear), who returns to her proximity when she unwittingly moves into his apartment building. Mamet plays Diana’s dilemma with the right mix of pathos and discomfort, while the writer and director Sophie Brooks crafts emotional stakes high enough to prevent the story from veering into sitcom territory.‘White Boy’ (2017)Stream it on Netflix.In 2018, Matthew McConaughey starred in “White Boy Rick,” a dramatization of the early life of the teenage drug dealer Richard Wershe Jr. But this documentary account was made first, and is the superior telling. The director Shawn Rech uses archival footage, contemporary interviews and re-enactments to tell the story of Wershe’s rise and fall, drawing heavily on the impressions of the rich cast of colorful (and, mostly, scary) characters around him. But it’s not just his story — it’s steeped in the history of Wershe’s home turf of Detroit, and how it fell on hard times in the late 1980s thanks not only to the drug trade but also to corruption in the police department and at City Hall. The filmmaking is mostly by the numbers, but this is such a compelling story, it hardly matters.‘The Last Cruise’ (2021)Stream it on HBO Max.On Jan. 20, 2020, the Diamond Princess cruise ship departed the Port of Yokohama, with 2,666 passengers and 1,045 crew members on board. By the time it returned after two weeks of stops throughout Southeast Asia, it had become a petri dish for Covid-19, with passengers quarantined in their staterooms as the number of positive cases ticked worrisomely upward every day. Hannah Olson’s mini-documentary augments the memories of a handful of passengers and crew with their own video recordings of the ordeal, from their early, carefree (and, in retrospect, infectious) group activities to the days of worry and fear. It becomes a story of the haves and have-nots; since someone has to feed the guests, the crew has to keep working, and watching them do so (in close quarters, with no support) is as upsetting as any horror movie. “The Last Cruise” is a tough watch, but a necessary reminder of how, from the very beginning, the pandemic brought ongoing issues of class inequality to the fore. More

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    Dark. Messy. Assaultive. Inscrutable. Even From Your Couch.

    Without international tours, streaming high-concept, director-driven European theater is the next best thing to being there.In October 1973, Arena Stage in Washington took its productions of “Inherit the Wind” and “Our Town” to Moscow and Leningrad for “the first American theatrical performances on the Soviet stage in memory,” according to The New York Times.A teenager named Dmitry Krymov was so bowled over by “Our Town” that he returned the next day. He grew up to become one of the world’s finest theatermakers, and “Our Town” plays a pivotal role in his wonderfully evocative recent memory play, “We Are All Here,” which tracks Krymov’s relationship with Grover’s Corners over the course of his life, and peaks in an emotional gut punch doubling as a visual masterstroke, with the cast lined up on a slowly rising bridge.The good news is that I was able to take in Krymov’s show earlier this month. The less-good news is that I saw it online.And that, in a nutshell, is what the past year has been for fans of border- and boundary-crossing theater: increased access, curtailed experience.Audiences in New York (and other cities that regularly host international companies) have long been able to discover theatrical ideas, techniques and aesthetics that can be radically different from the ones we encounter in the United States.Indeed, American theatergoers can be taken aback by another culture’s conception of the art form. Very roughly, if the playwright, dead or alive, rules in the United States, in Europe it’s the director who is the focus.But as Krymov learned in 1973, opening one’s mind to different possibilities is also incredibly exciting.The main problem is that travel was even harder this past year than it was between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1970s. And sharing a physical space has always been a key to the more adventurous experiences, the ones that make us question our artistic assumptions: The impact of a show by Italy’s Romeo Castellucci, France’s Ariane Mnouchkine or Poland’s Krystian Lupa can only be fully felt in real life.When you are in the room, you can see how Mnouchkine reconfigures the very idea of the theatrical space by placing movable sets on casters or having the actors get ready for a performance in full view of the audience.In the room, Scott Gibbons’s tectonic soundscapes, which are an integral part of Castellucci productions, feel as if they are pressing on your chest. Audiences entering “The Four Seasons Restaurant” at Philadelphia’s FringeArts festival, in 2014, were handed earplugs, and no, raising the volume on headphones at home just isn’t the same (you can try with another Castellucci show, “Inferno,” available in full on Vimeo).In the room, you can be awed by the supersize scope and the way live and videotaped perspectives intermingle in Ivo van Hove’s “The Damned.”The impact of oversized video imagery, as in this 2018 production of “The Damned,” can’t easily be replicated in a production watched at home.