“Counting the 2016 Republican primary, we’ve watched him do that 16 times,” Colbert said. “It’s excruciating. It’s like dental surgery and tonight was like getting our last wisdom tooth taken out.” More
“Sometimes I think we should move out of the city.”Grace Fraser, the extremely put-together Upper East Side therapist at the center of the HBO mini-series “The Undoing” (premiering Sunday), says that to Jonathan, her extremely roguishly charming husband, but she’s not referring to Covid-19. She’s feeling suffocated by her own wealthy white privilege, embodied in the swirling nastiness that comes with being a Manhattan private-school parent. In terms of most-talked-about pathologies of 2020, “The Undoing” bats .500.Created and written by David E. Kelley and starring Nicole Kidman as Grace, the six-episode series is, like their previous HBO collaboration, “Big Little Lies,” a murder mystery wrapped in a marital melodrama. It was based on Jean Hanff Korelitz’s 2014 novel “You Should Have Known,” whose title referred to a self-help book Grace had written and, more obliquely, to her failure to see the truth about that charming husband.The show’s new, more dire title, with its horror-movie ring, directly reflects the point of the story, as Kelley has shaped it: the undoing of Grace’s comfortable life and seemingly happy marriage amid the unraveling of her illusions about Jonathan, who fairly early on becomes the prime suspect in a sensational murder. Since the demands of the glossy melo-mystery must also be met, the show dangles (through the five episodes available for review) the possibility that Jonathan is innocent — of murder, at least — and that the enraged Grace will find a way to forgive him for his abundant other sins.This should all be sexily entertaining, and even fun, with Kidman and Hugh Grant playing Grace and Jonathan, and Kelley supplying the banter they exchange around the townhouse kitchen island. And for one episode it is. Grace is on the school auction committee, and Kelley and the director Susanne Bier make that the vehicle for an authentic and discreetly devastating portrait of the systemic smugness of her and her fellow moms.They also introduce Elena Alves (Matilda De Angelis), the sloe-eyed, full-figured mother of a scholarship student from Spanish Harlem. She lands on the auction committee like a bombshell, silently nursing her baby amid the discussion of Hockneys and free preschool admissions counseling. She also lands on the story like an archetype out of the slightly distant and distasteful past, a disruptive sexual force from the potent lower classes. But at least she’s employed sparingly, and eerily, as a device to get us into the thriller plot, with her own spooky-funny music cues when she drifts onscreen.The fun lasts a little way into the second episode, with Jonathan’s whereabouts uncertain, Grace’s nerves fraying and the shape of the mystery still unclear. It dissipates pretty quickly after that, though. The whodunit is slight and dreary, with Edgar Ramirez largely wasted as the lead detective. And the courtroom scenes, formerly a Kelley specialty, are tinny and theatrical. (Noma Dumezweni, as Jonathan’s high-priced lawyer, gives her speeches some gravitas; Sofie Grabol, of the original “The Killing,” is given nothing to do as the prosecutor.) Scene after scene, we’re put through the wringer of watching manifestly intelligent people doing stupid and highly improbable things on the witness stand, on TV or in response to late-night booty calls.The primary victim of this is Grant, for whom the part of Jonathan clearly was designed, like a pair of bespoke gloves. “How much charm do you think you have?” his lawyer asks him, and the answer is, quite a bit. In the early scenes, as he cocks his head, thickens his voice and asks Grace, in that mock-abashed way, “Would you like to be washed?,” it’s all still there.But the result of this tailoring of part to actor is that once Jonathan is the murder suspect and his secrets start to come out, the story turns on the question of whether he’s a sociopath or whether he’s, well, Hugh Grant. And that turns out to be an unwinnable proposition for the actor Hugh Grant, who, as the story progresses, resorts to self-parody in Jonathan’s moments of crisis — exaggerating the tics and hesitations we’re so fond of to try to sell the melodramatic claptrap with which he’s been saddled.Kidman fares much better — she can do tormented golden child in her sleep, and she doesn’t hit any false notes as Grace. Donald Sutherland and Lily Rabe also spruce things up in roles that are right in their wheelhouses, as Grace’s master-of-the-universe father and her high-strung best friend. Douglas Hodge makes an impression in a few completely extraneous scenes as Jonathan’s public defender; the character’s one contribution to the texture of the show is that he holds his meetings