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    Tituss Burgess in ‘Oh, Mary!’ Is Cole Escola’s Dream Come True

    As Burgess prepares to step in to the hit Broadway comedy, he thinks he should have “spent more time at the gym.”“Oh!” Tituss Burgess said, the curls of his Mary Todd Lincoln wig bobbing as he spoke. “I need kneepads.”Fully in costume, wearing the wig and a bell-shaped black dress, Burgess was about to rehearse Cole Escola’s hit comedy “Oh, Mary!” onstage at the Lyceum Theater on Broadway, just days before stepping into the starring role on Tuesday.And, yes, he really did need those kneepads. When Escola played Mary Todd, they channeled their sprung-coil energy into a performance of relentless hilarity and chaos. Burgess’s take on the role is no less physical; if anything, he is upping the ante with the cartoonish expressions and belted high notes fans know from his earlier Broadway appearances and shows like “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.”Burgess’s turn in the play, a demented fantasia of Mary Todd Lincoln as a frustrated and thwarted “rather well-known niche cabaret legend,” will run through April 6. After that, Escola will return to the part.When they do, it will be with a fantasy having come true. Last May, Escola was a guest on Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers’s podcast “Las Culturistas,” and said that they “would love for someone else to play Mary Todd” before adding, “My dream is Tituss Burgess.”Yang and Rogers let out an exclamation just short of a gay gasp, and Rogers said, “That would be fab.” Escola joked that they were worried Burgess would be “too good,” but also couldn’t help but imagine him in the show’s famous curly wig.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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    Why Black Satire Is the Art Form for Our Absurd Age

    Black American novelists, filmmakers and other writers are using comedy to reveal — and combat — our era’s disturbing political realities.LAST SPRING, DURING the Broadway revival of “Appropriate” (2013), Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sardonic drama about white family members returning to their ancestral plantation home in southeast Arkansas to bury their father, a rare moment of cross-racial candor transpired — not onstage but in the audience. In the third act, Bo, the middle-aged older brother played by Corey Stoll, unleashes a rant about the burdens of whiteness in 21st-century America. Even a passing acquaintance with the work of Jacobs-Jenkins, who’s a queer Black man, would condition theatergoers to understand the outburst as satirical exposure of a threadbare fallacy of racial innocence. “You want me to go back in time and spank my great-great-grandparents?” Bo says. “Or should I lynch myself? You people just need to say what it is you want me to do and move on! I didn’t enslave anybody! I didn’t lynch anybody!” The speech usually leaves audiences squirming. On this night, however, one person clapped.“They were clapping in earnest,” says Jacobs-Jenkins, as if Bo were “someone who’s genuinely out here now just telling his story — you know, ‘Found his letters and read each one out loud!’” Before the playwright, actors and audience could fully register what was happening, a voice called out from the darkened auditorium: “Are you serious right now?” For Jacobs-Jenkins, 40, the whole thing was a delicious disruption. “Part of what the work is doing is exposing these fissures inside of a community — these feelings that we’re encouraged, as we are with most conversations about race in our country, to nurse in private.” At its best, Jacobs-Jenkins says, the theater can become a space to “risk learning something we didn’t anticipate” about one another.Satire is the art of risk. It relies, after all, on an audience comprehending a meaning that runs counter to what the text reads, the screen shows or the comedian says. In this regard, it’s vulnerable to misinterpretation and to deliberate distortion. When that satire concerns race and when the audience is as diverse and as divided as the United States is today, those risks compound. Why hazard satire’s indirection when even the most straightforward language — the term “woke,” for instance, or the seemingly incontrovertible good of “equity” — is manipulated and weaponized against its original ends? Yet perhaps these are the conditions that demand satire most of all, meeting absurdity with absurdity.I spoke with Jacobs-Jenkins, whose new political family drama “Purpose” is now on Broadway, 10 days before Donald Trump was inaugurated as the 47th president of the United States, the same week that Trump gave a press conference at Mar-a-Lago in which he, among other things, called for renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” acquiring Greenland from Denmark and welcoming Canada as the 51st state. The way Jacobs-Jenkins sees it, “this is probably going to be one of the most difficult moments in recent memory to be an American, but it’s also going to be kind of the funniest — because come on! I think the question of this time will be: ‘Are you serious right now?’” The Black American satirical tradition, with its roots in the unfathomable dehumanization of slavery and the persistent pressures of racial discrimination, offers equipment by which all of us might better endure and even combat our lacerating realities.From left: the writer-director-actor Jordan Peele, the novelist Paul Beatty and the playwright Lynn Nottage.From left: Vivien Killilea/Getty for Imdb; Alex Welsh for The New York Times; Bryan Derballa 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

