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    Kim Woodburn, British TV’s No-Nonsense ‘Queen of Clean,’ Dies at 83

    She was a blunt and bossy domestic dominatrix on the series “How Clean Is Your House?” honing a persona as the rudest woman on reality television.Kim Woodburn, the platinum-haired, trash-talking darling of British reality television who found fame as a domestic dominatrix in the long-running series “How Clean Is Your House” and in other shows of the mean TV genre, died on Monday. She was 83.Her death, after a short illness, was announced in a statement by her manager. It did not specify a cause or say where she died.Ms. Woodburn had been working in Kent, England, as a live-in housekeeper for a Saudi sheikh when her employment agency asked her to audition for a new Channel 4 reality show. The idea was that she and Aggie MacKenzie, a brisk Scottish editor at the British version of Good Housekeeping magazine, would invade the houses of slobs, hoarders and other housekeeping failures and teach them how to mend their messy ways.She was 60 years old at the time, and she nailed the audition, which involved scrutinizing a young woman’s grimy flat in West London.“Well, this is a flaming comic opera, isn’t it,” Ms. Woodburn declared in the woman’s terrifyingly filthy kitchen, as she recalled in her 2006 memoir, “Unbeaten: The Story of My Brutal Childhood.” “You look so clean yourself, and yet you live like this. Talk about fur coat, no knickers!”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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    ‘America’s Sweethearts’ Is a Compelling Sports Series

    Season 2 of this docuseries about the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders is an intense look at found families and all the healing and trouble that come with them.Season 2 of the documentary series “America’s Sweethearts: Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders,” on Netflix, is a bit less rah-rah than Season 1 — still full of tears, high kicks and sisterhood but also more attuned to the pain of it all, the sorrow and struggle of cobbling together one’s self-worth.One of this season’s leads is Jada, a five-year veteran of the team and among its best dancers and most thoughtful leaders. She lays out the season’s theme at the beginning: “Everyone’s going to say, ‘Well, they’re just cheerleaders,’” she says. “Well, we’re really good cheerleaders.”Her grin begins to spread. “Show us that you appreciate us,” she adds.Are the members of the team appreciated? Not with money, they’re not, and part of this season’s most invigorating arc is the cheerleaders’ quest for better pay. Season 1 brought additional fame and adulation to the team, and it also drew attention to the exploitation of the enterprise. As Kylie, another team veteran, explains: “The world was kind of telling us, ‘Girls, fight for more.’ And we’re like, ‘OK!’”As the women practice the grueling signature routine, we hear the opening strains of the AC/DC song “Thunderstruck,” over and over. But the true refrain of the season is the fretting about being in one’s own head. It’s the catchall term for all distress and self-recrimination, the explanation for any lack of confidence or lapse in perfection. Yes, performers can overthink things, especially in prolonged auditions, and rumination and anxiety are enemies to the wide smiles and sexy winks the Dallas cheerleaders’ routines require. The job is to make it look easy.But there’s an interesting tension. Your head is where the good ideas are, too — ideas like: “Hey, a lot of people are making a lot of money off my work; why doesn’t any of that go to me?” Or: “Even people who I believe have my best interests at heart can disappoint and hurt me.”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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    ‘The Waterfront’ Brings More Murder to Netflix

    Created by Kevin Williamson, this new drama set in North Carolina is a pulpy family saga of violence and secrets, land and legacy.“The Waterfront,” a Netflix drama created by Kevin Williamson, is set in North Carolina in a small coastal town. The Buckleys are local royalty — not only in the sense that they’re well known and powerful, but also in that they’re tortured by their circumstances and deeply resent one another, even as they feel a duty to protect the family.The show is one of many to follow the “Yellowstone” model, a family saga of violence and secrets, of huffy men and sly women, of distinctive names (Cane, Harlan, Diller, Hoyt). It is also about land that’s been in this family for generations, gosh darn it — land that’s our legacy if only the cruelties of debt and developers would abate.Our gruff patriarch is Harlan (Holt McCallany), a drunk and a womanizer with heart troubles and a shady past. His wife, Belle (Maria Bello), has her own valuable secrets and runs the family restaurant. Their son, Cane (Jake Weary), meddles with the fishing side of the business, and their daughter, Bree (Melissa Benoist), tenuously sober and trying to rebuild a relationship with her surly teenage son (Brady Hepner), wants more responsibility in the family’s enterprises. But Belle isn’t so sure she’s ready. Cane has gotten himself into a spot of trouble with a drug ring, and suddenly his side hustle is a bigger and bigger problem.Only three of the eight episodes of “The Waterfront” were made available for review, so I cannot speak to its stamina or big arcs. But these early chapters do a few things well.Whatever its flaws may be as it goes on, “The Waterfront” does not start slow — it knows how to escalate. The bodies start piling up quickly and surprisingly, the double-crossing starts right away and the flirtatious glances turn to naughty trysts within an episode. Mysterious strangers do not remain so mysterious or strange for too long. The show often lacks texture, but it compensates with earnest momentum.The series also has dark fun with its setting, and its moody crimes include murder by fishing net, intimidation by dunking someone as shark bait and hiding a body in a swamp in the hopes that alligators will take care of the rest.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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    ‘Viola’s Room’: A Spooky Sleepover With Helena Bonham Carter

