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    The Tony Nominee Starring in Alicia Keys’s ‘Hell’s Kitchen’ on Broadway

    Maleah Joi Moon almost gave up on theater. Now, in her first professional role, the “Hell’s Kitchen” star is a Tony nominee.Maleah Joi Moon has come a long way in a short time.Just a few years ago, she was a theater kid in suburban New Jersey, listening to her dad’s Alicia Keys records, starring in a high school production of “Rent,” waiting outside a Broadway stage door hoping to meet the cast of “Waitress.”Now, at 21, she’s a Tony nominee for her Broadway debut as the star of the new Alicia Keys musical, “Hell’s Kitchen,” which opened last month. That means she is working alongside the people she had just been fangirling — getting vocal advice and the occasional breakfast with Keys; honing her acting instincts with the show’s director, Michael Greif, who directed “Rent” 28 years ago; and learning to manage an eight-show week from Shoshana Bean, the actress she stage-doored in “Waitress,” who has taken Moon under her wing while portraying her mother.Moon’s confident performance — smoky voice, headstrong attitude, gestural dance moves — has caught the attention of critics. “Sensational,” Elisabeth Vincentelli declared in The New York Times. For Vulture, Jackson McHenry called her both “a great discovery” and “a virtuoso.” And Adam Feldman of Time Out went for wordplay: “With apologies to astronomers: Moon is a star.”“It’s surreal and it’s ridiculous and crazy and insane and all the things,” Moon told me as we stood in Shubert Alley, just under a digital marquee featuring her atop a piano, not far from the stage door where she now signs autographs for her own fans. “But my inner child — the one that wanted to be Nala on Broadway — is like, this is aligned. It’s divine alignment. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t meant.”Moon is dancing a delicate dance in “Hell’s Kitchen,” sort of playing Alicia Keys and sort of not. The show is about a few formative months in the life of Ali, a 17-year-old girl chafing under her mother’s vigilance, hooking up with a street musician and discovering a gift for piano. It is a fictionalized remix of Keys’s own childhood chapters, but it is partly Moon too — she has been with the show through developmental workshops and an Off Broadway production, and her personality and physicality, as well as her very recent adolescence, inform those of her character.“Hell’s Kitchen,” a semi-autobiographical Alicia Keys musical, was nominated for 13 Tony Awards.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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    Robert Downey Jr. to Make Broadway Debut in Ayad Akhtar Play

    The Oscar-winning actor will star as an A.I.-curious author in “McNeal,” starting performances in September at Lincoln Center Theater.Robert Downey Jr., who earlier this year won an Academy Award, will make his Broadway debut this fall in “McNeal,” a new drama by the Pulitzer-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar.The play is about a gifted novelist with a difficult family life and a potentially problematic interest in artificial intelligence. Downey will play the writer.The production is being staged by Lincoln Center Theater, one of four nonprofits with Broadway houses, at its Vivian Beaumont Theater. Previews are to begin Sept. 5, and the opening is scheduled for Sept. 30.“McNeal” will be directed by Bartlett Sher, a resident director at Lincoln Center Theater and a Tony winner for “South Pacific.”Downey, 59, has been a prolific and enormously successful film actor, overcoming significant challenges (he had a long battle with substance abuse and served time in prison on drug charges). He has built a career that has been lucrative (he starred as Iron Man in multiple Marvel movies) and acclaimed (he won the Oscar for best supporting actor for a widely praised performance as Lewis Strauss, a government official, in “Oppenheimer”).His stage experience is limited — his one Off Broadway credit, “American Passion,” opened and closed on the same date in 1983 — and he said in a statement, “It’s been 40 years since I was last on ‘the boards,’ but hopefully I’ll knock the dust off quick.”Akhtar is a playwright and a novelist with an appetite for complex and thorny subjects whose previous plays have explored finance and Islam. He has had a long relationship with Lincoln Center Theater, which first produced his Pulitzer-winning play, “Disgraced,” on its Off Off Broadway stage, and also presented his plays “The Who & The What” Off Off Broadway and “Junk” on Broadway.Akhtar is also working on a musical: He is one of the book writers for a stage adaptation of the film “La La Land” that is now in development. More

