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    On ‘S.N.L.,’ Britney Spears Renders Judgment on Matt Gaetz

    The episode, hosted by Daniel Kaluuya, featured Chloe Fineman as the pop singer and Pete Davidson as the scandalized congressman.It worked before, so “Saturday Night Live” did it again: this weekend’s broadcast opened with another installment of “Oops, You Did It Again,” a satirical talk show where Chloe Fineman, playing the pop singer Britney Spears, looks back on recent cultural and political controversies.Fineman explained that the show is where “we shine a light on the social pariahs of the week and I get to decide whether they’re innocent or not that innocent.” She threw in a special acknowledgment of the state of Georgia, which she said was “voted the best place not to vote.”As Spears, Fineman said that she herself had recently been called out over accusations that someone else writes her social media content for her. Reading from an old Instagram post where Spears wrote, “Who else finds the sea more mysterious than space?” Fineman asked, “Who do they think is writing my account? Jacques Cousteau?”The show’s first guest was the rapper Lil Nas X (Chris Redd), who has been defending himself after putting out a racy video for his single “Montero (Call Me By Your Name)” and limited-edition Nike sneakers called “Satan Shoes.”Asked about the criticism and a lawsuit from Nike that followed the release of the shoes, Redd said, “Their whole thing is just do it. Well, I did it.”As for the detractors of the music video — in which Lil Nas X is seen giving a lap dance to Satan — Redd described them as “closed-minded idiots.” He added, “People are afraid of me because I’m different but really I’m just your typical gay Black country rap sneaker entrepreneur.”The show’s next guest was the Looney Tunes cartoon character Pepé Le Pew, played by Kate McKinnon who was wearing a skunk costume and wielding a cigarette holder.McKinnon lamented the fact that the character had been cut from a coming “Space Jam” sequel and told Fineman, “I would kiss you all the way up your arm but I realize that’s no longer socially acceptable.”McKinnon, in her skunk outfit, explained that career options for Le Pew were limited.“I would love to be at a point in my career where I can turn down projects but there’s not a lot of parts for old French skunks,” she said. “Every audition comes down to me or Gérard Depardieu.”Fineman introduced her last guest — “As we’d say in the early 2000s a hot mess and as we’d say today, a full-on sex pest,” she said — Representative Matt Gaetz, played by Pete Davidson.“My name is Matt Gaetz, like Bill Gates but with a Z at the end,” Davidson said. “Like a cool version for teens.”Fineman recounted several recent scandals involving Gaetz, including a Justice Department inquiry into whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him, and allegations that Gaetz showed nude photos and videos of women he’d had sex with to other lawmakers.“Which is not a crime,” Davidson said of that last account. “Just horrifying.”Fineman responded, “I think I can spot a teen predator when I see one. After all I was on ‘Mickey Mouse Club.’”Davidson said he was not that different from Pepé Le Pew, arguing, “I’m just a ladies’ man.”With some revulsion, McKinnon replied, “Dude, no. I am a cartoon skunk — you are a United States congressman. Be better, OK?”Opening Monologue of the WeekThis week’s host, Daniel Kaluuya, is a star of films like “Get Out” and he received an Academy Award nomination in March for his performance in “Judas and the Black Messiah.” Still, he knew his natural speaking voice would come as a surprise to some viewers.As he told the “S.N.L.” audience in his opening monologue, “First of all, I know you’re hearing my accent and thinking, oh no, he’s not Black — he’s British. Let me reassure you that I am Black. I’m Black and I’m British. Basically, I’m what the Royal Family was worried the baby would look like.”He also revisited his victory at the Golden Globes ceremony in February, when the audio went missing from the acceptance speech that he delivered over Zoom. “I was muted, can you believe that?” Kaluuya said. “I told the best joke of my life and I was muted. I felt like I was in the Sunken Place.”Fake Game Show of the Week“S.N.L.” has a proud tradition of sketches centered on fake game shows and, more recently, on game shows with coronavirus themes.“Will You Take It?” is a fine entry in this growing subgenre: Kaluuya played its host, a fictional doctor trying to convince four members of his extended family (Redd, Ego Nwodim, Kenan Thompson and Punkie Johnson) that they all need to get Covid vaccinations. He reminded Redd that he is a diabetic who has been shot in the lung, but Redd remained reluctant because, as he said, “I never get sick ’cause I sleep in my socks.”In a further exchange, Redd said he would receive a vaccine “when white people start taking it.” Told that white people have already been getting vaccinated, Redd replied, “Man, you can’t trust white people.”Weekend Update Jokes of the WeekOver at the Weekend Update desk, the anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che continued to riff on Matt Gaetz and on President Biden’s infrastructure plan.Jost began:Representative Matt Gaetz, who looks like a caricature artist’s drawing of me, is reportedly under investigation for an alleged sexual relationship with an underage girl. Because Gaetz believes that only voters should have to show ID. It’s also being reported that Gaetz may have paid for sex with women he met online. That story has since been confirmed by his whole vibe. Gaetz then defended himself, releasing this very normal statement. See if any of it sounds suspicious to you: “Matt Gaetz has never paid for sex. Matt Gaetz has never, ever been on any such websites whatsoever. Matt Gaetz cherishes the relationships in his past and looks forward to marrying the love of his life.” Here’s my response statement: “Colin Jost does not believe you. Colin Jost thinks you have been to alllll the websites. Colin Jost thinks you should hold off on sending out those wedding invites.”Che continued:President Biden unveiled his $2 trillion infrastructure plan, which some Democrats are calling the “New New Deal.” But I thought we weren’t allowed to make fun of his stutter. Biden plans to pay for his infrastructure plan by raising taxes on corporations and the wealthy, which, yeah, sounds like a great idea but it leaves me with one big question: How do I hide my money? More

