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    ‘Star Wars: The Acolyte’ Goes Back to the Beginning

    Her new “Star Wars” show is a dream come true, but she knows it carries enormous expectations. “I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared,” she said.Leslye Headland has been telling “Star Wars” stories onscreen since she was a teenager. Ostracized at school for being different, she retreated inward, making stop-motion films starring her action figures.So when she found success as an adult in Hollywood — Headland helped create “Russian Doll,” the 2019 Netflix comedy starring Natasha Lyonne — and got the chance to create an actual “Star Wars” show, it was the realization of a lifelong dream.And a chance for humiliating failure. On a galactic scale.“I essentially cold-called Lucasfilm and, after a lot of conversations, found myself pitching a show — utterly elated, my ultimate career goal, the culmination of my fandom,” Headland said. “At the same time, I would be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. There is so much pressure. It’s extreme. I had never done anything this big before.”Headland’s show, “The Acolyte,” will debut on Disney+ on June 4. Costing roughly $180 million (for eight episodes) and taking four years to make, it attempts two feats at once: pleasing old-school “Star Wars” fans — who can seem unpleasable — while telling an entirely new story, one that requires no prior knowledge of “Star Wars” and that showcases women and people of color.For the faithful, “The Acolyte” serves up scads of Jedi, a franchise fundamental that the other live-action “Star Wars” TV shows have depicted sparingly or not at all. The opening scene in “The Acolyte” takes place in an eatery crowded with colorful aliens, a callback to the Mos Eisley cantina from the first “Star Wars” movie, in 1977.Other shout-outs to core fans — we see you, we haven’t forgotten about you — are sprinkled into the dialogue: “May the force be with you” and “I have a bad feeling about this” makes an early appearance.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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    A Show That Makes Young Japanese Pine for the ‘Inappropriate’ 1980s

    A surprise television hit, now on Netflix, has people talking about what Japan has lost with today’s changed sensibilities.The younger generation has frequently called out Japan’s entrenched elders for their casual sexism, excessive work expectations and unwillingness to give up power.But a surprise television hit has people talking about whether the oldsters might have gotten a few things right, especially as some in Japan — like their counterparts in the United States and Europe — question the heightened sensitivities associated with “wokeness.”The show, “Extremely Inappropriate!,” features a foul-talking, crotchety physical education teacher and widowed father who boards a public bus in 1986 Japan and finds himself whisked to 2024.He leaves an era when it was perfectly acceptable to spank students with baseball bats, smoke on public transit and treat women like second-class citizens. Landing in the present, he discovers a country transformed by cellphones, social media and a workplace environment where managers obsessively monitor employees for signs of harassment.The show was one of the country’s most popular when its 10 episodes aired at the beginning of the year on TBS, one of Japan’s main television networks. It is also streaming on Netflix, where it spent four weeks as the platform’s No. 1 show in Japan.“Extremely Inappropriate!” compares the Showa era, which stretched from 1926 to 1989, the reign of Japan’s wartime emperor, Hirohito, to the current era, which is known as Reiwa and began in 2019, when the current emperor, Naruhito, took the throne.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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    Charles Barkley Has Thoughts on the Future of ‘Inside the NBA’

    Next season could be the last for TNT’s influential and beloved studio show, and Charles Barkley, for one, will not be going quietly.The future of “Inside the NBA” was already a sensitive topic when Charles Barkley stepped into an elevator in Minneapolis after Game 3 of the Western Conference finals late Friday night. Barkley’s on-air candor as an analyst is a key reason that the studio show has become so influential and beloved among basketball fans and around the league.But these are tense times for the show and those who work on it. Warner Bros. Discovery has not secured the rights to continue broadcasting N.B.A. games on TNT beyond next season. Without those, the long-term future of “Inside the NBA” is uncertain. So when Barkley, who had already batted away several attempts by security and public relations officials to prevent him from doing an interview, ushered me into an elevator filled with his co-workers, not everyone was happy.Kenny Smith, Barkley’s on-screen foil, voiced his irritation. But Barkley, as he has done throughout his decades in the public eye, made clear that he wouldn’t be muzzled.“Hey, man, I can talk to who I want to,” Barkley said to Smith, using an expletive. Others in the elevator shifted uncomfortably.“You should do that out there,” Smith said, suggesting the interview be done outside the elevator.Barkley turned to me: “Don’t worry about him.”“She should clear it through Turner,” Smith said. “She should do it the right way.”Why was it so important for him to talk, I asked Barkley, even if others around him didn’t want him to? He nodded to the impact the uncertainty has on staff members who work on the show. And not just the well-known, on-air personalities: Barkley, Smith, Shaquille O’Neal and the host, Ernie Johnson.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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    Two More ‘Succession’ Actors Are Broadway Bound, in ‘Job’

    Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon will star in the two-hander, a psychological thriller that previously found success downtown.“Job,” a two-character thriller about a psychological evaluation going awry, started small, with a run last year at SoHo Playhouse. Word-of-mouth was good, the New York Times review was positive and sales were strong, so early this year it transferred for another Off Broadway run at the Connelly Theater in the East Village.Now the play, written by Max Wolf Friedlich and directed by Michael Herwitz, is planning to make the leap to Broadway, with a two-month run beginning this summer at the Hayes Theater.The Broadway production, like the Off Broadway runs, will star Peter Friedman and Sydney Lemmon. Both of them appeared in the HBO series “Succession” — Friedman was a member of the principal cast, playing Frank Vernon, the chief operating officer of Waystar Royco, and Lemmon appeared in the show at one point as a love interest of Kendall Roy.Friedman is a mainstay of the New York stage who was nominated for a Tony Award for “Ragtime.” Lemmon has worked mostly onscreen, including in the Hulu streamer “Helstrom”; if her surname sounds familiar, that’s because she is also the granddaughter of the great actor Jack Lemmon.In “Job,” Friedman plays a therapist who has been hired to evaluate Lemmon’s character for her suitability to return to work. (She has been suspended after a videotaped workplace breakdown.) Their interaction is fraught, and frightening, from the get-go.“Job” is scheduled to begin previews July 15 and to open July 30 at the Hayes Theater, which, with about 600 seats, is the smallest house on Broadway. The run will be brief — it is scheduled to end on Sept. 29.The play is being produced by Hannah Getts, who has been with the show at each stage of its production history; Alex Levy, a speechwriter and media strategist whose work includes communications consulting for New York Times executives; Craig Balsam, who co-founded the music company Razor & Tie; and P3 Productions, the company that was the lead producer for last season’s musical “How to Dance in Ohio.”“Job” will be the latest sign of a surge to the stage by “Succession” alumni. Those include two of this year’s Tony nominees — Jeremy Strong, who played Kendall Roy on “Succession,” is nominated for “An Enemy of the People,” and Juliana Canfield, who played Kendall’s assistant, Jess, is nominated for “Stereophonic.”Also on Broadway, Natalie Gold, who played Kendall’s ex-wife, Rava, is featured in “Appropriate.”Meanwhile in London, Sarah Snook (Shiv Roy) won an Olivier Award last month for her performance in a one-woman version of “The Picture of Dorian Gray” that is expected to transfer to New York next year. Also in London, Brian Cox (Logan Roy) is starring in a revival of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” and J. Smith-Cameron (Gerri Kellman) is planning to star in a revival of “Juno and the Paycock” this fall. More

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    ‘Bluets’ Review: This Maggie Nelson Adaptation Is All About the Vibes