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    Netflix Takes Comedy Live With Tom Brady Roast and Katt Williams Special

    Sometimes that’s a good thing, as with John Mulaney’s variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.” But the Katt Williams special and Tom Brady roast were more uneven.On Friday night, in the premiere of his appealingly chaotic livestreaming variety show “Everybody’s in L.A.,” which runs every night this week, John Mulaney delivered a monologue about his adopted city next to a map that broke it down into a crooked jigsaw puzzle of neighborhoods.In his distinctive staccato cadence that could sell steak knives or a card trick as convincingly as the premise of a joke, he said, “One thing that unites every part of Los Angeles is that no matter where you go, there is zero sense of community.”For comedy fans, this past week felt different, because everywhere you went in Los Angeles, Netflix was there, blanketing the city in ads and shows for its Netflix Is a Joke Fest, running through May 12. It’s the biggest comedy showcase of the year (with more than 500 offerings, a 40 percent increase from the festival’s already mammoth debut event in 2022) but also something of a corporate flex. Who else could get Hannah Gadsby and Shane Gillis in the same festival or draw the talk-show titans Jon Stewart and David Letterman to host events? Or recruit Chris Rock to play the Billy Crystal role in a reading of the screenplay for “When Harry Met Sally,” with, as Rock introduced it, “an all-Black cast, like it was originally intended.” (Tracee Ellis Ross doing Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, but louder, received standing ovations from the audience and onstage participants, too.)The most newsworthy shift this year was the aggressive move into livestreaming events, following the blockbuster success of Chris Rock’s 2023 special, “Selective Outrage,” about being slapped at the Oscars. (One of that ceremony’s hosts, Wanda Sykes, returned to the place it happened, the Dolby Theater, for a festival show and began by saying this time no one would get assaulted).For the live events, Netflix picked stars with current buzz. Along with the Mulaney variety show, Katt Williams followed up his viral “Club Shay Shay” interview with a new hour, “Woke Foke,” on Saturday, and Kevin Hart, whom Williams singled out in his interview for criticism, tried to bring back the dormant genre of celebrity roast on Sunday with “The Greatest Roast of All Time,” starring Tom Brady, widely considered the GOAT of quarterbacks. (After livestreaming, the shows can be watched on Netflix, sometimes in edited form.)As the last half-century of “Saturday Night Live” has proved, there is an undeniable excitement to live comedy, an irreplaceable energy that can create a sense of event. But there are significant dangers, not the least of which is that you can’t cut the boring or unfunny parts. Netflix built its comedy empire on elevating the standup special as an art form to rival film or TV. Highlighting live comedy represents a commercial move for Netflix, spotlighting events that promise unpredictability more than refinement, mess instead of polish.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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    Late Night Cracks on Trump Being Held in Contempt of Court (Again)

    Jimmy Kimmel joked that Donald Trump will likely end up in jail “because he can’t stop talking about the case. It’s like trying to get a dog to stop licking itself.”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.11th Time’s the Charm?On Monday, the judge in Donald Trump’s criminal trial held him in contempt for the 10th time, threatening jail time if the former president continues to violate a gag order.Jimmy Kimmel said that he thinks Trump will end up in jail “because he can’t stop talking about the case. It’s like trying to get a dog to stop licking itself.”“This is Trump’s 10th violation, and we’re only on Day 12 of the trial. He’s already paid $9,000 in fines for the first nine, which doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is a lot for Eric, who now won’t be getting his allowance this week.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Again? I’ve got deja woo hoo!” — STEPHEN COLBERT“Please, you think Trump is scared of jail? That place is full of mobsters and white supremacists. He’ll walk into jail the way Norm walks into Cheers.” — SETH MEYERS“You’ve done it now, Donald. If you violate that gag order for the 11th time, the judge is going to really consider jail time. I mean, he’s strongly contemplating the possibility of consequences for your actions. Just one more chance!” — JORDAN KLEPPER“Sending the former president on a trip to Bar-A-Lago, according to Judge Merchan, is ‘the last thing I want to do,’ which is funny because it’s the first thing I would want to do. It’s like No. 1 on my list.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“And how would that even work? I mean, would they give him a cavity search? God help whoever gets that gig. They might find Vivek Ramaswamy living up there like a Keister elf.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“I’m going to go out on a limb here and say based on how much he’s complaining about conditions in the courtroom, he would hate jail.” — SETH MEYERSThe Punchiest Punchlines (All Dogs Go to Heaven Edition)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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    Eboni Booth on Winning the Drama Pulitzer for ‘Primary Trust’