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    in Theater

    Arthur Kopit, Whose ‘Oh Dad’ Shook Up the Theater, Dies at 83

    A three-time Tony nominee, he first became known for avant-garde works, many of them christened with rambling titles, that sparked spirited reactions.Arthur Kopit, the avant-garde playwright who thrust Off Broadway into a new era with the absurdist satirical farce “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” and earned Tony Award nominations for two wildly different plays, “Indians” and “Wings,” and the musical “Nine,” died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 83.His death was announced by a spokesman, Rick Miramontez, who did not specify the cause.In 1962, when “Oh Dad, Poor Dad” opened at the 300-seat Phoenix Theater on East 74th Street, American popular culture was shifting. Julie Andrews was between the idealistic “Camelot” and the wholesome “Mary Poppins”; Lenny Bruce, the hot comic of the moment, was known for what came to be called “sick humor.” Broadway was dominated by “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying” and “A Man for All Seasons.”Along came a 24-year-old playwright with a script about an older woman who liked traveling with her virginal adult son and her husband’s preserved corpse. The New York Times critic, Howard Taubman, had reservations — he called it “funny” and “stageworthy” but “nonsensical” — but it won the Drama Desk Award (then the Vernon Rice Award) and even transferred to Broadway for a few months in 1963.There was often vehement disagreement about Mr. Kopit’s work. Before “Indians” (1969) — a dreamlike production that positioned Buffalo Bill Cody as the first guilty white American liberal and prominently featured his 19th-century Wild West show — arrived on Broadway, there was a production in London, where critical reaction was decidedly mixed. The script included the rape of one Native American and the casual murder (for sport) of another.Clive Barnes, writing in The Times, called the Broadway production, starring Stacy Keach, “a gentle triumph” and praised Mr. Kopit for “trying to do something virtually no one has done before: the multilinear epic.” But Walter Kerr, his Times colleague, compared it to “bad burlesque.”John Lahr, writing in The Village Voice, summarized “Indians” as “never less than scintillating” and called it the “most probing and the most totally theatrical Broadway play of this decade.” “Indians” received three Tony nominations, including for best play.Mr. Kopit professed a very specific social conscience. “I’m not concerned in the play with the terrible plight of the Indians now — they were finished from the moment the first white man arrived,” he told a London newspaper in 1968. “What I want to show is a series of confrontations between two alien systems.” Many saw parallels to the Vietnam War, then at its peak.When Mr. Kopit returned to Broadway a decade later, his subject could not have been more different. “Wings,” which opened at the Public Theater in 1978 and moved to Broadway the next year, followed the journey of a 70-year-old woman (played by Constance Cummings) having a stroke and reacting to it with fear, determination and kaleidoscopic verbal confusion. As The Washington Post reported, when the main character is asked to repeat the sentence “We live across the street from the school,” she replies, “Malacats on the forturay are the kesterfacts of the romancers.”Mr. Kopit in 1999. “When I wrote a play,” he once said, “I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said.”Jack Mitchell/Getty ImagesRichard Eder of The Times called “Wings,” which had been inspired by the post-stroke rehabilitation experiences of Mr. Kopit’s stepfather, “a brilliant work” — “complex at first glance,” he wrote, “yet utterly lucid, written with great sensitivity and with the excitement of a voyage of discovery.”The play was nominated for three Tonys. Ms. Cummings won the Tony and Drama Desk awards for best actress and an Obie for her performance.Mr. Kopit discovered his gift for writing plays almost by accident. In a 2007 interview with The Harvard Gazette, the official news outlet of his alma mater, he looked back at his initial reaction when he switched from short stories to scripts. “I was having a lot of trouble with the narrative point of view,” he recalled. “When I wrote a play, I found that I lost myself as Arthur Kopit and I just wrote down what the characters said. I wasn’t anywhere in the play, and I liked that.”Arthur Lee Koenig was born on May 10, 1937, in Manhattan, the son of Henry Koenig, an advertising salesman, and Maxine (Dubin) Koenig. His parents divorced when he was 2, and his mother’s occupation was listed in the 1940 census as millinery model. He took on his stepfather’s name after his mother married George Kopit, a jewelry sales executive.Arthur grew up and attended high school in Lawrence, an affluent Long Island community. He was already writing by the time he left Harvard in 1959 with an engineering degree. As he began a graduate fellowship in Europe, he heard about a Harvard playwriting contest. He wrote, entered and won the $250 prize with “Oh Dad,” which he said he never believed had any commercial potential.Mr. Kopit was at first fond of wordy, rambling titles. “Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad” even had a subtitle: “A Pseudo-Classical Tragifarce in a Bastard French Tradition.” He followed that success with a collection of one-acts, including “The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis,” set at a suburban country club. “On the Runway of Life, You Never Know What’s Coming Off Next” was another early work.His last Tony nomination was for the book of the musical “Nine” (1982), based on Federico Fellini’s film “8½.” That same year, he adapted the book of Ibsen’s “Ghosts” for a Broadway revival. More

