Eliana Willis

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    Captain Sandy Yawn of ‘Below Deck Mediterranean’ Marries Leah Shafer

    Sandy Yawn of “Below Deck Mediterranean” married Leah Shafer on — what else? — a superyacht in Florida.Sandra Dolores Yawn has been locked up, left for dead on a Florida highway and chased through the Red Sea by pirates.In the summer of 2018, Leah Rae Shafer reached out on Facebook to send Ms. Yawn her blessings. Not because she thought Ms. Yawn, who goes by Captain Sandy, needed her well wishes, but because she had started watching “Below Deck Mediterranean” on Bravo.The show follows a crew tasked with catering to a revolving cadre of guests who have chartered a superyacht. Ms. Yawn, a star of the series, is at the helm. Ms. Shafer had written to congratulate her on the show’s success. There was another reason, too. “I thought she was hot,” she said.Ms. Yawn, 59, has been a yacht captain for more than 30 years. Her foray into television, which started in 2017, was not exactly foreordained. Until her mid-20s, “I was a mess,” Ms. Yawn said. “I was always in trouble. I got kicked out of 11th grade. I didn’t go to college.” At 13, at the start of an adolescence spent between Dundee, Fla., where her father lived, and Bradenton, Fla., where her mother lived, she started drinking. By 17, “I was getting arrested so many times I couldn’t even count how many,” she said. Usually a parent bailed her out. Her father’s refusal to do so after one drunken incident landed her a night in jail.In 1989, when she was 25, the revolving door of South Florida treatment centers she had been pushing through quit spinning when a counselor told her she couldn’t return. “She said, ‘Sandy, as soon as you get some money in your pocket you’re going to start drinking again,’” Ms. Yawn said.Fifty-five guests, the maximum allowed aboard She’s a 10 Too, were in attendance. Kelly MartucciWe 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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    Betty Buckley Is Not Wedded to the Same Old Songs

    The actress is back in concert mode at 76, and doing new material. She’s also looking forward to a bold new take on “Sunset Boulevard.”On her 35-acre ranch in Texas, the actor-singer Betty Buckley has been dreaming of playing a Western heroine at last — ideally in something by Taylor Sheridan, the “Yellowstone” creator, who shoots nearby.“I have literally contemplated going to his ranch and just knocking on the door,” Buckley, 76, said the other afternoon, and laughed.This week, though, she is slated to perform in Manhattan, Thursday through Saturday at Joe’s Pub, with songs and arrangements new to her show. After a year and a half of physical challenges including long Covid and compression fractures in her spine, she has worked her way back into concert mode.A veteran of the 1976 movie “Carrie” and the musical adaptation — a cult favorite that was a Broadway flop in 1988 — she is also back on-screen as an unsettling neighbor in the horror movie “Imaginary,” released in March, and with an animated short that she wrote and narrates, “The Mayfly,” scheduled for the Tribeca Festival in June.The actress played Norma Desmond in both the West End and the Broadway productions of “Sunset Boulevard” in the mid-1990s.John Stoddart/Popperfoto, via Getty ImagesSissy Spacek and Buckley in “Carrie,” which was Buckley’s big-screen debut in 1976. She later starred in a stage adaptation of the movie.United ArtistsA 1983 Tony Award winner for playing Grizabella in “Cats,” and famed for her trans-Atlantic 1990s turn as Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” Buckley spoke from her ranch by video call. These are edited excerpts from that conversation.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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    Zendaya for $200? ‘Jeopardy!’ Plans to Stream a Pop Culture Spinoff

    Sony Pictures Television said that “Pop Culture Jeopardy!” — which will pit teams of three against one another — would be streamed on Prime Video.“Jeopardy!” has long been ruled primarily by broadcast TV. As a staid, reliable quiz show that had the same host for 36 years, viewers have grown to depend on it at a certain time, on a certain channel.But on Tuesday, Sony Pictures Television, which produces the show, announced a new spinoff — a pop culture edition — that will be streamed only on Prime Video. The spinoff, called “Pop Culture Jeopardy!,” is part of a yearslong expansion of what the show’s producers have called the “Jeopardy!”-verse, as they have pushed new spinoffs and tournaments to shake up the brand, while also avoiding any major changes to the main show that might rankle its most devoted fans.The announcement about the new spinoff said contestants would compete in teams of three. Some of the topics that might come up, it said, include alternative rock music, “The Avengers,” Broadway, mixed martial arts and high-profile celebrities such as Zendaya.Under Michael Davies, who has been an executive producer of “Jeopardy!” since 2021, “Jeopardy!” has undergone a wave of expansion, featuring a new masters league with the show’s most successful players, a Second Chance Tournament that invites back promising contestants and a revival of “Celebrity Jeopardy!”It has not yet been announced who will host the pop-culture spinoff. Since the death of the show’s longtime host, Alex Trebek, in 2020, the succession process has been somewhat tortured. The initial plan to promote the show’s executive producer, Mike Richards, to host imploded after revelations that Richards had made offensive comments on a podcast. For a while, the actor Mayim Bialik split hosting duties with Ken Jennings, the show’s former champion, until Bialik abruptly announced late last year that she had been removed, leaving Jennings as the sole host, at least for now.“Jeopardy!” has had limited ventures into streaming before now. Viewers can stream some “Jeopardy!” episodes on Pluto TV, and the prime-time spinoffs stream on Hulu the day after they first air. The show used to have a sports trivia spinoff that could be found on Crackle, an online streaming service that never quite took off. More