    “Viola’s Room,” a transporting gothic mystery at the Shed, is the latest immersive work from Punchdrunk, the company behind “Sleep No More.”Felix Barrett, the artistic director of Punchdrunk, a premier experimental theater company, has often been asked to name his favorite show. This is a lot like asking a parent to choose a favorite child. But Barrett has always had a ready answer: “Viola’s Room.”Didn’t see “Viola’s Room”? You are in good and ample company. In the fall of 2000, Barrett, a recent college graduate, staged a version of “Viola’s Room,” then called “The Moon Slave,” at various locations around Exeter, England. Audience members arrived, one by one, at an otherwise empty theater and were then whisked away to a 13-acre overgrown walled garden. The journey culminated with 200 scarecrows and a marine flare that required clearance from the coast guard. The show ran for one night and could accommodate only four spectators.“It was the most beautiful, intimate Fabergé egg of a show,” Barrett said, on a video call from Shanghai. He has always longed to revisit it. Now he has.A reconceived “Viola’s Room” began performances on Tuesday at the Shed. The acreage is smaller, there are no scarecrows. But for a company that has become synonymous with large-scale masked extravaganzas (“Sleep No More,” which ended a 14-year Manhattan run in January, was the most celebrated), making a hushed, actorless work for just a handful of audience members to experience at any one time is an audacious choice. Like the early mask shows, it announces and refines a new form of immersive theater.The show is extremely tech heavy, involving more than 2,000 light cues. There are also bespoke scents, like one called “Burnt Witch.” George Etheredge for The New York Times“It’s all about trying to do things that our audiences aren’t expecting,” Barrett said. “Push the form, pull the rug, find further ways to seduce and lose audiences in these fever dreams.”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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    How Do You Adapt James Baldwin? Very Carefully.

    His works have been slow to come to stage and screen. But a new production of the novel “Giovanni’s Room” shows how rewarding it can be when done right.Few writers turn out their career-defining work on the first try. But that was James Baldwin with his 1953 debut novel, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” The semi-autobiographical book, about a day in the life of a Black teen whose stepfather is a minister of a Harlem Pentecostal church, was received by critics with glowing praise. Today it remains lauded as one of the great novels of modern American literature.Baldwin’s second novel, “Giovanni’s Room,” was quite a different story — literally and figuratively. A thematic departure from its predecessor, the novel was about two gay white men: David, a closeted American man, who falls in love with Giovanni, an Italian bartender, in Paris. In the book Baldwin unpacks motifs related to masculinity and queerness, classism and American exceptionalism all through sparkling dialogue and robust, deeply ruminative prose.Though now considered a significant work of the 20th-century queer literary canon, “Giovanni’s Room” didn’t share the immediate adoration and popularity of its predecessor. In fact, it was rejected by his publisher, Knopf, when first submitted. “We think that publishing this book, not because of its subject but because of its failure, will set the wrong kind of cachet on your writing and estrange many of your readers,” the editor Henry Carlisle wrote in a letter to Baldwin in 1955. But Dial Press published the book in 1958, and almost immediately Baldwin had further plans for it.First there was the stage. In 1958 he produced a dramatization of “Giovanni’s Room” for the Actors Studio starring the Turkish actor Engin Cezzar as Giovanni. The play didn’t make it to Broadway, but Baldwin intended to return “Giovanni’s Room” to the stage, or even adapt it to film. He insisted on creative control, which hindered some potential efforts from other artists.James Baldwin in 1973.Jack Manning/The New York TimesIn the late ’70s he collaborated with the South African filmmaker Michael Raeburn on a screenplay, with hopes of big names like Robert De Niro and Marlon Brando taking part. The project never got off the ground, though; Baldwin’s literary agent requested $100,000 for the book option, which the writer couldn’t afford.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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    Seth Meyers Wishes Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz Could Both Lose