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    Jon Stewart Isn’t Falling for Trump’s Golf Tournament ‘Win’

    After the president claimed victory at his own club, Stewart compared him to “the Make-a-Wish Batman kid: ‘Hey, look at that, Donald. You caught all the criminals.’” 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.Hole in NonePresident Trump declared on Sunday that he’d won a championship at Trump International Golf Club in Florida — not the first time he’d claimed victory at one of his own clubs.Jon Stewart mocked Trump’s announcement with some well-placed air quotes on Monday’s “Daily Show.”“Oh, he ‘won the tournament’ at ‘Trump International’? How did that happen?” Stewart said.“This dude’s whole life, he’s like the Make-a-Wish Batman kid: ‘Hey, look at that, Donald. You caught all the criminals.’” — JON STEWART“Look, I’m opposed to anyone rolling back American democracy, but I do tip the cap to any 78-year-old winning a golf tournament.” — JON STEWART“And, by the way, still having enough energy left to stroll into the command center in his golf attire to bomb the [expletive] out of Yemen! Yeah. Now, look, anyone can bomb the [expletive] out of Yemen after nine holes, but 18?” — JON STEWART“Who are the other players in this tournament? I mean, seriously, are there other golfers, or is it just Eric with his Fisher-Price clubs?” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I want to see a full 580-page investigation of this tournament. I want to know everything. I want scorecards, I want video, I want affidavits from the caddies, I want a forensic investigation of every divot he didn’t bother to replace. How is it possible that this guy beats every other golfer every year?” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (St. Patrick’s Day Edition)“Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Once again, it is cabbage’s night to shine tonight.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“You know what? The way things have been going lately, it’s nice to have an excuse to drink on a Monday.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“That’s right, people getting lit on a Monday morning. For one day, everyone gets to feel what it’s like to be a pilot for Southwest.” — JIMMY FALLONWe 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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    ‘Purpose’ Review: Dinner With the Black Political Elite

    A family not unlike Jesse Jackson’s gets barbecued on Broadway by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins.You may have trouble catching your breath from laughing so hard during the first act of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s sophomore Broadway outing, “Purpose,” which opened Monday at the Helen Hayes Theater. Deeply imagined and grave beneath its yucks, it unspools like a brilliant sitcom.Then, also like a sitcom, it jumps the shark.Ah well, mixed emotions go with the territory. If “Purpose” is primarily a merciless dissection of hypocrisy in an important religious-political Black American family — the Jesse Jackson dynasty comes to mind — it is also a grudging love letter to them in all their God-praising, backroom-dealing, self-promotional glory. The problem is that in the constant switchback of perspectives, the play, directed by Phylicia Rashad, grows too hectic and attenuated to maintain a line of conviction.The same could be said of the family, the Jaspers. Chicago-based like the Jacksons — the play originated at the Steppenwolf Theater Company in that city — they, too, are headed by an oratorical pastor who, in his youth, worked closely with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Also familiar are several possible unauthorized offspring, hushed up but not quite silent. Jacobs-Jenkins cannot help noting that among that generation of Bible-quoting civil rights worthies are enough sins of the father to burden a host of sons.Indeed, approaching 80 and withdrawn from the front lines, Solomon Jasper (Harry Lennix) now reserves most of his thunder for his family. His formidable wife, Claudine, a honeyed matriarch with a law degree, is tough enough to shape it to her own ends as needed. But on their disappointing sons falls the brunt of Solomon’s biblical disapproval.The older son, named for his father, is the more obviously wayward. Raised to uphold Solomon’s political legacy, Junior (Glenn Davis) instead tarnished it when, as a state senator, he was convicted of embezzling campaign funds. These he spent, according to his embittered wife, Morgan, on “cashmere drawers and betting on racing pigeons.”From left, Jackson, Hill, Young and Alana Arenas.Sara Krulwich/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