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    ‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 3: Friends in Low Places

    This week’s episode is so packed with action that an entire prison riot and jailbreak gets dispatched in under five minutes of screen time.‘The Falcon and the Winter Soldier’ Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Power Broker’Too often, TV series described by their creators as being “like a six-hour movie” have the kind of problems that actual six-hour movies might have. The pace can be unnecessarily slow, with characters spending a lot more time talking at length about what they’re going to do — or brooding over what they’ve already done — than taking action.So far, this hasn’t been the case with “The Falcon and the Winter Soldier,” which continues to rocket through its plot. This week’s “Power Broker,” for example, is so packed with incident that an entire prison riot and jailbreak gets dispatched in under five minutes of screen time. When Bucky gets back from meeting with the locked-up Baron Helmut Zemo, he says to Sam, “Can I walk you through a hypothetical?” and then proceeds to explain — quickly — how he sprung their old nemesis. There’s no time to dwell on the big brawl, because there’s so much more to do.From there, this episode’s credited writer Derek Kolstad (the creator of the “John Wick” franchise and the screenwriter of the current box office hit “Nobody”) and the director Kari Skogland speed through multiple action sequences, mostly taking place in the rogue city-state of Madripoor, where Zemo has contacts who might be able to fill in some background on the Flag Smashers’ supply of the super-soldier formula. The Sam/Bucky/Zemo trio fight their way out of a seedy neighborhood in Madripoor’s “low town,” rendezvous with the fugitive Sharon Carter (Emily VanCamp) in “high town,” and corner the mad scientist Dr. Wilfred Nagel (Olli Hasskivi) in one of those labyrinthine shipping docks common to action movies.Nearly any one of these big scenes in Madripoor — not to mention the opening jailbreak — could’ve anchored their own episode. So kudos to the show’s creative team for not dawdling, and instead trying to cram as much forward motion as possible into this hour. By the closing credits, our heroes (and Zemo) know all about Nagel’s involvement with creating a more “subtle, optimized” super-soldier serum, and they know more about how Karli Morgenthau (Erin Kellyman) has commandeered his doses for her Flag Smashers. There’s even a fun surprise at the end, when Wakanda’s Ayo (Florence Kasumba) confronts Bucky, demanding to see Zemo, who was responsible for the murder of her King T’Chaka. We’re zipping right along here, at the halfway point of the series.That said, there’s such a thing as moving so quickly that everything becomes a blur. While entertaining — and visually impressive, with their elaborate demimonde sets and backdrops — the Madripoor set pieces are sometimes lacking in the kind of careful setup necessary for dramatic tension. We find out a little about where the characters are and what they’re trying to do, but the plans aren’t laid out in enough detail to make it as nerve-racking as it should be when things go awry. Very quickly in Madripoor, the objective becomes more about surviving, as covers get blown and the gangs of anonymous toughs start attacking. It’s all very exciting, but not at the same level as the action in the previous weeks, where the stakes and the opponents were clearer.In the place of conversations about objectives and methods, the characters spend a lot of time this week talking about a few of the show’s major themes: namely, whether patriotism and heroism still matter, in a world where borders are blurry and it’s not easy to tell who’s “right” and who’s “wrong.”Sharon, who has been on the run and embracing the mercenary lifestyle since the events of “Captain America: Civil War,” is especially cynical about the importance of ideals and virtues, grumbling, “You know the whole hero thing is a joke, right?” Meanwhile, in Lithuania, one of Morgenthau’s close colleagues gets troubled when she blows up an occupied building at the end of one of their missions. Even Sam and Bucky have to wonder what they’re doing when they see that they’re fighting alongside Baron freakin’ Zemo — who is sporting his ominous purple mask, no less.Zemo baits Bucky throughout this episode, trying to see if some of the old Winter Soldier is still buried deep in his head — while also suggesting that Bucky was always somewhat “himself,” even when he was a brainwashed assassin. Like the Flag Smashers, Zemo sneers at heroic and nationalistic iconography, arguing that when people focus on symbols like Captain America’s shield, they forget that the men and women who wield them have flaws. Anyone could become the Winter Soldier — or a Flag Smasher — under the right pressure.Whatever this episode’s failings when it comes to the construction of thrilling and emotionally compelling fights and chases, at least Kolstad and Skogland take the time to include some of those thoughtful conversations and pertinent asides — like the part where Bucky and Sharon explain to Sam that most of the great paintings and statues in museums are replicas. Even as the story races ahead, it’s always worth taking a few moments to think about what makes an image meaningful … and whether fakes and replacements can move and inspire people, the same as the originals.The All-Winners SquadKolstad brings a little of that “John Wick”-style criminal mythology to his conception of Madripoor, a place so wild that Sam has to dress up as a stylish, platform shoes-wearing character named “the Smiling Tiger” — and consume a special cocktail containing snake innards — to fit in.The banter between Sam and Bucky keeps this show from becoming too heavy, but at times the joshing can feel a little forced. This week’s conversation about the deeper meaning of Marvin Gaye’s “Trouble Man” soundtrack felt too much like an attempt to recreate “the modern man schools the man out of time” rapport between Sam and Steve. (Then again, given how conflicted Bucky feels about his place in the larger Captain America lore, maybe his unwillingness to play along and gush over Gaye was apt.)Speaking of Captain America — the John Walker version, anyway — he also bops around Germany this week, chasing some of the same leads as our heroes. In keeping with this episode’s themes, he alarms his sidekick Battlestar with his willingness to bend the law to aid their mission. Walker may consider himself the rightful heir to Steve’s legacy, but there are clearly some issues there, likely to be explored in this series’s second half. More