    How do you bring an almost plotless book of elliptical fragments to the stage? The director Katie Mitchell has tried with three actors, four screens and three bottles of whiskey.When the Royal Court Theater in London announced it was staging an adaptation of Maggie Nelson’s prose poem memoir “Bluets,” my first reaction was head-scratching surprise. This largely plotless book, in which elliptical fragments of autobiography are entwined with meditations on the cultural history of the color blue and loosely coalesce around the theme of depression, doesn’t exactly scream theater.In Margaret Perry’s adaptation, directed by Katie Mitchell and running through June 29, a trio of actors — Ben Whishaw, Emma D’Arcy and Kayla Meikle — recite passages from “Bluets” and act out moody scenes of everyday life; these are combined with innovative use of video technology and melancholic music to generate a multisensory representation of the narrator’s consciousness. It’s an admirably ambitious undertaking, but a lack of narrative thrust or tonal variation make for a somewhat bloodless experience.The performers are stationed at three tables, each equipped with a bottle of whiskey and a tumbler. Behind each of them, a television screen plays prerecorded footage of everyday English locales: an ordinary shopping street, a subway carriage, a municipal swimming pool. Each actor is filmed by a ball-shaped camera, like a webcam, on a tripod in front of them; this footage is instantly relayed to a large movie screen, where it is superimposed over images from the TVs below, so that the actors and their backdrops merge to uncanny effect.Emma D’Arcy in “Bluets.” Throughout the play, the actors are filmed and the footage is instantly relayed to a large movie screen, where it is superimposed over other images.Camilla GreenwellThe gloomy aesthetic and lugubrious soundscape befit the morose timbre of the material as Nelson’s maudlin narrator reels off tidbits about her favorite color — referencing Derek Jarman, Joni Mitchell and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe — while intermittently brooding over her ex-partner, whom she addresses in wistful and reproachful tones, and recounting the struggles of a close friend who was paralyzed in an accident. (The video design is by Grant Gee and Ellie Thompson; the sound is by Paul Clark). Onstage and onscreen, we see a lot of blue: blue props, blue outfits and blue-centric video clips, including one in which a bowerbird builds a nest with bits of blue detritus.First published in 2009, “Bluets” was reissued in 2017 after the success of Nelson’s similarly hybrid 2015 work, “The Argonauts,” which heralded a publishing fad for essay-memoirs that combined ambient erudition with diaristic introspection. But the very quality that some readers enjoy in these books — the weightlessness of the narrative, evoking an untethered, freewheeling subjectivity — makes them exceptionally ill-suited to the theater, which thrives on momentum, tension and conflict.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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    Johnny Wactor, ‘General Hospital’ Actor, Reported Killed in Shooting in Los Angeles

    Johnny Wactor was fatally shot when he interrupted a person who was stealing his vehicle’s catalytic converter, his mother told a news outlet.Johnny Wactor, an actor best known for his role in “General Hospital,” was shot and killed on Saturday, reports said, amid what his family described as an attempted theft of a catalytic converter in Los Angeles.The fatal shooting took place around 3 a.m. on Saturday, when Mr. Wactor approached three men in downtown Los Angeles, The Associated Press reported, citing the Los Angeles Police Department.His mother, Scarlett Wactor, told the local news station ABC7 that Mr. Wactor left the rooftop bar where he worked late in the evening and was walking with a co-worker toward his vehicle when he interrupted someone who was in the process of stealing the vehicle’s catalytic converter.Ms. Wactor said her son thought his car was being towed at first, and when he approached the person to ask, the person “looked up, he was wearing a mask, and opened fire.”Three men fled the scene in a vehicle, and Mr. Wactor was taken to a hospital, where he died, The A.P. reported. No arrests have been made.Representatives for the Police Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.Mr. Wactor had played Brando Corbin in more than 160 episodes of the soap opera “General Hospital,” according to his IMDB page. He also appeared in episodes of “Westworld,” “The OA” and “Station 19.”In a statement on social media, a page for “General Hospital” said the show’s cast and crew were “heartbroken to hear of Johnny Wactor’s untimely passing.”Many of Mr. Wactor’s co-stars from the show posted tributes on social media, including Kirsten Storms, who played the character Maxie Jones. Ms. Storms wrote in an Instagram post, “I just cannot believe that his life was stolen from him the way it was.”There has been a jump in the number of thefts of catalytic converters, or “cats” for short, in recent years. These critical emission-control devices are valuable because they contain rare metals, like palladium and rhodium, that can be extracted and resold. More