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    In ‘Weather Girl,’ Climate Change Sets Off a Meltdown

    A new one-woman show from the producer of “Baby Reindeer” and “Fleabag” is an irreverent allegory about wildfires and global warming.At the Soho Theater in London, a beleaguered weather reporter is giving double meaning to the phrase “hot mess.” The setting is drought-stricken Fresno, Calif., where temperatures are sweltering and wildfires rage on the city outskirts. The presenter, Stacey Gross, has a telegenic glamour and a peppy on-screen persona, but underneath is an angst-ridden functioning alcoholic who secretly quaffs Prosecco on the job. She suspects her TV station is misleading viewers about the role that climate change has played in the fires, and as the heat wave progresses she has a meltdown, embarking on a cathartic, booze-fueled rampage featuring wanton destruction, kidnapping and karaoke.“Weather Girl” has arrived in London amid plenty of hype, following a successful run at last year’s Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The show’s producer, Francesca Moody, has a knack of turning Fringe plays into television hits — she was behind “Fleabag” and “Baby Reindeer” — and a Netflix adaptation of “Weather Girl” is already in development, according to the trade publication Deadline. Onstage, the title character is played by Julia McDermott, who also takes several other parts in this lively but slightly undercooked one-woman show, a silly but serious climate change allegory that runs through April 5.The show’s title character has a telegenic glamour but underneath is an angst-ridden functioning alcoholic who secretly quaffs Prosecco on the job.Pamela RaithWearing a bright blouse, hot pink skirt and heels, McDermott performs on a bare stage, with just a colored screen behind her as an allusive backdrop. Her only prop is a trusty Stanley Tumbler. Over the course of 60 frenetic minutes, her character regales the audience in a fraught, high-tempo monologue about Stacey’s escapades in drinking holes with names like Malibu Nights and the Antelope Lounge. 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 White Lotus’ Season 3, Episode 5 Recap: A Poetic Act

    It was a big week for cutting loose and confessions, for sex as a metaphor but also just for sex.Season 3, Episode 5: ‘Full-Moon Party’The HBO publicity department is pretty good at keeping secrets, huh? Last week, the season premiere of “The Righteous Gemstones” featured an unexpected guest star: the 12-time Oscar nominee Bradley Cooper. This week, “The White Lotus” brings in the Oscar-winning actor Sam Rockwell, whose participation in this season had been kept pretty tightly under wraps, right up to the moment he appeared onscreen as Frank, Rick’s old friend in Bangkok.Rockwell is not this episode’s main character. But he does deliver a knockout monologue that is one of the season’s standout scenes. And his speech would likely be the most talked about “White Lotus” moment this week, were it not for the rather shocking kiss at the end of the episode.I will get to the smooching, I promise. But I want to start with Frank, who meets Rick at a nice hotel, bringing with him something Rick needs for when he confronts his father: a heavy bag containing a big gun. We are not told how these two men know each other or why one of them is holding on to an arsenal. But clearly they have a close friendship, which has apparently involved some violent exploits.This episode is a direct continuation of last week’s, which had several characters heading out to various decadent parties, joining the locals in celebrating the full moon. The “White Lotus” creator and director Mike White does a lot more intercutting between the story lines than usual, creating a feeling that night itself has its own dark, strange momentum as people across Thailand get increasingly intoxicated.But the episode breaks from that delirium for one long speech from Frank, who has to explain to his old friend why he has embraced Buddhism and given up booze, drugs and sex.Frank’s story is too raunchy to repeat in fine detail. It involves him interrogating the nature of desire and the role gender identity plays in lust — all of which led to him experimenting with cross-dressing and gay orgies before coming to the conclusion that “sex is a poetic act; it’s a metaphor.” But for what? That remained frustratingly unclear to Frank, which is why he become a Buddhist, detaching himself from the wheel of lust and suffering.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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    On ‘The White Lotus,’ Patrick Schwarzenegger Gets Rich Quick