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAnd in the room, you can thrill to an audience’s response to the moment. It’s possibly even more exciting when you’re in the enthusiastic minority in a sea of haters, “Rite of Spring”-style: I can still hear the slaps of seats springing back up as enraged patrons left in the middle of Jan Lauwers’s berserk “King Lear” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and that was 20 years ago.But just like that, the pandemic closed borders: we will have to do without outré tableaus from visiting companies for the foreseeable future. The sudden disappearance of international theatrical touring did not make headlines in America last year: Our shellshocked stages went into survival mode, and a much needed discussion of racism in theater took precedence.Obviously I am not begrudging any of that — the reckoning was overdue — but I couldn’t deny the dull ache I felt for what was missing.It was somewhat alleviated, at least, when we switched from glaring at supertitles to glaring at subtitles, as the digital floodgates opened and theaters all over the world began streaming both shows in their repertoires and new projects.Krymov’s “We Are All Here,” for example, was just one of 15 subtitled captures I binged over five days of watching this year’s Golden Mask Festival. These were part of the Moscow-based festival’s showcase section, called Russian Case, which offers works available for tour bookings.Some of them were entrancing even on a screen, like Mihhail Plutahhin’s hypnotic “The Observers,” which consisted of handlers wordlessly moving objects rescued from forced-labor camps this way and that on a table.Yury Butusov’s staging of the Florian Zeller drama “The Son” was so bizarre that it was compelling on its own terms — the actors’ histrionic line readings were refreshingly free of any attempt at psychologizing. The popular writer Vladimir Sorokin’s “Spin” was staged by Yury Kvyatkovsky in a glass house, where we spied a rich family reveling in a decadent boozy brunch via surveillance cameras.Not everything worked, especially the shows that illustrated Regietheater (or director’s theater) run amok, like the incomprehensible commedia dell’arte-influenced production “Pinocchio. Theater.”“Investigation of Horror,” which recreated a soiree of 1930s avant-garde philosophers, complete with real-time potato-peeling and intense debates, looked at times like a “Saturday Night Live” parody. After I admitted, in a postfestival debrief on Zoom, to having been bewildered by a modern-dress adaptation of Dostoyevsky’s “The Idiot,” another viewer reassured me by saying, “I’m Russian, I read the book, and I had no idea what was going on.”None of the Russian Case shows I watched were of the naturalistic bent most common in the United States. I never caught a glimpse of characters desultorily chit-chatting on a couch plopped center stage.Come to think of it, there was not much desultory chitchat at all.Yevgeny Mironov, left, as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, in “Gorbachev.” Ira Polyarnaya, via Theatre of Nations, MoscowIn her introductory note to “Investigation of Horror,” the Russian Case curator Marina Davydova wrote: “Watching relationships between characters is getting boring — it is much more interesting to observe ideas fleshing out.”This applied even to the most traditional productions, which always had a twist, like “The Son” and its outré Expressionism, or the Latvian director Alvis Hermanis’s brilliant bioplay “Gorbachev” having the virtuosic Yevgeny Mironov in the title role as Mikhail Gorbachev and Chulpan Khamatova as his wife, Raisa, change costumes and wigs in full view as their characters age over the course of the show.And Russian Case was just the apex of a year in which I gorged on non-English-speaking theater.It all started last spring, when major companies scrambled to put catalog productions online as soon as their venues shut down — many of them stuck to traditional curtain times and eschewed on-demand, which meant appointment matinees for American viewers.Suddenly, it became easier to see work by directors we have come to know over the years. Berlin’s Schaubühne dug into its archive for full-length