Eliana Willis

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    ‘Bad Monkey,’ Bad Deer, Bad Weather: The Fun of Filming in Florida

    Alex Moffat, an actor and comedian best known for his work on “Saturday Night Live,” rarely shouts at deer. But during a tense scene in the new crime comedy “Bad Monkey,” a Key deer, a member of an endangered species native to the Florida Keys, kept entering the frame. In one exasperated moment, Moffat, in character as a disreputable real estate developer, turned to the deer and shouted, “Go back to the woods or whatever!”The line wasn’t in the script. But it’s definitely in the show.Developed by Bill Lawrence and debuting Wednesday on Apple TV+, “Bad Monkey” tracks a cop turned health inspector, Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn), who pursues a case involving a severed arm, Medicare fraud, voodoo-adjacent witchcraft and a menacing capuchin. It is based on Carl Hiaasen’s novel of the same title, and as with most Hiaasen tales, it is set in a version of the sunshine state defined by raw natural beauty and equally raw Florida-man shenanigans.Not a lot of shows shoot in Florida — blame the lack of film infrastructure; blame the absence of tax breaks; blame the deer and the gnats and the 99 percent humidity. Even shows set in the state will typically shoot in North Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana or, as in the case of Lawrence’s Florida-centric comedy “Cougar Town,” Los Angeles. This is understandable. When you film in Culver City, you rarely need to hire armed alligator wranglers.Hiaasen, a former Miami Herald columnist, had been burned by Hollywood before. He strongly preferred a Florida shoot, especially for the scenes set in the Keys.“There’s nowhere in California that looks like that,” Hiaasen said.Lawrence (“Ted Lasso,” “Shrinking”), who had long had his sights on “Bad Monkey,” made that happen.“Feeling authentically Florida and a little sweaty and dirty, it really mattered,” he said.“We wanted to really capture the nature and the beauty of the state,” said Lawrence, right, with the actor Ronald Peet. Scenes set in the Bahamas, such as the one above, were also shot in Florida.John Brawley/ACSWe 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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    When I Get Anxious, These Videos Help Calm My Mind

    Tunnel through time with vintage B-roll.It was a grainy video, autoplaying in my Facebook feed, that first grabbed my attention. It seemed vaguely familiar — like a home movie from my childhood in suburban Boston but without the main characters, leaving only a warm, generic 1980s ambience. In the clip, kids in wide-collared shirts amble around a school cafeteria with burgers, tater tots and little square boxes of chocolate milk served by lunch ladies in those big buglike eyeglasses my grandmother used to wear. The video ended after about two minutes. Next, I watched a street glide by from the window of a moving vehicle: Kenmore Square, Boston, January 1977. The camera panned across storefronts — Strawberries, Paperback Booksmith, College Donuts — but I didn’t recognize anything until it zoomed out and the famous Citgo sign was revealed, perched atop the building where it still sits today.Discovering these videos felt like time-traveling back to some precise moment when nothing of note happened. They are just short, contextless clips of old B-roll — the background film cut into broadcasts to break up the main footage — culled from the collections of WGBH, a 69-year-old Boston public-television station. In 2018, James Auclair, a station employee, began regularly posting the videos to social media. They infiltrated my own Facebook algorithm in the fall of 2023, which, it turns out, was just when I needed them. That August, I eagerly applied for a dream-job faculty position at a university, and I knew I was in for months of consistent, nagging anxiety about my professional future. When I came across the footage Auclair was posting under the handle GBH Archives (they dropped the “W” a few years ago), I was hooked: Here, finally, was a reprieve from the swirl of negative thoughts in my head.I’ve devoured, by now, countless hours of B-roll. I’ve watched shoppers peruse CDs at the long-shuttered Tower Records on Newbury Street in the ’90s, transporting me back to Saturdays in high school when my friends and I browsed the rap and hip-hop racks for hours. Cars as big as boats — station wagons, sedans and vans like my parents drove — roll over the Tobin Bridge in 1979; drivers reach out their arms to pass cash and coins to toll attendants. I’ve watched ice skaters gliding over the frozen Charles River in the late ’70s and hairsprayed teenagers in leather and oversize sweaters smoking cigarettes outside their high school in the ’80s.I’m not the only one hooked on these B-roll clips: YouTube is full of “retro B-roll” material, and GBH Archives alone has more than 200,000 combined followers on Facebook, X and Instagram. For some viewers, the appeal is pure nostalgia — many comment wistfully on the absence of cellphones or the predominance of suits and ties and dresses. Others note changes in the ever-evolving cityscape. Every so often, someone recognizes their younger self in a video.Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it.What I love most is that the videos contain no narrative; they feel like ambient music — hypnotic, meditative. Rather than tell you what to think or fear, they just show you things. There’s a funny intellectual twist here: Television is an entertainment medium, and the primary purpose of these B-roll clips was to keep viewers visually engaged so they wouldn’t get bored watching a single shot of a newscaster talking. Watching this remediated B-roll subverts that purpose. There are no quick shots and snappy edits, no breaking news alerts or sensational chyrons, just slow and boring slices of life. Where the format of television news can crowd out thought, these videos create space for it. 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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    My Midsummer Dream: 7 Plays, 5 Days, 4 Stages, 1 Story