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    ‘Bridgerton’ Star Regé-Jean Page Will Not Appear in Season 2

    The breakout star of the Shonda Rhimes Netflix series has delivered his final zinger as the rakish Duke of Hastings.Dearest readers, we have bad news.Simon Bassett, the character played by Regé-Jean Page, the breakout star of the Netflix series “Bridgerton,” will not return for the show’s second season, Netflix and Shondaland, Shonda Rhimes’s production company, announced on Friday.The news was delivered, appropriately enough, via a missive from Lady Whistledown, the show’s mysterious narrator — and sometimes instigator — of scandal.“Dearest Readers, while all eyes turn to Lord Anthony Bridgerton’s quest to find a Viscountess, we bid adieu to Regé-Jean Page, who so triumphantly played the Duke of Hastings,” a letter posted by the show’s Twitter account said. “We’ll miss Simon’s presence onscreen, but he will always be a part of the Bridgerton family.”For readers of the Julia Quinn romance novels upon which the series is based, the news will not come as a shock. (The Duke of Hastings’s story line largely concludes in the series’s first novel, “The Duke and I.”)But that did not mean fans were not still mourning his loss on Twitter on Friday.“What?!?? There’s no #Bridgerton without Rene-Jean Page,” one tweeted.When the show left Page’s character and his now-wife, Daphne (Phoebe Dynevor), at the end of the first season, she had just given birth to the couple’s first child, a son. Daphne will return for the new season, Netflix said, which will focus on her oldest brother, Anthony, and his own quest for romance.“Daphne will remain a devoted wife and sister, helping her brother navigate the upcoming social season and what it has to offer — more intrigue and romance than my readers may be able to bear,” the letter from Lady Whistledown said.The eight-episode saga, the first original series for Netflix by Shonda Rhimes’s production company, was a hit with both fans and critics, and Netflix reported that 82 million households watched the series in its first month following a Christmas Day release. The show follows the drama of a courting season in 1813 London, with social machinations, scheming and scandal galore as high-society families contrive to pair off their young eligibles.In his review, The New York Times’s chief television critic, James Poniewozik, called the British period drama “sexy, smart popcorn escapism” that believes that characters of color “should get to have just as much fun, have just as much agency and range of possibility — and be just as bad — as anyone else.”Page, who last week won the N.A.A.C.P. Image Award for outstanding actor in a drama series, recently finished filming the Netflix spy thriller “The Gray Man.” Next up is a role in the film adaptation of “Dungeons & Dragons” for Hasbro/eOne and Paramount.Rhimes, an executive producer of “Bridgerton,” paid tribute to Page’s scene-stealing performance on Instagram on Friday.“Remember: the Duke is never gone,” she wrote. “He’s just waiting to be binge watched all over again.” More

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    What Makes ‘Follies’ a Classic? 7 Answers and 1 Big Problem.