in one of New York’s great neighborhood institutions, the Lexington Avenue steakhouse Donohue’s.It’s possible, if you tune out the more risible aspects of the story, to enjoy (or bemoan) “The Undoing” for its visual evocation of a crowded, vital, pre-pandemic New York City. In that case the most important person in the production is the brilliant cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle (“Slumdog Millionaire,” “T2 Trainspotting”), doing an entire TV series for the first time. He captures New York as both dream and nightmare — in not quite hallucinatory streetscapes, or in the way a walk through the city takes you constantly in and out of sun and shadow. After a while, everything else about the show is just noise. More
Note the last two words in the title of Heidi Schreck’s hit show, “What the Constitution Means to Me”: This is a highly personal take, not a historical or legal lecture. Yet Schreck succeeds in widening her autobiographical play into a paean for basic fairness: The American Constitution, admired as it is, fails to protect all of us from violence and discrimination.Like the recent captures of “Hamilton” and “American Utopia,” albeit on a much more intimate scale, “What the Constitution Means to Me” (streaming on Amazon) successfully preserves a Broadway experience for the screen. Schreck, who has the amiable presence, storytelling verve and pedagogical chops of an ideal schoolteacher, starts off by recounting how she paid for college with the money she earned as a teenager giving speeches about the Constitution in American Legion halls.[embedded content]A terrific actress who manages to make the text feel off the cuff, Schreck starts by channeling her 15-year-old self, then quickly broadens the scope. She explores both her personal history (including her abortion) and family history to methodically expose the biases and omissions baked into the Constitution. And always, she makes the potentially dry material accessible, while her sidekick Mike Iveson, projecting “positive male energy,” has a quiet, affecting presence.The director Marielle Heller (“A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood”) used a multicamera setup to shoot a few performances, as well as a rehearsal, of Oliver Butler’s production. She refrains from flashy moves, though a few judicious shots of the audience help widen the frame by suggesting the idea of community.At the end of each performance, Schreck faced one of two poised New York high school debaters over whether the Constitution should be kept or abolished. (In the movie, it’s Rosdely Ciprian; you can see Thursday Williams in a bonus video.) A random audience member was then asked to pick the winner. A final panel informs us that the Constitution was kept at 123 of the 183 Broadway performances.What the Constitution Means to MeNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes. Watch on Amazon. More
Barbara Mundel takes over as artistic director of the Münchner Kammerspiele, lately perhaps the most consistently exciting playhouse in Germany. More
Quibi, the beleaguered short-form content company started by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, announced on Wednesday that it was shutting down just six months after the app became available. The mobile streaming service offered entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks intended to be watched on phones by people on the go, but it struggled to find an audience with everyone stuck inside their homes during the pandemic.Despite raising a combined $1.75 billion in cash from each of the Hollywood studios, the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba and other investors, Quibi will wind down its operations and begin selling off its assets. It had searched for a buyer for the company but found no takers.“Quibi is going to go down as a case study at Harvard Business School on what not to do when launching a streaming service,” Stephen Beck, the founder and managing partner of the management consultancy cg42, said in an interview.The news of Quibi’s shutdown was first reported by The Wall Street Journal. Mr. Katzenberg announced the news to his 200-person staff on Wednesday afternoon. Quibi did not give an exact date for when the app would no longer be available.