    At the Stratford Festival, a remix of genders and genres tells a brand-new, age-old tale of personal freedom.Walking the streets of this almost-too-charming town along the I-kid-you-not Avon River, I’ve often had the experience of hearing voices in my head.I am but mad north-northwest, as Hamlet would have it. After all, at the Stratford Festival, 400 miles in that direction from my usual haunts, internal voices are utterly normal, the result of seeing, cheek by jowl, so many new productions. After you see two or three, they start a conversation, sometimes delighting in what they have in common and sometimes arguing about what they don’t.During a visit in July, those voices were louder than ever. The five plays and two musicals I caught in five days on four stages were not just conversing but collaborating, seeming to scribble in one another’s scripts. “Twelfth Night” wrote part of “La Cage aux Folles.” “Something Rotten” cribbed “Romeo and Juliet.” “Hedda Gabler” and “The Goat” drank from the same bloody fountain.And “Cymbeline”? Well, that little-loved Shakespeare once again proved to be mad on its own.The clash and coupling of such seemingly different works is the great value, and great pleasure, of the repertory system, one so difficult to sustain that few theaters bother anymore. Stratford is by every measure — budget, employment, attendance, production — the largest repertory theater in North America, and likely the largest nonprofit theater, period.Also the broadest. Where else could you take in so easily a program so diverse, by genre, era, style and origin? Indeed, if you hit the right part of the season, which this year began on April 16 and runs through Nov. 17, you could theoretically see all 12 shows in one week.That efficiency wouldn’t matter unless the shows were good; in some years, that’s all they are, and that’s enough. But this year, both in scope and quality, Stratford outdid itself, with a thrilling “Goat” and “Gabler,” a delightful “Cage” and “Rotten” and a scintillating “Twelfth Night.”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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    Book Review: ‘The Hypocrite,’ by Jo Hamya