    Fifty years ago, Stephen Sondheim and James Goldman exploded the Broadway “concept” musical by conjuring the bittersweet reunion of aging showgirls.It was supposed to be a murder mystery: two couples, four motives, one gun. What it became was a different kind of mystery entirely: a musical that got prominent pans, alienated much of its audience and lost most of its investment — yet survived.Not only is “Follies,” which opened on Broadway on April 4, 1971, still here 50 years later, trailing a string of revivals, revisals and gala concerts, but it is also now recognized as the high-water mark of the serious “concept” musical, that genre in which form and function are brought into the tightest possible alignment. The score, by Stephen Sondheim, is a marvel and a minefield of layered meanings. The sets make comments. And in the original staging, by Harold Prince and Michael Bennett, even frivolity had to serve a purpose.Not that there was much frivolity in James Goldman’s script; the gun disappeared but the two couples were still floridly dysfunctional. Both wives had been showgirls in the Weismann (think Ziegfeld) Follies at the end of its run of annual extravaganzas in the years between the World Wars. Both had been in love with Ben, a Stage Door Johnny with big ambitions. But Phyllis was smart enough to nab him; they are now wealthy, unhappy sophisticates. Sally — romantic, conventional — got Ben’s feckless pal Buddy; never for one moment in the 30 ensuing years has she been happy with the trade-off.Ghostly showgirls wander through the ruins of a theater in the 2017 London revival.Johan PerssonDuring a Follies reunion at the decrepit Weismann Theater, on the night before it will be razed to make room for a parking lot, the two couples meet up and promptly disintegrate. As they do, their past selves appear alongside them as living characters. At the same time, former stars of the Follies relive memories and stumble through old numbers, magically ventriloquized from Broadway’s past in the Sondheim songs.As the ghosts crowd in, the couples’ tangled history is unearthed, bringing them to the point of a group nervous breakdown in the form of a 30-minute mini-“Follies” of their own. To see them collapse, dissolving into a fantasy world accompanied by a Golden Age score, is to see American optimism collapse along with them.But its big canvas is not the only reason “Follies” remains important. (See seven more reasons, and a caveat, below.) In its seriousness and cleverness, in its matching of style to substance, in its use of a medium to comment on itself, it has hardly ever been bettered. In any case, ambitious musical theater would never be the same; we would not have “Fun Home” or “Hamilton” or “Dear Evan Hansen” without “Follies” hovering behind them, the most beautiful ghost of all.1. A requiem for nostalgiaThe ensemble of older actors with their younger counterparts hovering above in the 2001 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times “Follies” is about two lousy marriages. Mucking around among their mind games and betrayals, it more readily recalls midcentury drama than anything in the musical canon. (Imagine “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” staged by Busby Berkeley.) But it’s also about the lousy marriage of American ideals and American reality, a union of near opposites polished and preserved by the shellac of nostalgia.The brilliant concept was to use the two stories to inform each other, letting the Faulknerian past that is “not even past” intrude upon the present. So Sally’s ghost makes love to Ben while his makes love to her; later, she sings a torch song that sounds as if it’s from 1941. The reunion, if it reunifies one couple, destroys another. Even the songs we love are dangerous. That paradox is crystallized in “One More Kiss,” warbled by an ancient Viennese soprano while her younger self casually tosses off its coloratura. “Never look back,” the lyric warns. “Follies” is what happens if you do.2. In praise of older womenThe ghosts of Follies past that live in the theater had to be both ethereal and imposing. Casting was done among Las Vegas showgirls who were already six feet tall before their enormous headdresses turned them into giants. Even so, a Who Was Who of middle-aged and older women stole the show: Dorothy Collins, 44; Mary McCarty, 47; Yvonne De Carlo, 48; Alexis Smith, 49; Fifi D’Orsay, 66; and Ethel Shutta, 74, among them. Though cast for the kick of nostalgia their names elicited, they made survival itself seem vital and sexy, as Smith’s high-stepping Time magazine cover demonstrated.3. Copies that improved on the originalsBernadette Peters performing the now-standard “Losing My Mind” in the 2011 Broadway revival.