    On the set of the third season of “The White Lotus,” which shot for seven sticky months in luxury hotels in Bangkok and Koh Samui, Thailand, the writer and director Mike White had a repeated note for the actor Patrick Schwarzenegger.“You’re not walking rich enough,” White would yell across the pool deck. “Patrick, be richer.”Schwarzenegger, 31, recounted this — incorporating an impeccable White impression — on a bright morning at a coffee shop in the TriBeCa neighborhood of Manhattan. (Schwarzenegger described himself as a coffee “addict.” His on-set nickname: Cold Brew.) In person, he was polite, earnest.“I’m thankful each and every day for the life that I’ve been given,” he said as he spooned up yogurt and berries.In the current season of “The White Lotus,” Patrick Schwarzenegger plays the oldest child in a privileged North Carolina family. Sam Nivola and Sarah Catherine Hook portray his siblings.Fabio Lovino/HBO, via Associated PressWhite saw this guilelessness as genuine. “Patrick is just somebody who likes people, and people like him,” White said on a call earlier that week. “He’s a sincere actor, but he’s uncomplicated in his presentation of self.”Schwarzenegger had come into the city to do a few days of press for “The White Lotus,” his most high-profile project to date. He plays Saxon, the eldest son of a wealthy North Carolina couple (Parker Posey and Jason Isaacs). A cocky finance bro, Saxon’s preferred pastimes include smoothies, pornography and observations about his siblings’ sex lives.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 Residence,’ Plus 7 Things to Watch on TV this Week

    A new murder-mystery series, starring Uzo Aduba, comes to Netflix, and Oscar-winning films come to streaming platforms.Between streaming and cable, there is a seemingly endless variety of things to watch. Here is a selection of TV shows and specials that air or stream this week, March 17-23. Details and times are subject to change.Something isn’t right?Natalia Grace Mans was adopted from Ukraine in 2010 by an American family. By 2011, they had argued to a court that they didn’t believe Mans was a child, as they had been told, and instead was an adult woman with dwarfism. Perhaps because of its similarity to plot of the 2009 horror movie “The Orphan,” the story went viral and became the topic of podcasts, news stories and a documentary series entitled “The Curious Case of Natalia Grace.” Now, a fictionalized version, “Good American Family,” is coming out this week. The show stars Ellen Pompeo and Mark Duplass as the adoptive parents and Imogen Faith Reid as Natalia. Streaming on Hulu on Wednesday.The new mystery drama “The Residence” asks the question: What would happen if there was a murder at a White House state dinner? The series stars Uzo Aduba as Cordelia Cupp, a detective with the Metropolitan Police Department who is brought in to question the personnel who were around when the crime occurred. And of course, throughout all of this, interpersonal conflicts arise, people start acting shady and secrets are revealed. Streaming on Netflix on Thursday.In the 1990s, there were a string of murders around the U.S. When the cases started getting media attention, the killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, would write letters to newspapers and police departments detailing the specifics of his crimes and signing with a smiley face, giving him the moniker “the happy face killer.” He is currently serving four consecutive life sentences. In the new series, “Happy Face,” Dennis Quaid is taking on the role of Jesperson in this fictional retelling of the terrifying and true story. Streaming on Paramount+ on Thursday.Celebrating music.This week, music will be celebrated at the iHeart Radio Music Awards. And though Taylor Swift finished with her Eras Tour, she continues to be top of mind — the show takes place on the two year anniversary of the start of the tour, so the show will feature a filmed performance from that first night. Lady Gaga and Mariah Carey will be honored, and LL Cool J is set to host. Monday at 8 p.m. on Fox.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