Eliana Willis

More stories

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    ‘Ludwig’ Is Like a Fun British Version of ‘Monk’

    The twisty, serialized mystery stars David Mitchell of “Peep Show,” who plays identical twins, one of whom goes missing.David Mitchell stars as identical twins in “Ludwig,” the latest charming quirky British detective show, coming to BritBox on Thursday. The show is a big hit in England and has already been renewed for a second season.Mitchell is mostly playing John, the extra-fastidious twin, the one who lives a solitary life. But he has his puzzles: He makes a living as a puzzle creator known as “Ludwig” and publishes books that thrill the cryptology crowd.He is yanked from his hermitage by a phone call from his sister-in-law, Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin), with whom he has been close since early childhood. His twin brother, James, a detective, is missing, and she has a kooky scheme to get to the bottom of it. John needs to pretend to be James, go to the police station and gather the intel they need. What could go wrong?John is not a smooth operator, and he struggles with office chitchat and idiomatic language. But dang if our guy isn’t a genius observer and brilliant logician who gets to play Sherlock Holmes on cases by seeing all the ways they remind him of his games. This one is an elaborate deductive reasoning puzzle; this one is like a game of chess. You, ma’am, are under arrest.The procedural aspects here are clever and twisty, and the serialized mystery of James’s disappearance is an ample engine. In addition to being like a fun British version of “Monk,” “Ludwig” is a stationery aficionado’s utter dream. The pens, the pencils, and oh, the notebooks. You can tell by just the sound of their snips that those scissors have the heft and excellence of God’s own shears. Appropriate for its title, the show also has a fantastic score.SIDE QUESTSMitchell is one of the team anchors in my favorite British panel show, “Would I Lie to You?” Several seasons are on Amazon Prime Video and BritBox, but you can have just as much fun looking up clips on YouTube.Mitchell is perhaps best known as the star of “Peep Show,” all nine seasons of which are on Amazon, Hulu, the Roku Channel and Pluto.In addition to “Monk” (Amazon, Peacock) and “Psych” (Amazon, Peacock), “Ludwig” reminds me a lot of “Death in Paradise,” which also centers on a fussy fish-out-of-water detective who solves nutty cases and maybe learns to soften up along the way. That’s on BritBox, as are dozens of similar shows.If you want to watch Maxwell Martin do more of the solving, she is one of the stars of “Bletchley Circle,” a period drama about female code crackers who solve crimes after World War II. That’s on Amazon, Peacock and the Roku Channel. More

  • 138 Shares199 Views

    in Theater

    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

  • 138 Shares149 Views

    in Theater

    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

  • 113 Shares119 Views

    in Television

    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

  • 100 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    ‘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

  • 113 Shares99 Views

    in Theater

    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

  • 138 Shares99 Views

    in Television

    ‘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

  • 113 Shares149 Views

    in Television

    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