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    ‘The Daily Show’ Skewers Samuel Alito Over Another Provocative Flag

    “Did this guy get a two-for-one deal at the MAGA flag store?” Michael Kosta said of the Supreme Court justice on Thursday’s “The Daily Show.”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.Flagging RightDays after reports surfaced of an inverted U.S. flag being flown outside his home around the time of the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is facing criticism for flying a second flag associated with that riot, this one at his vacation home in New Jersey last summer.“Another flag? Did this guy get a two-for-one deal at the MAGA flag store?” Michael Kosta joked on “The Daily Show.”“That’s right, a second flag at a second home. Alito’s second wife better watch her back.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“But if you’re upset about this, the good news is the Supreme Court has a code of ethics. Now, the bad news is they wrote that code of ethics, and they don’t follow it.” — MICHAEL KOSTAThe Punchiest Punchlines (Daily Habits Edition)“Daily pot smokers are beating daily alcohol drinkers in the race to see who can escape their sad lives more quickly.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“Some may be surprised by this, but as a New Yorker, I am not. I smoke weed every single day, whether I want to or not on the sidewalk, literally everywhere I go.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now remember, this is daily or near-daily use because, in overall numbers, alcohol is more widely used. So, congratulations, weekend binge drinkers, you still have the biggest problem.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“This news has alcohol makers worried. They’ve changed their standard disclaimer from ‘Please drink responsibly’ to ‘Please drink.’” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth Watching“The Garfield Movie” star Chris Pratt and Jimmy Fallon played a game of lasagna cornhole on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutTemilade Openiyi, better known as Tems. “You can control what you do, but you can’t control how life lifes,” she said after recently experiencing an earthquake.Erik Carter for The New York TimesAfter working with Beyoncé, Drake, and Rihanna, the Nigerian Grammy-winning R&B singer-songwriter and producer Tems will release her debut album in June. More

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    Review: ‘The Hours Are Feminine,’ a Family Braces for a Storm

    In José Rivera’s latest play, a Puerto Rican family moves to Long Island in 1960, contending both with Hurricane Donna and their neighbors’ hostility.When it is revealed, the meaning of “The Hours are Feminine,” the title of José Rivera’s latest play, is an apt encapsulation of the work. A newly immigrated Puerto Rican mother is explaining the Spanish language’s gendered grammar to her neighbor within a larger conversation about how bored they are as housewives on Long Island: “Time is masculine, but …”It’s a poetic phrase that is almost too perfect, bordering on trite. Yet it contains such insight that it evokes a nodding mm-hmm from the audience. Like this line, the whole play, in its premiere production at Intar Theater in Manhattan, strikes a delicate balance between truism and genuine feeling.Rivera writes and directs it as a remembrance of his family’s move to Long Island in the summer of 1960, which ended with the arrival of Hurricane Donna. His stand-in, 5-year-old Jaivin (Donovan Monzón-Sanders), and his mother, Evalisse (Maribel Martinez), arrive in Lake Ronkonkoma from their native island a year after his father, Fernán (Hiram Delgado), has settled into their new home.Fernán has secured for them a ratty, illegally rented shack in the backyard of a picturesque house owned by Charlie (Dan Grimaldi), an aging Italian American creep who taunts them with slurs he knows they don’t understand. (The three family members perform their Spanish dialogue in English, so that their language barrier is revealed, poignantly, as a ghost might realize he’s invisible).At the diner where Fernán works for $99 a month, he overhears patrons worrying about the Black and Puerto Rican families moving into their white idyll. That’s also the reason Charlie’s son, Anthony (Robert Montano), has moved himself and his wife, Mirella (Sara Koviak), into the big house, fleeing an integrating Brooklyn.Mirella, though, is worldlier than that, and eagerly strikes up a friendship with Evalisse. Their interactions, hinged on the commonalities of midcentury womanhood, form the play’s tender core, before the families’ increasing friction culminates with the storm’s climactic arrival.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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    Jimmy Kimmel Roasts Republicans for Crying Wolf