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesAll of the performative songs in “Follies” — the ones sung as if they were real numbers from the past — are pastiches, sampling Harold Arlen (“I’m Still Here”), George Gershwin (“Losing My Mind”), Irving Berlin (“Beautiful Girls”), Sigmund Romberg (“One More Kiss”) and many others. With this catch: In almost every case, they are better crafted and richer than their templates. Which makes their salute to the past a wonderfully complicated, and sometimes cruel, gesture.4. A number for the agesTerri White, center, as Stella Deems leading “Who’s That Woman” in 2011 with (from left) Elaine Paige, Florence Lacey, Colleen Fitzpatrick, Jan Maxwell, Peters and Susan Watson.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesStella Deems, an old-school belter, had a specialty “mirror” number in the Follies. Now, at the reunion, she and six alumnae of the chorus line, including Phyllis and Sally, try to perform it, even though the dance (as one of them puts it) “winded me when I was 19.” Soon you see why, as the choreography, which at first involves simple poses and mirroring gestures, turns into an exhausting tap extravaganza, courtesy of Bennett. But the mindblower comes halfway through, when strange shards of spinning light emerge from the dark behind the panting, middle-aged women. These are the ghosts of their former selves: glamazons in mirror-encrusted costumes performing the number tirelessly and perfectly.By the time the real and the remembered choruses merge in a thrilling finale, the idea of mirroring has taken on a larger meaning. “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord!” Stella sings in wonder and horror at the person she sees in her looking glass. “That woman is me!”5. ‘I’m Still Here’De Carlo — a movie star of the ’40s and ’50s but Lily Munster to everyone thereafter — had the biggest name in the cast yet one of the smallest roles. She needed a showstopper; the one Sondheim originally wrote wasn’t working. During tryouts in Boston, he replaced it with “I’m Still Here,” a five-minute number that catalogs with tart good spirits a showbiz life (based on Joan Crawford’s) in which you “career from career to career.” It could not have been staged more simply: De Carlo basically just stood downstage and let it rip. Still, it was (and remains, in the many interpretations since) a knockout, driving home the point that long-term professional survival, and maybe emotional survival as well, is often a matter of inoculating oneself with failure.6. The fabulousnessAt $800,000, “Follies” was a very expensive show for its time, but you saw where the money went. Boris Aronson’s set, which exploded into lace and froufrou for the final sequence, was technically complex; Florence Klotz’s costumes were among the most sumptuous seen on a Broadway stage since Ziegfeld himself. And with all the major roles doubled by “ghosts,” the cast was huge: 47 performers, not including understudies and standbys.“Nearly everything that could cause a Broadway musical to go over budget did,” says Ted Chapin, now the president of the Rodgers and Hammerstein Organization but then Prince’s apprentice — and the author of “Everything Was Possible,” a memoir of that experience. “If it were produced today, I would imagine it would log in at close to $30 million.” Alas, that’s a sum no one would spend on such a chancy show, which means we’ll never see its like again.7. That posterDavid Edward Byrd designed the poster for the original production.PhotofestIn 1971, the graphic artist David Edward Byrd was best known for his rock posters, including one for the original Woodstock and one for Jimi Hendrix. But he’d started designing for theatrical productions as well, and when an “aesthetic argument” led Prince to ditch one of his Art Deco-inspired sketches, Byrd came up with the now-famous face of “Follies”: an impassive beauty with flowing Technicolor hair and a branching crack from chin to brow. (The face was based on Marlene Dietrich’s, in a photo from “Shanghai Express.”) To Byrd, it represented the end of an era, but it also conveyed, with powerful concision, the crackup of an American fantasy of endless tranquillity. And, not incidentally, made a Broadway show seem as cool as Woodstock.8. Then again …“Follies” is brilliant and “Follies” is a mess. It bowls me over perhaps more than any other musical, yet I have never been fully satisfied with it intellectually. Look beneath the unparalleled packaging — the score, costumes, casting, staging — and you find a lot that doesn’t add up. As Frank Rich noted in his 1971 Harvard Crimson review, it’s “a musical about the death of the musical” — a wonderful paradox but one that undermines the experience. If musicals are dead … is this one too?Sometimes — even when Carlotta sings “I’m Still Here” — the vaunted concept seems a bit opaque. (If it’s about her own life, how could it also be her Follies number?) And don’t look too closely at the main characters, either; spouters of self-conscious dialogue, they are only fully believable when they sing. For that, Goldman usually gets the blame — but if so, he should also get credit for providing the armature for everyone else’s epochal achievement. It may be about the death of musicals, but “Follies” pointed the way to bringing them back to life. More

