Eliana Willis

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    Eight Small New York Theaters Sue Cuomo Over Pandemic Restrictions

    A group of eight small theaters and comedy clubs in New York City has filed a lawsuit challenging the closing of their venues during the coronavirus pandemic.The lawsuit, filed Friday in Federal District Court in Manhattan, argues that the orders shutting down theaters “shock the conscience and interfere with plaintiffs’ deeply-rooted liberty and property rights, including the right to work, right to contract, and right to engage in commerce.”The theaters filing suit include the Theater Center, the Players Theater, Actors Temple Theater, SoHo Playhouse, the Gene Frankel Theater, the Triad, Broadway Comedy Club and New York Comedy Club, all of which are in Manhattan and have 199 seats or fewer, and most of which are commercial operations. They sued Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio.In the lawsuit, the theaters argue that pandemic restrictions have been enforced arbitrarily, noting that bowling alleys, casinos, catering halls, gyms and shopping malls have been allowed to reopen, as have schools, colleges and “Saturday Night Live.” They ask a court to overturn the executive orders barring theaters from holding performances.The lawsuit was put together by Catherine Russell, an actor who is the general manager of the Theater Center, which has already installed an improved air filtration system in hopes of reopening to masked, socially distanced, temperature-tested audiences. She said she was inspired by reading about the production of “Godspell” at the Berkshire Theater Group and decided to pull together a group of theaters to press for an easing of restrictions in New York.“Small theaters are much more capable of doing this safely, and if people walk into our theaters and feel safe and protected, they’ll be more likely to see ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Six’ next summer,” Russell said in an interview. “Also, people need to go back to work. We were closed with restaurants and bars, but they’ve been open for a while, and it’s actually safer to be in a theater because you keep your mask on.”Some of the venues present their own programming and some rent their spaces to other producers; at the time of the shutdown the Theater Center had a long running production of “Perfect Crime,” starring Russell, as well as “The Office! A Musical Parody.”One-person shows are typical fare at the SoHo Playhouse, including Phoebe Waller-Bridge in “Fleabag” in 2019 and Drew Droege in “Happy Birthday Doug,” which had its run cut short this spring by the pandemic.Other businesses and organizations have tried to challenge New York’s pandemic protocols, including the Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn, bars, restaurants, gyms and strip clubs. In several of the cases, the plaintiffs were represented by James G. Mermigis, the lawyer who is now representing the theaters.“We get sued virtually every day for virtually every action taken during this pandemic, and frankly I’ve lost track of all the frivolous suits filed against us,” said Richard Azzopardi, a senior adviser to the governor. “We are moving heaven and earth to contain this virus and we know some people are unhappy, but New York continues to have one of the lowest infection rates in the nation, and better to be unhappy than sick or worse.”A spokeswoman for the city’s law department said her agency would wait to comment. “We will review the lawsuit when served and respond accordingly,” said the spokeswoman, Kimberly Joyce. More

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    ‘Fargo’ Season 4, Episode 6 Recap: Blood for Blood

    Season 4, Episode 6: ‘Camp Elegance’Gaetano is ready for his beating.Kidnapped, bloodied and tied to a chair, having been shot point blank in the head and survived, the Italian brute laughs at the pain that awaits him. This is the machismo we’ve come to expect from him, which has stood him in stark contrast to his diminutive brother, who is characterized by a fumbling pragmatism. And yet before Gaetano gets worked over by a shadowboxing henchmen, he first has to listen to a Loy Cannon monologue about Sugar Ray Robinson. To him, this is the real torture.I can sympathize.As a continuing homage to the films of Joel and Ethan Coen, “Fargo” has gamely attempted to mimic the verbosity of the Coens’s scripts, which themselves evoke a bygone era of Hollywood patter. The wit and musicality of their dialogue is the hardest thing for a non-Coen to simulate — they have almost no contemporary equals in that department — but patterns of speech are a key element, too, with plenty of variance between big speeches and rat-a-tat exchanges. It never feels predictable.In the TV “Fargo,” and in episodes like this week’s especially, the long windup before characters finally get to the point can be exasperating. It’s not enough for Loy merely to beat Gaetano for information. He has to talk about a legendary boxer first. It’s also not enough for Loy to turn Odis from adversary to asset. He has to analogize owning figurines to owning human beings first. It’s not enough for a trigger man to take Satchel “for a ride.” He has to reflect on the American experience first.And so on. The problem isn’t so much the monologues themselves — though the figurine analogy is absolutely terrible — but the predictability of deploying them. When the audience can see a speech coming, it’s no different than being a mile ahead of the plot. Worse still, it throws the brakes on a conflict that’s been escalating steadily and is on the verge of busting out into the open. It plays against the show’s long-running strength for spinning a good yarn.Another spool’s worth of yarn gets spun on this episode, which focuses mostly on the Loy’s urgent need to retaliate after Doctor Senator’s death. Josto isn’t the shrewdest capo, but he realizes the significance of the moment. It’s the bell that can’t be un-rung. In the funniest scene of the episode, his consigliere sits down to deliver a two-point message from the bosses in New York: First, he has two weeks to “fix things” with Loy. Second, he has to make things right with his brother. The second point gets delivered immediately after he learns that Gaetano is probably dead. Setup, punchline.On his end, Loy wants to have his revenge but doesn’t feel he has to sacrifice his own men to do it. He directs Zelmare and Swanee to bring Gaetano to him alive, which they do through a miraculously not-fatal gunshot, and he strong-arms Odis into taking Satchel from the Faddas’ compound. (The latter is such an obviously terrible plan that it’s surprising Loy would dream of it, especially with his son’s life at stake.) As Deafy watches from afar, Odis pin-balls from one side to the other, a hapless tool of two mob outfits that think they have a lawman in their pocket.Under orders from Josto, who’s ready to dispose of the Cannon syndicate’s collateral, a henchman reluctantly drives Satchel to an abandoned camp, echoing the celebrated sequence in “Miller’s Crossing” in which Tom Reagan (Gabriel Byrne) takes his mistress’s brother, Bernie Bernbaum (John Turturro), into the forest for a hit. Satchel doesn’t beg for his life like Bernie — he doesn’t realize his life is in danger — but there’s evidence that the henchman, like Tom, may not have the will to go through with it. We’ll never know, because Milligan shoots the man first.It’s here that the episode lands on a grace note, as Milligan defies the Faddas in defense of another son orphaned for the family business.“I never got to choose,” Milligan tells Satchel. “A child soldier, that’s what they made me.”So here’s Milligan, the Irishman once lent to an Italian family, coming to the aid of a Black boy lent out to the same clan. Milligan’s use of the word “choose” is telling: Americans are supposed to choose their destinies, and that’s a value that he’s chosen to fight for now on behalf of himself and a boy of a different race and a younger generation. There’s hope in that gesture, and it takes little pontificating to express it.3 Cent StampsOne big Coen moment, aside from the “Miller’s Crossing” reference: the man popping out from behind a shower curtain to abduct Odis, a nod to Jean Lundegaard’s kidnapping in the film “Fargo.” (The slapstick amateurishness of the operation, such a signature Coen touch in the film, is not in evidence here.)Two smaller Coen moments for the price of one: The darkening of the Gaetano’s doorstep mirrors Anton Chigurh’s showdown with Llewelyn Moss in “No Country for Old Men” and the bursts of light that stream into the room when he shoots through the door are straight out of “Blood Simple.”Surely there will be a point when Odis’s O.C.D. comes into play, right? And it’s not merely a character tic?Surely there will be a point when Oraetta’s role in the larger narrative is clarified, right? For now, she has easily deflected Ethelrida’s attempts to expose her. To quote Omar from “The Wire,” “You come at the king, you best not miss.” More