shows, including a healthy selection from the artistic director Thomas Ostermeier — a treat for those of us who have loyally trekked to St. Ann’s Warehouse and the Brooklyn Academy of Music for his live productions. As of this writing, the prestigious Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris was still streaming a subtitled capture of a contemporary take on Molière’s “The School for Wives.”The most ambitious institution may well have been the Comédie-Française, also in Paris, which started by offering a slew of weekly archival captures (without subtitles) in the spring of 2020. I was finally able to see the 1974 production of Jean Giraudoux’s “Ondine” that starred a teenage Isabelle Adjani and has attracted a cult following; I laughed alone in front of my computer watching a zippy staging of the Feydeau farce “Le Système Ribadier.”The Comédie-Française’s virtual programming has evolved over the past year as regulations changed, and this 341-year-old grande dame has exhibited enviable verve. When in-person rehearsals were authorized again, the company put its troupe to great use with new initiatives like the table read series “Théâtre à la Table,” which has become increasingly sophisticated (and will remain on YouTube, unlike the full captures).The Comédie-Française’s reading of “The Seagull,” part of a series that is available on YouTube.via Théâtre à la tableThose familiar with “The Seagull” could be tempted by the Comédie-Française’s dynamic reading, led by Guillaume Gallienne as Trigorin and Elsa Lepoivre as Arkadina (they also played the terrible lovers Friedrich and Sophie in “The Damned” at the Park Avenue Armory).Choices of source material show inventiveness, too, as with a fantastic re-enactment of Delphine Seyrig’s “Sois Belle et Tais Toi” (“Be Pretty and Shut Up”), a prescient feminist documentary from 1981 in which actresses including Ellen Burstyn, Maria Schneider and Jane Fonda talked about sexism in the film industry.Other companies have taken to appointment, blink-and-you-miss-it livestreaming, most notably Internationaal Theater Amsterdam — the company led by van Hove, whose staging of “The Things That Pass” you can catch on April 25.Not long before my Russian immersion, I was on the edge of my, er, couch during the British director Robert Icke’s take on “Oedipus” for the Amsterdam theater. Even though there was no doubt as to the outcome, the modern-dress production had the intensity of a thriller and I caught myself yelping “no no no no no” out loud as the characters headed toward their fate like asteroids pulled into a black hole by an irresistible gravitational force.Hans Kesting as the title character in Robert Icke’s production of “Oedipus.”Jan VersweyveldThere have even been actual online festivals such as “Stories From Europe,” which presented subtitled captures from members of the theater network mitos21. For a few days in January, we could pretend we were at the Berliner Ensemble, Moscow’s Theater of Nations or the Teatro Stabile Torino. In dark wintertime, that escape felt precious, a window onto a world of possibilities rather than restrictions.In an article for The Times recounting that trip to the Soviet Union in 1973, the Arena Stage associate director Alan Schneider quoted an account in the Literaturnaya Gazeta newspaper. “Truly,” it said, “the exchange of theater experience, of theater groups, is one of the finest proofs of the willingness of peoples to live in peace, to seek mutual understanding.”If that understanding must happen online for now, so be it. The glass, at least, is half full. More

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    How Late Night Addressed the Derek Chauvin Verdict

    “It’s hard to celebrate, because a man is still dead, but there is a sense of relief that at least this one injustice was not compounded with indifference,” said a somber Stephen Colbert.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.‘A Step in the Right Direction’On Tuesday night, several late-night hosts addressed the breaking news that Derek Chauvin, a former police officer in Minneapolis, had been convicted of murder in the death of George Floyd. The case prompted mass racial justice protests last year after Chauvin, who is white, was filmed kneeling on the neck of Floyd, who was Black, for more than nine minutes as Floyd pleaded for his life.“After 10 hours of deliberation, a jury in Minneapolis decided that it’s illegal for the police to murder people; that Black lives matter,” said Stephen Colbert.“It’s hard to celebrate, because a man is still dead, but there is a sense of relief that at least this one injustice was not compounded with indifference. And it could easily have gone the other way. No matter what you saw on that tape, this nation does not have a great track record on this subject. But at least in this case, this man faces accountability.