    The clash of conservative titans had Meyers feeling like a Roman emperor: “I just want someone to feed me grapes while I say, ‘Let them fight.’”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. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.‘Rooting for a Sinkhole’In a heated exchange on Tucker Carlson’s show, the host grilled Ted Cruz about Iran’s population and ethnic makeup, suggesting that the Republican senator was ignorant about the country whose government he wanted the United States to help overthrow.Seth Meyers was amused by the standoff, saying he’d never “felt more like a Roman emperor.”“I just want someone to feed me grapes while I say, ‘Let them fight.’” — SETH MEYERS“It’s like watching a sequel to ‘Alien vs. Predator’ called ‘I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This, but the Predator is Making Some Very Salient Points.’” — SETH MEYERS“Oh, damn, Ted Cruz. Are you a pair of $800 Ferragamo boat shoes? Because Tucker Carlson owned you, buddy.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“And Ted Cruz was like, ‘I know the population, just give me a second to count, OK? Let’s see, there’s the ayatollah, that’s one. Uh, the Iron Sheik, two. Is Aladdin one? No? No?” — JORDAN KLEPPER“It’s so wild to see these two fighting. But I gotta say, in an argument between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, I’m rooting for a sinkhole.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Punchiest Punchlines (Flagpole Edition)“Not now, dude! This is like your boyfriend getting down on one knee and saying, ‘Kelly, will you make me the happiest man in the world and look at these two beautiful flagpoles?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT, on Trump’s announcement that new flagpoles would be installed at the White House“What’s going on here? It feels like someone told him, ‘Sir, you’re not doing well in the polls.’ And he was like, ‘I hear you, I’m on it.’” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Now personally, I think it’s cool that Trump found a new use for the 50-foot pole that Melania refuses to touch him with.” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Wow, ‘tall, tapered, rustproof’ flagpoles. You know he must love them ’cause that’s the same way he describes his son Barron.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“What a president. He spent 48 minutes yammering about flagpoles. He spent more time raising these flags than he did raising Eric and Don Jr. combined today.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Bits Worth Watching“Jimmy Kimmel Live” timed how long it took fans to start eating from a bowl of nachos left on top of a garbage can at the N.B.A. Finals.What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightPaul Simon will discuss coming out of retirement on “The Late Show.”Also, Check This OutSteven Spielberg, holding the camera, and his cinematographer Bill Butler during the filming of “Jaws.”Peacock/Universal Pictures, via Associated PressFifty years ago, “Jaws” established a template that blockbuster movies have been following ever since. More

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    ‘Fight Back’ Recreates an Act Up Meeting From 1989

    This immersive theater experiment enlists attendees to help recreate an AIDS activist meeting from 1989 as an exercise in empathy.On Monday evening at the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center, in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village, anyone entering Room 101 would step directly into March 13, 1989.Thirty-six years ago, the AIDS activist group Act Up New York had the space that night for its weekly meeting — an event that David Wise’s immersive theater experiment “Fight Back” seeks to recreate.Audience members are by definition participants, too. Each has been assigned the persona of someone who was involved with the organization early on. Act Up was in emergency mode then, trying desperately to get the culture to treat the catastrophic epidemic with greater urgency.Just days before the meeting, AIDS had killed Robert Mapplethorpe at 42. Within a year, it would claim Alvin Ailey at 58, Keith Haring at 31 and many thousands more. For the people in the room, death had become a far too frequent part of life.That is the cauldron in which the real meeting took place, and into which “Fight Back” means to drop its audience, as an exercise in empathy. As Wise, 47, explained by phone, he doesn’t expect people in 2025 to be able to access the breadth of emotions the activists felt in 1989.“But I do think that there’s something about inhabiting with your body,” he said, “and doing the actions that someone was doing, and saying the words that someone might have been saying, that is really effective, and affecting.”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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    Michelle Williams to Star in Off Broadway Revival of ‘Anna Christie’ With Mike Faist

    The actress will lead a revival of “Anna Christie” at St. Ann’s Warehouse, directed by her husband, Thomas Kail, and co-starring Mike Faist.A big star is coming to the small stage: Michelle Williams, the Emmy-winning, Oscar- and Tony-nominated actress, will return to New York theater this fall to lead an Off Broadway revival of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1921 drama “Anna Christie.”Williams, who was last on Broadway in 2016, will play the main character, a former prostitute who falls in love with a seaman. The seaman will be played by Mike Faist, who was nominated for a Tony Award for originating the role of Connor Murphy in “Dear Evan Hansen” and who then had a supporting role in Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation of “West Side Story.”The production is scheduled to run from Nov. 25 to Feb. 1, with a two-week break during the winter holidays, in a 450-seat theater at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn Bridge Park. It will be directed by Thomas Kail, the Tony-winning director of “Hamilton,” who is married to Williams. The two previously collaborated on the 2019 streaming series “Fosse/Verdon.”“We met making TV about theater, and we always thought it would be fun to make theater together,” Kail said in an interview. He said he had long been interested in O’Neill — he wrote his college thesis on the playwright — and that Williams had long been interested in the role, which was originated on Broadway a century ago by Pauline Lord, and has been played since on Broadway by Celeste Holm, Liv Ullmann and Natasha Richardson, and on film by Greta Garbo.“Taking something that has existed in various forms, with multiple terrific productions over the years, and having the chance to be part of a lineage is something that I love about the theater,” Kail said, “and that’s certainly something that sparked when I started having conversations with Michelle about it.”Williams has had a varied career since her breakout role in the television series “Dawson’s Creek.” She won the Emmy for “Fosse/Verdon,” was nominated for a Tony for the play “Blackbird,” and has been nominated five times for Academy Awards, for “Brokeback Mountain,” “Blue Valentine,” “My Week With Marilyn,” “Manchester by the Sea” and “The Fabelmans.”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