“The world has changed dramatically since Quibi launched and our stand-alone business model is no longer viable,” Mr. Katzenberg said in a statement.Ms. Whitman added that while the company had “enough capital to continue operating for a significant period of time, we made the difficult decision to wind down the business, return cash to our shareholders and say goodbye to our talented colleagues with grace.”Quibi produced more than 100 original series, along with offerings like news from NBC and CBS, and sports programming from ESPN. Marquee names like Steven Spielberg, Sam Raimi, Antoine Fuqua, Jennifer Lopez and Chrissy Teigen were involved. But it struggled to attract subscribers from the start and those who did tune in groused that Quibi wasn’t giving them what they wanted. Consumers complained that the programming couldn’t be watched on television sets (something that became more important with people stuck at home) and they criticized the app’s inability to allow them to share content on social media, a feature that could have helped generate word-of-mouth excitement.Quibi is also embroiled in a lawsuit with Eko, a tech company that accused Quibi of misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on a patent for the technology that allows viewers to shift seamlessly between horizontal and vertical viewing on a phone. The activist hedge fund Elliott Management has committed to funding the lawsuit.And as the pandemic continued for months, the company’s backers began looking for a return on their investment.One major challenge in trying to orchestrate a sale was the fact that Quibi doesn’t own any of its content. In an attempt to lure the brightest lights in Hollywood, Quibi offered each of its partners sweetheart deals where Quibi would pay both to produce the content and then to license the programming for an exclusive two-year period. After that two-year term ended, Quibi would still be able to show the programming on its app, but the content creator would be allowed to stitch together the short episodes into a television show or a film and resell it to another buyer.“Katzenberg created something that was beneficial to content creators,” said Michael Goodman, an analyst with Strategy Analytics. “But when push came to shove, the market spoke that chunking up premium content is not what consumers want. They like short-form video: news clips, sports clips, beauty. There is a market for that. It’s just not a premium market. It’s not a new lesson but a lesson that has to be continually taught over and over again.”Despite its shortcomings, Quibi did win two Emmy Awards last month, for the actors Laurence Fishburne and Jasmine Cephas Jones in the series “#FreeRayshawn” from Mr. Fuqua. Two of the company’s other shows also scored nominations: “Most Dangerous Game” starring Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, and a reboot of the comedy “Reno 911!”“We continue to believe that there is an attractive market for premium, short-form content,” Ms. Whitman said in the statement. “Over the coming months we will be working hard to find buyers for these valuable assets who can leverage them to their full potential.”Hollywood is marveling at the pace of Quibi’s demise. The company’s advertising campaign for its April introduction included a series of commercials featuring characters facing imminent death, whether by quicksand or from a zombie bite. They all had about “a Quibi” before disaster struck. In the end, the company’s life cycle didn’t last much longer. More
A prominent Broadway producer and Lloyd’s of London have fought in court for four years over whether Audra McDonald’s 2015 pregnancy, which was cited as the cause for closing the musical she was starring in, qualified as an “accident” or “illness” for insurance purposes.In a filing last week, the parties agreed to drop the case.The production, “Shuffle Along, or The Making of the Musical Sensation of 1921 and All That Followed,” and Lloyd’s, the insurance company, filed a one-paragraph stipulation in New York State Supreme Court, declaring the case “discontinued.”Neither the show’s lead producer, Scott Rudin, nor Lloyd’s would comment. A spokeswoman for McDonald said the actress had not been informed of the development and had nothing to say.The case began in 2016, when the production filed suit against Lloyd’s, asserting that McDonald’s unexpected pregnancy, at age 45, forced an “abandonment” of the musical, which closed at a loss.The show, as is common in productions led by stars, had purchased insurance to cover the possibility that McDonald would be unable to perform due to an accident or illness; Lloyd’s denied coverage, saying a pregnancy was neither an accident nor an illness. The show claimed it had suffered damages in excess of $12 million, which was its capitalization costs.Ever since, the parties have been fighting in court over what aspects of McDonald’s health, going back many years, were or were not disclosed to the insurer. Many of the documents were filed under seal, but it’s clear that the back and forth was not pleasant: among other things, the parties argued about the relevance of English law, filing deadlines, and word counts. More
Frightening movies help fans gain a “new understanding,” says the veteran star of scary stories, including the new “Tales From the Hood 3.” More
Performers share fragmented reveries in “Electric Feeling Maybe,” while “Voyeur” brings a touch of Paris to the West Village. More