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    Wayne Brady and Nichelle Lewis of ‘The Wiz’ Are Striving for Excellence

    The veteran and the newcomer each had their own fears as they joined the Broadway revival of the beloved all-Black musical.“That show was so Black,” my 8-year-old whispered after we saw “The Wiz” on Broadway. He hadn’t made this observation last fall after seeing a performance of the show in Baltimore, during the national tour that preceded this revival. So I was curious: What had changed, and why was this iteration more culturally resonant for him than even the 1978 movie starring Diana Ross and Michael Jackson or NBC’s 2015 “The Wiz Live!” special that I’d screened for him.I suspected my son was drawn to this version’s colloquial expressions (“All I got to do is stay Black and die,” Evillene tells Dorothy), choreography (ranging from Atlanta street dancing to South African amapiano) and its casting of Wayne Brady as the Wiz, who greets the Scarecrow and the Tinman with a dap. (Brady will depart the production on June 12.)Wayne Brady as the Wiz in the show’s Broadway revival.Richard Termine for The New York TimesLewis, who is making her Broadway debut, with Kyle Ramar Freeman as a glammed up Lion and, in the background, Avery Wilson as the Scarecrow and Phillip Johnson Richardson as the Tinman.Richard Termine for The New York Times“The Wiz,” an all-Black incarnation of “The Wizard of Oz,” premiered on Broadway in 1975 with Stephanie Mills as Dorothy. The revival’s creative team — including the director Schele Williams and the comedian Amber Ruffin, who updated the book — have said that they wanted this version to reflect the richness of Black American history and contemporary culture.The show features a cast of newcomers, including Nichelle Lewis, whose TikTok performance of “Home” helped land her an audition for the role of Dorothy. Brady, who made his Broadway debut 20 years ago in “Chicago,” offers up a charismatic Wiz who will do (almost) anything to leave Oz and, in Wayne’s back story, return to his loved ones.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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    With ‘We Are Lady Parts,’ Nida Manzoor Rocks On

    “Silliness is hugely important to me,” said the writer, whose comedy about a Muslim female punk band has won awards and challenged stereotypes.When the writer-director Nida Manzoor began dreaming up Season 2 of “We Are Lady Parts,” the comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band, one of her earliest ideas was a song: “Malala Made Me Do It,” a neo-Western hype track celebrating the activist Malala Yousafzai. And then she had another idea: Maybe she could get Malala, whom she had met briefly at a talk, to star in the video.She wrote Yousafzai a love letter. To Manzoor’s surprise, Yousafzai, who loves comedy, responded. And this is why, in the second episode of the new season of “We Are Lady Parts,” which premieres on Thursday on Peacock, Yousafzai appears on a horse, resplendent in a white cowboy hat, while the band irreverently sings her praises: “Nobel Prize at 17/the baddest bitch you’ve ever seen.”Directing her idol brought on some fan-girl panic. “I was, like, totally not cool,” Manzoor said. “But it was joyful to work with her.”Joy has been an animating force for Manzoor, 34, the assured and wildly original creator of “We Are Lady Parts” and “Polite Society,” a martial arts film about a teenage girl rebelling against her sister’s arranged marriage. In a moment where nearly everything onscreen feels like a reboot, a reprise, a retread, a spinoff, Manzoor’s works (an urban Muslim musical comedy, a surreal teenage eugenics-addled action caper) reliably feel like nothing else, each a microgenre unto itself.“I like to just make the genre smaller and smaller and be the only one in there,” Manzoor said one morning in early May, speaking on a video call from her home in Bristol, England. She wore a blazing orange sweater over a bright green shirt and her affect was by turns giddy, introspective, confiding, resolute. Her work resists generalization — Manzoor resists it, too.In Manzoor’s 2023 martial arts film “Polite Society,” a teenage girl rebels against her sister’s arranged marriage. Parisa Taghizadeh/Focus FeaturesWe 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