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    Podcasters as TV Heroes? We’re All Ears

    Why have podcasters emerged as the rumpled protagonists of numerous television shows? We’ll discuss after the break.Gilbert Power, a public radio veteran and the host of the podcast “On Record,” went to a small town in Ireland to make a show about a 20-year-old missing-persons case. The podcast, he explained, was meant to be “a bit of fun, something to listen to on your drive home. I didn’t understand then how much power a story actually has. But stories can change us.”Gilbert, played by a grinning Will Forte, is the lightly inane hero of “Bodkin,” a seven-episode series that premiered last week on Netflix. And as the fictional host of a fictional podcast, he has plenty of onscreen competition.In the past five years, podcasters have emerged as the rumpled protagonists of numerous television shows (“Based on a True Story,” “Truth Be Told,” “Only Murders in the Building,” “Alex Inc.”) and films (“C’mon C’mon,” “Vengeance,” “Monolith,” “Bros”). Even the trendsetting Carrie Bradshaw was onboard; in “And Just Like That…,” she moved from print journalism to the advice podcast “X, Y and Me,” before going solo.Some of these works are comedies, some dramas. Many of them involve one or more mysteries in homage to or parody of true-crime podcasting. In these shows and movies, podcasters fill the roles once occupied by journalists or amateur sleuths, as tyros desperate for answers. These protagonists are often bumbling, and their relationship to ethics is distinctly off-and-on. But characters like these help fulfill a very particular fantasy: that we can tell the truth while also telling a good, possibly even powerful, story. And maybe land a mattress sponsorship while we’re at it.From left, Selena Gomez, Martin Short and Steve Martin in “Only Murders in the Building,” which revolves around a true-crime podcast.Patrick Harbron/HuluWe 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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    Darren Criss to Return to Broadway as a Robot in Love

    The actor will star in “Maybe Happy Ending,” an original musical set in a future Seoul. It will begin previews in September.Darren Criss, who parlayed a breakout role on “Glee” into a multifaceted career in television, theater and music, will return to Broadway this fall in a new musical that is nominally about robots but is also about life, love and loss.The show, “Maybe Happy Ending,” is a rarity for Broadway: a fully original musical — not adapted from a pre-existing story or song catalog. Criss will star alongside Helen J Shen and two other actors in the musical, which is set in Seoul in the late 21st century and is about two outmoded helperbots who meet at a robot retirement home and forge a relationship while grappling with their own obsolescence.The musical, by Will Aronson and Hue Park, had an initial Korean-language production in Seoul in 2016, and an English-language production in Atlanta, at the Alliance Theater, in 2020, where Jesse Green, a New York Times chief theater critic, called it “a charming, Broadway-ready new musical about robots in love.”The Broadway production, announced Tuesday, will be directed by Michael Arden, who also directed the Atlanta production, and who last year won a Tony Award for directing a revival of “Parade.” “Maybe Happy Ending” is scheduled to begin previews Sept. 18 and to open Oct. 17 at the Belasco Theater.“It’s a strange, futuristic look at love, with a beautiful score that feels quite classic,” Arden said in a telephone interview. “When I first read it I found it absolutely devastating and heartbreaking and beautiful — it was one of the most human stories I’d come across, even though our leads aren’t human.”Criss, an Emmy winner for “The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story,” last appeared on Broadway in a 2022 revival of “American Buffalo”; he had previously starred in “Hedwig and the Angry Inch” and “How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.”“Maybe Happy Ending” will be the first Broadway show for Shen, who is currently in “The Lonely Few” at Off Broadway’s MCC Theater. Criss and Shen will play the robots; the cast will also include Dez Duron, a onetime contestant on “The Voice.”“Maybe Happy Ending” is being capitalized for $18.25 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.The musical’s lead producers are Jeffrey Richards and Hunter Arnold, who on Friday announced that they are also among the producers of a new Off Broadway play, “N/A,” starring Holland Taylor and Ana Villafañe. That play, written by Mario Correa and directed by Diane Paulus, is to begin previews June 11 and to open June 23 at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater. The play, described in a news release as inspired by real people and events, is about tensions between the first female speaker of the House and the youngest woman elected to Congress; the characters have parallels to Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. More

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    Enhancing Broadway, by Any Bodily Means Necessary