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    A Stand-Up Set at the Swipe of a MetroCard

    For about three months, an Upper West Side comedy club has been organizing Saturday-night shows on the 1 train.Rachel Lander, a Brooklyn stand-up comedian, was in the middle of a joke about the 2020 presidential election — her audience’s ears perked for the punchline — when the train reached its final stop.“I’ll finish this later,” Lander said into the mic. “We need to transfer.”Six comedians, a comedy club booker and eight audience members disembarked from the downtown 1 train and walked down the platform like schoolchildren on a field trip to the aquarium. As they passed people waiting for their trains, heads turned toward the group — a strangely boisterous one for a mid-pandemic Saturday night. Two M.T.A. workers glanced at each other quizzically but didn’t ask questions.When the group reached the last car of the uptown train, they piled in and arranged themselves as before: a comic standing at one end of the car, mic in hand and portable speaker on the floor, and the audience seated nearby.“All right, I’m going to finish that story about the election,” Lander said as the passengers settled in.The Stand Up NY group heading to the show, a.k.a. the subway, starting at the 72nd Street station on the 1 line.Adam Powell for The New York TimesFor about three months, New York’s comics had been preparing sets to perform Saturday nights on the 1 train. It may not have been the most glamorous of gigs, but as a comic joked last Saturday, at least it was cleaned regularly. The relentless screeching of the subway had a tendency to drown out punch lines, but a few of the comics agreed that wasn’t so different from the hum of activity in a typical club — the clinking of glasses, the waiters whispering, “What can I get you?”“I need all the live shows I can get to shake off the rust,” said Jeff Scheen, who closed out Saturday’s show as the train reached 42nd Street.The weekly subway gigs are arranged and advertised by Stand Up NY, a club on the Upper West Side. Since it closed last March because of the pandemic, the club’s co-owner, Dani Zoldan, has been inventing ways to keep comics performing in front of live audiences, instead of in stilted Zoom shows. The club has put on about 500 outdoor shows in parks and on rooftops across the city over the past year, Zoldan said. Last June, there was an invitation-only indoor comedy show at the club itself without a formal audience — which was undoubtedly against the rules intended to keep people from gathering, but the police never intervened — and in February, it held comedy shows disguised as weddings (one couple actually got married).Paying patrons and regular passengers alike were on hand Saturday for Alex Quow’s set.Adam Powell for The New York TimesWhen winter came, Zoldan had to get creative again.“I was just wracking my brain,” Zoldan said. “What else could we do? We couldn’t have shows in the club, we couldn’t have outdoor shows anymore.”His solution was the subway, which singers, dancers and musicians have long treated as a stage (comics, less so). At the first subway show in late December, Stand Up NY’s chief of staff and booker, Jon Borromeo, recalled that an M.T.A. conductor approached them and said, “Are you guys doing comedy?” The group braced for a reprimand, but instead the conductor said, “That’s awesome,” gave a thumbs up, and returned to his post.“I was like, ‘Yes! Yes! We have approval from the M.T.A.!’” Borromeo remembered.On Saturday, audience members and comics, who are paid $25 each to perform, met at 72nd Street and Broadway, outside a Bloomingdale’s Outlet store. Carrying the speaker and hand-held microphone, Borromeo led the group to the 72nd Street station, where they swiped in and waited for the downtown 1 train to South Ferry. (Tickets for the show are $15 each, plus the $2.75 fare, but the rules are as loose as the surroundings.)The audience of about eight was lighter than usual, probably because it was a warm spring night and the Passover holiday was beginning. Furqan Muqri, a 33-year-old surgeon from Syracuse, was visiting his brother, Hasan Muqri, a 25-year-old medical student, in the city. The brothers — who were both fully vaccinated — had long attended stand-up comedy shows together, and when they searched the internet for shows during the pandemic, this was what they found.Comics and others took in the stand-up sets on Saturday.Adam Powell for The New York TimesVictoria Ruiz, 25, and Raymond Gipson, 26, showed up after dinner in the West Village, all dolled up for date night. Robert Brock, 38, had visited the club on West 78th Street for years and had brought his 22-year-old daughter, Adonnis Brock, to the show.Under the glaring subway lights, each audience member was a target for crowd work — there was no hiding in the shadows of a club. Pointing to Gipson, who had cozied up to Ruiz, the comedian Alex Quow joked that he was certain that Gipson had received a pandemic stimulus check, based on the fact that Ruiz’s arm had not left his.“My brother right here, he got his stimulus,” Quow said, “His girl has been on him all night!”Then, there were the audience members who did not ask to be audience members. There was the man who rolled his eyes when the show started and did not look up from his phone for 17 stops; the woman who entered the car, glanced at the spectacle and immediately moved on to a new car; the young couple who put up with multiple comics asking them questions about where they were from with good humor.“Hello, welcome to a comedy show that you wanted no part of — I’m so sorry,” the comic Adam Mamawala said as a man wearing a Yankees cap entered the car.The show had the chaotic air of something that could get shut down at any moment by a strict police officer who was not in the mood for a joke. A few people sipped beers, but everyone wore face coverings, making reactions to jokes harder to decipher. Still, the comics said they could tell from crinkled eyes and body language.Jon Borromeo, the Stand Up NY booker and chief of staff, laughing during Rachel Lander’s performance Saturday.Adam Powell for The New York TimesOn the uptown train at the Franklin Street stop, Erik Bergstrom joked about a vegan woman he dated who railed against the unhealthiness of eating cheese, then happily snorted cocaine.At 28th Street, Scheen recounted the evolutionary tale of how male birds lost their penises, holding onto the metal subway pole for stability.Often, the amplified voices of the comedians clashed with an M.T.A. employee reminding riders about transfer points.“He’s making an announcement,” Scheen said. “It’s probably very important and we have no idea. He’s like, ‘Everyone get off the train, the Slasher’s here.’”During the pandemic year, as artists and performers were deprived of their passions and their income, Zoldan has made himself into a determined advocate for the survival of stand-up comedy. He has toed the line for pandemic performances rules (and sometimes brazenly jumped over it); the club has sued the state over rules limiting comedy clubs from welcoming audiences; he even went up against a New York stand-up behemoth, Jerry Seinfeld, whom he accused of not doing enough to support New York’s comedy industry.But, come Friday, there won’t need to be any complicated machinations or creative thinking to get comics in front of a live audience. On April 2, the state said, arts venues will be allowed to hold plays, concerts and other kinds of performances at 33 percent capacity, with a limit of 100 people indoors or 200 people outdoors, and higher limits if patrons show they have tested negative for the coronavirus.Stand Up NY plans to hold its first club shows on Friday evening, with a maximum of 40 audience members. Still, on Saturday, it plans one more night of subway performances, just for fun. More