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But justice is a far more difficult goal. America still has a problem of over-policing and systemic racism, but hopefully this is a step toward a future where police being held accountable for their actions isn’t headline material, and a hope that accountability today is a deterrent for tomorrow.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Today is one stop on a journey that began last May and led to protests calling for that accountability in every town and every city in America. But this is just one stop. There is more work to be done, and it’s work that all of us should be committed to, because as Ben Crump, the Floyd family lawyer, reminded us today, justice for Black America is justice for all America.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“And while this is a step in the right direction, there’s still a lot of work to be done. Too often, justice isn’t served, and the need for police reform remains. We all must continue to call out injustice until things change for the better.” — JIMMY FALLON“Real justice would be Black Americans not having to live in fear of being stopped by police and killed, and surely that is a verdict that we need to work towards. And that can be the verdict that one day we can celebrate.” — JAMES CORDEN“I think we’re all grateful that it went the way that it did. In this case, the jury made the correct decision, a unanimous decision, which is a step in the right direction. And I hope the verdict itself brings comfort to the family of George Floyd and all those who mourn his death. And I also want to say, ‘Good luck in prison, Derek, you’ll need it.’ That’s right. I hope you’re there for a very long time.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (National Holiday Edition)“4/20, of course, is a holiday for pot smokers and pot eaters who celebrate 4/20 by doing pretty much exactly what they do every day.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I read that 40 percent of people who smoke think 4/20 should be a national holiday, while the rest skipped work today because they thought it was a national holiday.” — JIMMY FALLON“Right now there is so much smoke in New York City, every apartment looks like it elected a new pope.” — JIMMY FALLON“And this April 20 is the big one, because today, 4/20 turned 50. Fifty! That means it’s old enough to sneak off into the garage while the kids are at soccer practice and smoke half a joint, but then it has a panic attack, so it spends the afternoon on the couch drinking water and watching QVC. Far out, man.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This is the 50th anniversary because, back in 1971, a group of California high school students used to gather to smoke pot every day at 4:20 p.m. Admirable punctuality for a group of kids who were always high.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Not really as edgy, is it, as it used to be? Do you know what I mean? Now that marijuana is legal in California, you know? Sort of feels like the equivalent of White Wine Day.” — JAMES CORDEN“I hope we don’t get caught up in the commercialism of 4/20 and forget the real meaning of 4/20, you know?” — JAMES CORDENThe Bits Worth WatchingMike Lindell, the MyPillow founder and fiercely loyal Trump supporter, responded to Jimmy Kimmel’s Monday-night monologue, in which the host jokingly invited him on his show.What We’re Excited About on Wednesday NightRicky Martin will perform on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutChris Buck for The New York TimesSeth Rogen, above, has made a pivot from Hollywood stoner to homemade ceramist. More

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    After 'Tiger King,' Law Proposed to Protect Big Cats

    The Big Cat Public Safety Act has been introduced before, but a bipartisan group of lawmakers hopes the public outcry from the Netflix documentary series will finally help it become law.The former roadside zoo owner known as Joe Exotic, Joseph Maldonado-Passage, remains in prison. The animal rights activist he was convicted of trying to kill, Carole Baskin, was given control of his old zoo in Oklahoma.But one year after the premiere of the Netflix series “Tiger King,” an unexpected quarantine binge hit that focused on their feud and the cutthroat world of roadside zoos, big cats remain unprotected from the exploitative practices the series helped reveal.Now, a bipartisan group of United States senators has introduced the latest version of a bill designed to keep unlicensed individuals from owning tigers and other big cats and forbid zoo owners from letting the public pet the animals or hold cubs.Senator Richard Blumenthal, a Democrat from Connecticut, introduced the Big Cat Safety Act last year, but it did not make it to the floor for a vote. Mr. Blumenthal said he was hopeful that with Democrats in control and some Republicans already supportive of the legislation, this is the year the bill will finally clear the Senate.