    The choreographers nominated for Tony Awards this year have a broader vision than usual of the possibilities of dance in theater.In the Broadway musical adaptation of “The Outsiders,” something shocking keeps happening. It isn’t that the characters throw punches, or not exactly. These are teenagers who rumble, so it isn’t surprising that they’re violent. What’s shocking is the kinesthetic impact. You seem to feel the blows yourself.The impact is electrifying, but it doesn’t operate alone. It serves the storytelling and engages the emotions of an audience by bodily means. This is what choreography at its best can do, and it isn’t limited to what you might think of as dancing.The choreographers of “The Outsiders” and of the four other shows nominated for the Tony Award in that category this year understand this. None dole out the usual stuff. This broader vision of theatrical choreography is worth noticing and applauding.Hell’s KitchenMaleah Joi Moon plays the lead role in “Hell’s Kitchen,” which has choreography by Camille A. Brown.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesA loosely autobiographical jukebox musical of songs by Alicia Keys, “Hell’s Kitchen” takes place in the 1990s, in the Manhattan neighborhood of the title. Camille A. Brown’s choreography fits the setting. It looks, delightfully, like dancing that the people who live there would do, like regular folks getting their groove on.But it’s also a throwback to an older, neglected mode of integrating dance into a musical, the tradition that Agnes de Mille inaugurated with shows like “Oklahoma!” and “Carousel” in the 1940s. Like de Mille, Brown individuates the ensemble with detail: This guy is extra flamboyant; that gal pops her gum bubbles on the beat. Moving like this, the dancing chorus becomes the appealing community that draws the show’s 17-year-old protagonist, Ali, into the world — and out from the apartment building where her mother wants her to stay sheltered.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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    Watching the New ‘Doctor Who’ With 5 Superfans

    Five British fans gathered to watch the premiere, wondering what a new Doctor and Disney+’s co-production would mean for their favorite show.“Doctor Who,” the BBC’s beloved sci-fi series about an alien time traveler and his human companions, has had 875 episodes over 61 years. The show first ran between 1963 and 1989 on the BBC, was revived in 2005 and has been airing ever since.As a result, the TV shows has one of the most diverse a fan bases when it comes to age. It appeals to older people who sat down to watch the first broadcast on black-and-white televisions, as well as to children watching on their iPads in 2024.On Friday, a new season started airing, featuring Ncuti Gatwa — the 31-year-old Scottish actor who was previously best known for his role as Eric on “Sex Education” — as the latest Doctor. Russell T Davies, who was the showrunner between the reboot in 2005 and 2010, is back at the helm. The show also has a new home on Disney+, the first time the BBC has produced “Doctor Who” in partnership with another company in the show’s history.On a recent evening, Richard Unwin, a 44-year-old writer and actor, gathered four other “Doctor Who” fans at his apartment in East London to watch the first two episodes. They were a little nervous about what the Disney influence, and the need to cater to a new, international audience, might have done to their favorite program.“I am worried that they will Americanize it,” said George Norohna, a 61-year-old retired civil servant, who remembers the show as the first thing he ever saw on a color television. They were joined by the fantasy author Janelle McCurdy, 28, Francis Beveridge, a 27-year-old neuroscience researcher, and Beth Axford, 26, who writes for “Doctor Who Magazine,” a fan publication.Surrounded by shelves packed with “Doctor Who” memorabilia, the fans helped themselves from a platter of vegetarian sandwiches as they watched the episodes: the first about a baby farm in space and the second about a villain who steals the world’s music. From one corner of the room, a full-size replica Dalek watched over the scene.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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    Tony Awards 2024: Who Will Win (and Who Should)

    Our chief theater critic names the shows and artists he thinks will win, should win and should have been nominated — and suggests a few new categories.The 2023-24 Broadway season was rich with new plays and, let’s say, crowded with new musicals. Revivals were rarer — not a bad thing, necessarily. But the combination of factors makes for quite a horse race as the Tony Awards presentation approaches. So take my annual Tonys “ballot” with the usual caveats, listed below, and with a grain of salt for my highly unscientific commentary within each category. As always, that includes a plea for the addition of new awards; if we can change, why can’t the Tonys?1. I’m not an oddsmaker. I don’t actually vote. Prizes for artistic merit are silly. You could probably do better by flipping a coin.2. The people and productions listed in the “Should Win” category are not necessarily more deserving than those in “Will Win.” There’s often little if any excellence gap between the two groups.3. The “Should Have Been Nominated” category obviously includes Broadway work that was eligible but spurned. Less obviously, it also includes work from Off Broadway and beyond (indicated by an *asterisk*) that’s totally ineligible for the Tonys, just because.Best PlayWILL WIN“Stereophonic”Should win“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”“Mary Jane”Should have been nominated“Primary Trust”*“Infinite Life”*“The Comeuppance”*“Jonah”*Four cheers for Off Broadway, where so many Broadway plays start — including this year’s “Stereophonic, “Mary Jane,” “Appropriate” and “Prayer for the French Republic.” And a fifth cheer for “Primary Trust,” which won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.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