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    ‘Dear Evan Hansen’ and ‘Leopoldstadt’ Pick Up Olivier Awards

    LONDON — “Dear Evan Hansen,” the hit musical about an anxious teenager who takes advantage of a fateful encounter with a schoolmate, was one of the big winners at the Olivier Awards on Sunday.It took home three Oliviers, the British equivalent of the Tony Awards, including best new musical for its production at the Noël Coward Theater and best actor in a musical for Sam Tutty, for his widely praised performance in the lead role, his West End debut. The Oliviers are normally awarded each April in a lavish ceremony at Royal Albert Hall in London, but this year the event was delayed because of the pandemic, and most of the event was prerecorded.“Dear Evan Hansen” was not the only production to win three awards. “& Juliet,” a jukebox musical that uses chart-topping hits by Britney Spears and Ariana Grande to retell “Romeo & Juliet” also won three awards, as did “Emilia” at the Vaudeville Theater, a romp about the life of Emilia Bassano, one of Britain’s first female poets. It was honored for best entertainment or comedy, best sound design and best costume design.Despite those big successes, this year’s Oliviers were notable for the variety of winners. “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s play about Jewish life in mid-20th-century Vienna, won for best new play. “This may be the Stoppard play for people who don’t normally cotton to Stoppard,” wrote Ben Brantley, in a laudatory review for The New York Times when the show opened in January. It had to shutter just two months later because of the coronavirus.A perhaps more surprising winner was “Cyrano de Bergerac” at the Playhouse Theater, named best revival ahead of Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell’s “Death of a Salesman.” That play, starring Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman, received five nominations in March.In the end, it only secured two awards, with Elliott and Cromwell winning best director for a production that brought race into the heart of Arthur Miller’s play, and Sharon D. Clarke winning best actress for her performance as Linda, Willy’s wife. Ben Brantley, in his review for The New York Times, called Clarke’s portrayal “magnificent.” She “transforms a character often portrayed as a whimpering doormat into a strong, self-aware woman who knows the choices she has made and is determined to honor them,” he wrote.Other notable winners included Andrew Scott, who took home the best actor award for his performance as a self-obsessed actor in Noël Coward’s “Present Laughter” at the Old Vic. “He does not so much play the part of the vainglorious actor Garry Essendine as grasp it around the waist and do a hot-to-trot tango with it,” Ann Treneman wrote of Scott in a review for The Times of London. “His panache fills the entire theater.”The Oliviers came at a hopeful moment for audiences in London. On Wednesday, the National Theater reopened for its first production since the coronavirus forced its closure in March. “Death of England: Delroy,” a one-man show about a Black man examining his British identity, is being performed to a socially-distanced audience wearing face masks. Several West End productions are also scheduled to return in coming weeks under the same conditions, including “Six,” the hit musical about the ill-fated wives of King Henry VIII. But coronavirus cases are soaring in Britain, which could change the outlook for performances. On Sunday, Italy’s government closed theaters, concert halls and movie theaters until Nov. 24 because of rising cases. In France, theaters are having to start shows in the early evening because of a 9 p.m. curfew.The pandemic was referenced during the Olivier ceremony. “Those of us who believe in the theater also believe in its resilience,” said Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, in a prerecorded speech. “Please remain resilient,” she added: “We need you, and we’ve missed you.” More