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    in Theater

    Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

    With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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    in Television

    They Are Giving Hemingway Another Look, So You Can, Too

    Lynn Novick and Ken Burns consider the seminal writer in all his complexity and controversy in their new PBS documentary series.Of Ernest Hemingway, Ken Burns, left, said, “This is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated.” Lynn Novick said the moment for the series was apt: “We are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past.”Kelly Burgess for The New York Times, Lauren Lancaster for The New York TimesCould there be anything more subversive than turning a spotlight, in this moment, on Ernest Hemingway?Though his influence on generations of writers is inescapable, he has come to be seen as an avatar of toxic masculinity, the chest-thumping papa of American letters, sacrificing all to the work, headstrong and volatile, serially discarding one wife for another.And yet this contradiction is what made him interesting to the documentary filmmakers Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, who have worked together on in-depth series such as “The Vietnam War” and “Baseball.”That Hemingway is a writer who has contributed so much to the form but who is also full of complexities — or, to borrow another electric word from our current moment, that he is “problematic” — only seems to have made him more of a draw.Burns’s and Novick’s new three-part series on Hemingway, which begins airing Monday on PBS, approaches the man and the writer without trying to tidy any of it up. The alcoholism; the womanizing; the not-so-subtle anti-Semitism and racism; the many, many shot lions and elephants — it’s all there. But there is also reverence for his literary gifts, a desire to remind us of them and even introduce new dimensions, such as Hemingway’s apparent interest in gender fluidity.Ernest Hemingway, pictured here in 1945, is the subject of a new documentary series on PBS.Art Shay / Courtesy Monroe Gallery of PhotographyIn a video interview from their homes last month, Burns and Novick seemed to revel in the challenge of reviving Hemingway and allowing his “mysteries,” as Burns put it, to coexist alongside the enduring myth of the man. They also discussed his relationships with women, what parts of him they see in themselves and the Hemingway book they always come back to. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.Why Hemingway now?KEN BURNS Well, you know, we don’t have a “now.” We were talking about Hemingway as early as the early ’80s. I found a scrap of paper from after we decided to do the Civil War that said, “Do Hemingway, Baseball,” and then it showed up on lists through the end of the aughts and into the teens. We didn’t know it was going to take six years to do. We don’t anticipate the timing of it. We just know that every project we work on will resonate in the present, because human nature doesn’t change.But you had to be aware that perhaps Hemingway wasn’t the sort of historical figure with whom a 2021 public would be eager to spend time.LYNN NOVICK We’re aware of the fact that he’s a controversial figure. And that there are people who are so put off by his public persona that they haven’t read his work or don’t want to read his work. But we are living in times when we are re-evaluating all these icons from our past. And there’s no better way to do that than looking at Ernest Hemingway. Some of it is very ugly, and very difficult. And if you’re a woman or a person of color, or you’re Jewish, or you’re Native American, there are going to be things in Hemingway that are going to be really, really tough. But he is so important as a literary figure and in terms of his influence that to ignore him seems to just avoid the problem.What remains most refreshing about his work was this ability he had to trust the reader so completely.BURNS It’s a beautiful thing. And the thing I go back to often is that this is a guy who’s emerging out of a modernist tradition in which everybody is complicated. Joyce and Faulkner, they’re really super complicated. And he dared to impersonate simplicity. What he understood is that you could use these seemingly simple sentences, and they would be as pregnant as any long Joycean paragraph or Faulknerian sentence that goes on and on. So much was below the surface. And it requires you to go searching for meaning. It isn’t just how to order a French meal or fire a machine gun, it’s also about life and death and these fundamental human questions. And he’s saying, I’m not going to walk you through this. It’s mesmerizing to me, when it works. There’s nothing better.Behind-the-scenes filming of Hemingway’s manuscripts and typewriters at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.Jonah VelascoThe most surprising thing for me was the thread of gender fluidity that runs through the series and seems to upend everything we’ve come to think about Hemingway — the fact that he was willing to experiment with his sexuality and take on what he thought of as a female role.NOVICK I think the world first got a hint of this when the family published “Garden of Eden” posthumously in the 1980s. But I don’t think we fully appreciated what this said about him. Even when that was published. Now we have the framework to talk about it that we didn’t have as a culture then. There’s a reason he never published “Garden of Eden.” It’s a dangerous topic for him to go into. Even in an unpublished manuscript, even in his private life, given who he is. And then there were the huge problems he had with his son who was also interested in the same things. It caused an irreconcilable conflict between them, which is so sad.BURNS It’s pretty interesting that he is pursuing this all the way through and, and not blindly, that is to say, I think there’s a consciousness to it. It’s in him asking all his wives to cut their hair short, in his sympathy for female characters in stories like “Up in Michigan” and “Hills Like White Elephants.” I don’t think it’s like, Oh, I can’t let this out of the bag. I think he’s moving toward it. And he’s exploring it all the time.The wives also punctuate the entire series, becoming a big part of the structure as he moves from Hadley Richardson to Pauline Pfeiffer to Martha Gellhorn to Mary Welsh. It’s clear that he always needs a woman in his life as both an anchor and a foil.BURNS You got to have her and you got to leave her or you got to be bad to her. Edna O’Brien [an Irish writer who appears in “Hemingway”] says in the opening: I love that he fell in love. But she also knows that he has to escape all of that, too, in order to provide himself new material.NOVICK You do feel that somehow there’s some kind of arrested development or something where he’s just sort of stuck in this place of needing to have this great romance. And then when ordinary life or tensions or problems come up, he’s out of there. To me, the most fascinating is the relationship with Martha Gellhorn because she can hold her own with him. It’s so exciting when they get together, even though he’s cheating on Pauline. But there’s something really interesting about their professional connections. And then he can’t deal with it.Lynn Novick, left, with Edna O’Brien, a writer who appears in “Hemingway.”Meghan HorvathIf Hemingway is one of our great archetypes of the artist, is there anything you recognized of yourself in him?BURNS Only one thing. I think that we have, and have always had, a really strong work ethic and a discipline. And not being satisfied until it’s really done. And we’re not afraid to take a scene that is already working and dismantle it because we learn new information. Our scripts are just filled with that same sort of crossing out and emendations that Hemingway did.NOVICK Hemingway has you in the palm of his hand from the very first word. And you know, I feel personally I should be so lucky to ever be able to do that. So we are storytellers, and the obsession and reworking that Ken is talking about is in the service of trying to tell a good story. And that’s an example that he left for us when he’s at his best, with all his flaws.So have you emerged from this process with a favorite Hemingway work?NOVICK It’s the same work that was my favorite when we started, which is surprising because I read or reread almost everything. I started with “A Farewell to Arms,” and I ended with it. I love the short stories, but I really love diving into a great novel. And that, that is one of the all-time great novels for me. It’s pure poetry from the very first words. It’s not the classic Hemingway minimalist take. It’s a big epic story, and it gives you everything you need to know. And even though I know how it’s going to end, obviously, I love to reread it because I see different things every time I go through it. It’s beautiful. It’s devastating. It’s epic. And it’s timeless for me.BURNS What she said. I champion the short stories, and I can list the 10 that really float my boat, like “Snows of Kilimanjaro” and the two parts of “Big Two-Hearted River.” But if it’s a favorite novel, then it has to be “A Farewell to Arms.”Follow New York Times Books on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, sign up for our newsletter or our literary calendar. And listen to us on the Book Review podcast. More