“What I’ve seen is a groundswell of support,” Mr. Blumenthal said on Tuesday. “I don’t want to overstate it, but it really seems like an idea whose time has come.”Two Republicans, Senators Susan Collins of Maine and Richard Burr of North Carolina, agreed to introduce the bill on Monday with Mr. Blumenthal and Senator Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat.“Big cats like lions, tigers, and cheetahs belong in their natural habitats, not in the hands of private owners where they are too often subject to cruelty or improper care,” Ms. Collins said in a statement.The bill is similar to legislation that Representative Mike Quigley, Democrat of Illinois, introduced in 2020.That bill, which would have allowed breeding and transporting of big cats only by educational facilities, and wildlife sanctuaries and zoos that restrict direct contact between animals and the public, had 230 sponsors and was passed by the House in December.Sara Amundson, president of the Humane Society Legislative Fund, said the Big Cat Safety Act had the support of law enforcement organizations and dozens of zoos and sanctuaries, giving it “significant momentum.”“Whether it’s Joe Exotic, Doc Antle or Joe Blow, we can’t permit private individuals to keep big cats captive for pleasure or profit,” she said in a statement. “These operations endanger the public and produce the worst possible fate for the animals involved.”Under Mr. Blumenthal’s bill, it would be illegal for a private individual to transport big cats across state lines, breed them or own them. Zoos, sanctuaries and other exhibitors and organizations that are licensed by the Department of Agriculture or by a federal facility registered with the department would be exempt. Under the bill, no zoo or exhibitor could allow direct contact between members of the public and the animals.The law already requires all zoos to be licensed federally, according to Mr. Blumenthal’s office.Ms. Baskin’s organization, Big Cat Rescue, has long pushed for the Big Cat Safety Act, which was first introduced in 2012. The organization has been calling for a ban on cub petting for more than 20 years.“There is almost nothing more adorable than a tiger cub, and it’s very understandable if you don’t know the back story to want to pet a tiger cub and take a picture with it,” said Howard Baskin, Ms. Baskin’s husband and the treasurer and secretary of Big Cat Rescue. “It’s a miserable life for the cub.”The documentary was criticized by conservation groups and animal rights activists for not focusing enough on the abusive practices of roadside zoos and instead playing up salacious details, including the mystery around the disappearance of Ms. Baskin’s first husband.More tigers live in captivity in backyards, roadside zoos and truck stops in the United States than remain in the wild, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.Before his arrest and conviction, Mr. Maldonado-Passage was a major breeder and seller of tigers and other big cats, who churned out cubs for profitable petting and photo sessions. When they became too big and dangerous for play, he disposed of them.Some were sold as pets to private buyers and others went to other roadside zoos for breeding. Some simply disappeared.The documentary’s footage of baby cubs being ripped from their mothers so they could be petted by the public shocked many viewers. Since then, state legislators have introduced their own version of bills that would ban such practices.Keith Evans, president of the Lion Habitat Ranch in Las Vegas, which has 31 big cats, said he was worried that legislators have become too reactionary and that the new laws being passed around the country could create bureaucratic entanglements that would punish responsible zoo owners.“The way some of the bills are worded, they’re wide open to interpretation,” he said. “There are enough rules on the books that if they just enforce them it would make everybody happy.”Mr. Blumenthal said the bill he introduced was meant to protect big cats from cruel and dangerous practices, not hamstring responsible zoos and sanctuaries.He said the bill had been referred to the Environment and Public Works Committee, which Mr. Carper chairs.“My focus is on preventing abuse and exploitation of the big cats and safeguarding the public,” Mr. Blumenthal said. “Those two goals are paramount.” More