    President Biden “sent an elite team of ultraliberal F.B.I. agents to assassinate Donald Trump, but somehow he slipped out the back door,” Kimmel joked on Wednesday.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Losing the PlotNewly unsealed files from the F.B.I. search of Mar-a-Lago in 2022 showed that agents were authorized to use deadly force if necessary.“Which is standard operating procedure, whenever the F.B.I. execute a search warrant,” Jimmy Kimmel noted on Wednesday, “but in the MAGA-verse, it is a plot to kill Donald Trump.”Conservatives reacted with outrage to what some have called an assassination attempt, with Trump writing in a campaign email, “Joe Biden was locked and loaded ready to take me out and put my family in danger.”“I always thought of Biden as a doddering old man, but Donald Trump makes him look like one of The Expendables.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“‘Locked and loaded’? ‘Ready to take me out’? I’ve never heard Joe Biden sound so [expletive] cool in my life.” — MICHAEL KOSTA“The diabolical mastermind Joe Biden sent an elite team of ultraliberal F.B.I. agents to assassinate Donald Trump, but somehow he slipped out the back door. Somehow, they missed the fact that the loudest and most famous man in America and all 15 of his Secret Service agents were in New Jersey at the time that they raided Mar-a-Lago.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (Trump’s Bedroom Edition)“Well, speaking of the former president, according to a new report, Trump’s attorneys found classified documents in his bedroom four months after the F.B.I. searched Mar-a-Lago. The lawyers knew Trump was hiding something when they saw a box labeled ‘books.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Oh, my God, the only thing more shocking to find in Donald Trump’s bedroom would be a current wife.” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Now, to be fair, Trump rarely goes into his bedroom. As we’ve recently learned, he does most of his sleeping in court.” — STEPHEN COLBERTThe Bits Worth WatchingJay Pharoah performed diss raps in the style of Shaquille O’Neal, 50 Cent, Katt Williams and more on Wednesday’s “Tonight Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe musician and “The Voice” star John Legend will appear on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutOn his 41st  wedding anniversary, the actor Peter Gallagher talks about happy matrimony.Photo Illustration by The New York Times; Photo: Charley Gallay/Getty Images For NetflixThe actor Peter Gallagher discussed his four-decades-long marriage to Paula Harwood on this week’s Modern Love Podcast. More

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    New York’s Palace Theater Gets an $80 Million Refresh (and 30 Feet Higher)

    The Palace now has 1,648 seats, down from 1,740 in 2018 and 1,800 in 1913. The seats are wider, and there is more legroom. The Palace is also more accessible, with additional wheelchair locations, and an elevator to all floors.The theater added 10,000 square feet to its front-of-house and backstage areas; improvements include new rigging for lighting and lifts for the orchestra and set pieces. “Walking in there, I have the same feeling I had when I was 7 and 8 years old,” Nederlander said. “No pun intended, but it’s like I just walked into a palace, and it goes all the way back to vaudeville.” More

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    New ‘Richard III’ Raises an Old Question: Who Should Wear the Crown?

    A production at the Shakespeare’s Globe theater faced criticism because a nondisabled actor plays the scheming king. But disputes like these miss the point, our critic writes.When Michelle Terry, the artistic director at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London, decided to put on a production of “Richard III” with a feminist twist, she probably didn’t expect accusations of discrimination. But that’s what she got. The run-up to the show’s premiere on Tuesday was overshadowed by a controversy over the fact that Terry had cast herself as villainous title character despite not having a physical disability.The play depicts a set of murderous machinations whereby Richard, Duke of Gloucester, achieves his ascent to the English throne in 1483, and the events leading to his demise at the hands of Henry, Earl of Richmond, who would become Henry VII, the first Tudor king. Richard, described as “deformed” in the play’s opening lines, has traditionally been portrayed as a hunchback — almost always by able-bodied actors, with only a few notable exceptions in recent years. (In 2022 Arthur Hughes, who has radial dysplasia, became the first disabled actor to play Richard for the Royal Shakespeare Company.)When Shakespeare’s Globe announced its casting earlier this year, the Disabled Artists Alliance, a British organization, published an open letter condemning it as “offensive and distasteful,” since Richard’s “disabled identity is imbued and integral to all corners of the script.”Shakespeare’s play, the statement added, “cannot be successfully performed with a non-physically-disabled actor at the helm.” The Globe issued a robust response pointing out that Richard would not be played as disabled in this production, and adding that, in any case, “the Shakespearean canon is based on a foundation of anti-literalism and therefore all artists should have the right to play all parts.”The Globe pushed back strongly against organizations like the Disabled Artists Alliance, which said Richard should be played by a disabled actor.Marc BrennerUntil relatively recently, it was uncontroversial to have a nondisabled actor play a disabled role. Dustin Hoffman’s portrayal of an autistic character in “Rain Man” and Daniel Day-Lewis’s protagonist with cerebral palsy in “My Left Foot” both won best actor prizes at the Academy Awards in the late 1980s. These days, the practice is increasingly contentious: Jake Gyllenhaal received blowback when he played an amputee in “Stronger” (2017), as did Dwayne Johnson in the action movie “Skyscraper” (2018); Bryan Cranston was similarly criticized for playing a quadriplegic in “The Upside” (2019).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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    ‘Evil’ Review: Is It Satan, or Is It Us? It’s Time to Find Out.