    In Jo Hamya’s second novel, “The Hypocrite,” a 20-something playwright puts her absent, aging writer dad on blast.THE HYPOCRITE, by Jo HamyaEven bad, absent daddies can set aside ego to appreciate the trappings of a classic. In “The Hypocrite,” Jo Hamya’s sharp and agile new novel, an unnamed, aging writer admits the brilliance of a nearly 10-minute sex scene to open his daughter’s latest play. It’s a shame the actor thrusting onstage is a venereal, self-regarding avatar of the writer himself, otherwise he’d tell his daughter how clever she was.We are in London, in the summer of 2020. The city is cautiously stirring to life after months of lockdown. The play has been warmly received by critics, and its 20-something playwright, Sophia, is unquestionably talented. Also: wounded, blinkered, petulant.Her father is a middle-aged novelist of moderate renown who is said to “offend people for a living,” and whose views aren’t quite prehistoric but are premodern enough that I’d prefer not to hear his feelings about women breastfeeding in public. At a glance, he resembles Martin Amis during a low moment. He saw Sophia only intermittently during her childhood, hasn’t published a book in years, hasn’t navigated the shifting cultural tides terribly well. Settling into his seat at the theater, he had no idea what he was in for.Their longest stretch of time together, a Sicilian vacation a decade earlier in which Sophia took dictation for his novel-in-progress, is the play’s subject. Her memory is ferociously loyal, but unsparing: She nails precise details of the dill-scented kitchen where they worked, his cherished purple shirt, the sexual encounters he thought he’d kept secret. Within moments, the humiliation sets in — he is reduced to a version of himself that had sex “like a pig and wrote like a dictator,” as the audience howls with laughter.Still, there are crumbs of mercy. Thank God Sophia hasn’t cast someone who can replicate the sputtering of his orgasms.And thankfully, nobody in this appropriately claustrophobic story emerges the clear hero. No one is that doomed L-word, likable. Hamya bats our sympathies between characters: Sophia, the neglected child who craves both her father’s approval and his artistic toppling; her father, who seems baffled by how quickly he’s encountered irrelevance; and Sophia’s mother, who is justifiably fed up after loving two self-engrossed yet profoundly un-self-aware writers.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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    Late Night Tackles Trump’s Obsession With Crowd Size

    “The fact that Kamala Harris is pulling such huge crowds is really getting under his, let’s call it, skin,” Stephen Colbert said of former President Donald Trump.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.Crowd WorkFormer President Donald Trump falsely claimed in a series of posts on Truth Social that Vice President Kamala Harris had used artificial intelligence to create images and videos of large crowds at her rallies.On Monday’s “Late Show,” Stephen Colbert said that “Trump’s crowd envy has set his brain to ‘broil’” over the thousands of people confirmed to be in attendance.“[imitating Trump] Fake crowd, everybody! Many people are asking — no, many people are asking, ‘Is it cake?’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“The fact that Kamala Harris is pulling such huge crowds is really getting under his, let’s call it, skin.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“It is the definition of insanity to think that this crowd here is A.I., though I would not be surprised if Harris generated Tim Walz with A.I. by just using the prompt ‘Sympathetic Meatloaf.’” — STEPHEN COLBERT“OK, OK, that’s one of those mom-and-pop issues for the single-issue crowd size voter.” — JON STEWART“First of all, I guarantee Trump has no idea what A.I. stands for. He probably thinks it’s a steak sauce: [imitating Trump] ‘She A1-ed the crowd. She gave out free bottles of steak sauce to people on the street to get them to come in. That’s why I was there. I was wearing a Kamala T-shirt and camo hat.’” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (Olympics Edition)“Yep, the big winners at the Olympics were Team USA, China and the French pole-vaulter’s Tinder account.” — JIMMY FALLON“He didn’t medal. You know I felt bad for him, but, then again, I didn’t.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingOn Monday, Jeff Goldblum kicked off a week of guest hosting for his neighbor, Jimmy Kimmel.What We’re Excited About on Tuesday NightThe “Saturday Night Live” star Bowen Yang will appear on Tuesday’s “Late Night.”Also, Check This OutShelby Lynne left Nashville behind two and a half decades ago. When she returned this time, she found a group of female collaborators who supported her new vision.Eric Ryan Anderson for The New York TimesThe singer-songwriter Shelby Lynne makes her return to country music with her 17th studio album, “Consequences of the Crown.” More