    Michelle and Robert King’s macabre comedy about the possibility of demonic possession and the certainty of evil begins its final season.Season 3 of “Evil” ended on a typically funny but creepy, outlandish yet somehow understated note. With moments to go in the final episode, Kristen Bouchard, the show’s demon-investigating psychologist, found out that one of her eggs had been fertilized by the sperm of a possible demon. The last thing we saw was her dumbfounded face.Coming into Thursday’s premiere of the show’s fourth and final season on Paramount+, she and we have had nearly two years to think about how to respond. Kristen’s choice? To laugh, like an only slightly crazy person. “I giggle at the thought of you waking up at 3 a.m.,” she tells her nemesis and baby daddy, Leland Townsend, “because the Antichrist needs changing.”Like just about everything in “Evil,” her riposte works on both the human and the supernatural planes. (All babies can seem like the Antichrist, after all.) This is appropriate given that, with 14 episodes to go, the show’s central characters remain conflicted about whether the weird stuff they experience is a product of the devil or of human malevolence amplified by their own overactive imaginations.Their indecisiveness goes to the heart of the show, whose fundamental message is that supernatural evil abets, hides behind and jealously competes with everyday human evil. It’s a continuum. You can’t have one without the other.On the basis of the season’s first four episodes, “Evil” remains one of the smarter, more entertaining and more stylishly produced shows out there, and it continues to carry the hallmarks of its creators and showrunners, Michelle and Robert King.The music cues are refreshingly offbeat; a character whispers the “Green Acres” theme during a nighttime stakeout in a corn field, and the show reprises its fondness for the novelty songs of Roger Miller. There is the somewhat self-conscious engagement with and critique of digital technology, as characters try to blame social media or rogue hackers for what look like demonic possessions.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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    Review: In ‘Usus,’ Pig Latin Gets Lost in Translation

    T. Adamson’s new comedy, which opens Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project, is about a group of worked-up Franciscan friars.As befits a play set among an order of 14th-century friars, “Usus” occasionally uses Latin words. Sort of. It’s likely that most audience members will understand “vile rat astard-bay” without resorting to a dictionary because pig Latin is still a living language.That the monks in T. Adamson’s play slip into ig-pay Atin-lay is par for the course since their speech mixes eruditely cryptic references (to those who haven’t spent time in a seminary) and a vernacular that at times feels ripped from TikTok.The show, which opens the 2024 edition of Clubbed Thumb’s popular Summerworks series at the Wild Project in the East Village of Manhattan, is about a small group of Franciscan friars worked up by Pope John XXII (pronounced X-X-I-I) declaring their vow of poverty heretical. After all, the brothers (pronounced bros) are merely following the precepts of their patron saint, Francis of Assisi, and that shouldn’t make them dissidents.In between preparing a letter of complaint to their boss, the men go about their brotherly business. Bernard (Ugo Chukwu), for example, is accumulating scientific knowledge about the mole rats rooting in the garden. JP (Annie Fang) is a young goofball who often finds himself awed by the brusque, brainy Paul (Crystal Finn, whose own play “Find Me Here” closes out Summerworks). “It’s so cool how you know all this lore and expanded universe stuff,” JP says after Paul brings up the First Council of Nicaea.JP (Annie Fang), right, is a young goofball; Paul (Crystal Finn), is brusque and brainy. Maria BaranovaPaul is a bit of an alpha bro, more articulate than the others, more learned — or at least more willing to wield his knowledge — and he directs the writing of the letter to the Pope, instructing Bernard to include the accusation that “John X-X-I-I is the earthly materialization of Antichrist.”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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    Kit Connor and Rachel Zegler Headline Broadway ‘Romeo and Juliet’

    A production featuring the screen stars, with music by Jack Antonoff, will open in October at Circle in the Square.Rachel Zegler has already played a Juliet-inspired figure, starring as Maria in the 2021 film adaptation of “West Side Story.” And Kit Connor has played a Romeo of sorts, starring as a yearning adolescent in the boy-meets-boy television series “Heartstopper.”Now the two actors are bringing a new production of “Romeo and Juliet” to Broadway. Their version, which seems to be leaning into the alienation of youth in a world of violent adults, is to begin performances Sept. 26 and to open Oct. 24 at Circle in the Square Theater.The production, which announced its timing and location on Wednesday, has said little about its concept, but there are indications it will be influenced by contemporary ideas: The show is to feature music by Jack Antonoff, the Grammy-winning producer best known for his successful collaborations with Taylor Swift, and it is being marketed with a vulgarity about the plight of young people. On Wednesday, the show released a video of Zegler and Connor, in contemporary clothing and setting, flirting and dancing to a song from Bleachers, which is Antonoff’s band.“Romeo and Juliet” is one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, and this will be its 37th production on Broadway, according to the Internet Broadway Database. This production is to be directed by Sam Gold, a Tony winner for “Fun Home” who has previously directed Broadway productions of “Macbeth” and “King Lear” and who is directing this season’s revival of “An Enemy of the People.” Sonya Tayeh, the Tony-winning choreographer of “Moulin Rouge!”, will add a dancer’s sensibility to the production; she is being credited with “movement.”This revival, first announced last month, is being produced by Seaview, an increasingly prolific production company founded by Greg Nobile and Jana Shea and partially owned by Sony Music Masterworks. More