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    Sutton Foster and Michael Urie Reunite in the Zany ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    The hit Encores! production has transferred to Broadway, with a cast fiercely dedicated to entertaining its audience.Princess Winnifred and Prince Dauntless are goofy and playful characters. In most musicals, they would provide comic relief from the main story line. But in “Once Upon a Mattress,” it’s the funny people who rule, both literally and figuratively.All the more so since Winnifred and Dauntless are played by Sutton Foster and Michael Urie in symbiotic performances that are highly controlled and precise while maintaining the appearance of off-the-cuff abandon.And with the rest of the cast mostly following suit, it is refreshing to see actors so actively dedicating themselves to entertaining their audience. This kind of unabashed reveling in the joys of strutting your stuff appears to be in demand, too, judging by the recent success of “Oh, Mary!” and “Cats: The Jellicle Ball.”The family-friendly “Once Upon a Mattress,” which premiered in 1959, is a good fit for the Encores! series — which stages shows that are rarely revived and presented this one in January. Now the production has transferred, with some changes in the supporting cast, to the Hudson Theater on Broadway.Like many Encores! entries, Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer’s variation on the Hans Christian Andersen tale “The Princess and the Pea” would probably struggle to crack anybody but a tween’s Top 10 list of the best musicals ever.Also like many of those entries, “Once Upon a Mattress” turns out to be surprisingly sturdy in the right hands. Rodgers’s music is zingy and Barer’s lyrics often deploy sneakily enjoyable wordplay (“I lack a lass; alas! Alack!”). Just as important, the book by Barer, Jay Thompson and Dean Fuller is engineered to let gifted comic actors run loose — it is no coincidence that Carol Burnett originated the role of Winnifred.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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    Rachael Lillis, Who Voiced Popular ‘Pokémon’ Characters, Dies at 55

    Ms. Lillis voiced the characters of Misty and Jessie in the animated series based on a video game. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in May.Rachael Lillis, an actress who voiced the original English versions of Misty and Jessie, popular characters in the 1990s “Pokémon” anime television series, and later in the franchise’s movies and games as well, died on Saturday in Los Angeles. She was 55.The cause was cancer, according to Laurie Orr, one of her sisters.Ms. Lillis started voice acting in the 1980s, according to her IMDB page, but her big break came in the late 1990s when she was cast in the English version of the “Pokémon” TV series, a popular Japanese anime based on the “Pokémon” video games. In hundreds of episodes over eight years, Ms. Lillis voiced the characters Misty, a trusted friend of the main character, Ash Ketchum, and Jessie, one of the show’s villains.She also voiced those characters in two “Pokemon” movies as the cultural phenomenon grew.Ms. Lillis, who lived in Los Angeles, also was the voice of Jigglypuff, whose fairy song put listeners to sleep and was one of the creatures the characters pursue.Ms. Lillis, who had dozens of other voice credits to her name, had a strong sense of humor and a talent for voice acting, said Eric Stuart, who voiced James, the other member of Team Rocket in the “Pokémon” series, and worked with Ms. Lillis for many years.“If you met her, you’d not say this was so natural for her,” Mr. Stuart said in a phone interview. “Rachael in real life was pretty low key, kind of quiet and sweet,” Mr. Stuart added. “The minute she stepped in that booth it was like this whole other energy came out.”Mr. Stuart first met Ms. Lillis in the mid-1990s, when there were not a lot of people dubbing anime into English.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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    This Theater Company in Wisconsin Banks on the Glory of the Human Voice

    For a regular theatergoer, a recent July evening in rural Wisconsin was peak surreal.It could have been the sight of an amphitheater packed to its 1,075-seat capacity for a weeknight performance of the fairly obscure French comedy “Ring Round the Moon.”Or maybe it was that the actors didn’t have mics, which is a rarity nowadays. From my seat, I could see audience members leaning in, transfixed by those unamplified voices.“They’re here to listen,” Brenda DeVita, the artistic director of American Players Theater, said of the faithful who flock to Spring Green, about an hour west of Madison.A.P.T., in its 45th season, describes itself as a language-based company, which explains why it has doubled down on idiosyncratic choices in the current theatrical landscape. One is not doing musicals. Another is eschewing mics.That last is partly a practical choice since A.P.T. productions — nine this season, with the last closing on Nov. 10 — are done in repertory. This means the actors are always busy rehearsing or performing, leaving little spare time to add microphones to tech rehearsals. But banking on the glory of the human voice is primarily an artistic decision: Nothing comes between the actors, their words and the public.“Much Ado About Nothing,” featuring Sydney Lolita Cusic, lower left, and Samantha Newcomb and Briana J. Resa on the balcony, is running through September at American Players Theater’s 1,100-seat outdoor amphitheater.Eric Ruby for The New York TimesWe 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