    This play about a lonely, emotionally damaged man resonated with audiences returning to the theater after the pandemic.Eboni Booth dreamed up the story that became “Primary Trust” for a school assignment. She was a playwriting fellow at Juilliard, and she decided to write about a guy who works at a bank. At the time, she drank mai tais, and soon, so did her protagonist.That play, which she drafted in 2019 and which was first staged last year, won the Pulitzer Prize in Drama on Monday. The judges praised it as “a simple and elegantly crafted story of an emotionally damaged man who finds a new job, new friends and a new sense of worth, illustrating how small acts of kindness can change a person’s life and enrich an entire community.”The play, set in a fictional small town outside Rochester, N.Y., and starring William Jackson Harper (“The Good Place”), was staged Off Broadway by the nonprofit Roundabout Theater Company. The first West Coast production is scheduled for this fall at La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego.“I wrote about being hungry for connection, and then I got so much connection through the production, and that was very meaningful,” Eboni Booth said of the response to her work.Booth, 43, grew up in the Bronx and now lives in Queens; she had a previous play, “Paris,” staged in New York in 2020, and she has also worked as an actress. She talked about “Primary Trust” on Monday afternoon, shortly after learning that she had won the prestigious award.These are edited excerpts from the interview.For those of our readers who didn’t get to see it, what is “Primary Trust” about?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 Sympathizer’ Opens a Counteroffensive on Vietnam War Movies

    HBO’s series is not just a good story. It’s a sharp piece of film criticism.HBO has long defined itself in contrast to mainstream television — “It’s not TV,” as the slogan goes — but in many ways its history is one of revising and responding to the movies. “The Sopranos” updated the mafia movie (and its characters quoted, and were influenced by, films like “The Godfather”). “Game of Thrones” dirtied up the high-fantasy genre; “Deadwood” the Western; “Watchmen” the superhero story.But the network has never given us its longform version of, or rebuttal to, one Hollywood staple: the Vietnam War movie (unless one counts the alternative history aspects of “Watchmen”). Until now, with “The Sympathizer,” Park Chan-wook’s kinetic and darkly hilarious adaptation (with the co-showrunner Don McKellar) of the novel by the Vietnamese American author Viet Thanh Nguyen.The seven-episode series is many things. It’s an exploration of dual identity: The protagonist, known only as the Captain (Hoa Xuande), is a half-French, half-Vietnamese communist double agent planted as an aide to the General (Toan Le), a leader of the South Vietnamese secret police. It’s a spy thriller, a satire of colonialism and its many faces — many of them Robert Downey Jr.’s — and an exploration of the complications of love and memory.But it’s also an intense dialogue and argument with the movies. It is simultaneously its own Vietnam War movie, bold, inventive and sometimes bloody, as well as a pointed, detailed work of movie criticism.In “The Sympathizer,” which began airing in April, the movies are a continuation of war by other means. Its fixation on film begins early. Retelling his story in a postwar re-education camp — the framing device for the series — the Captain recalls watching the vicious interrogation of a communist agent on the stage of a movie theater, where the marquee sign for “Emmanuelle” is coming down, and the one for Charles Bronson’s “Death Wish” is hoisted into place. Even in Hollywood’s dream vision, beauty gives way to an American pointing an oversized gun.“Hollywood” is a metonym for America in “The Sympathizer”; it is the country’s front door, its export and its weapon. The Captain’s C.I.A. contact, Claude (Downey), lectures his “protégé” (who he is unaware is a communist) about American pop culture, expounding to him about the Isley Brothers and the Herbie Hancock score for “Death Wish.” Later, Claude tells him about the C.I.A.’s interest in keeping tabs on film directors: “As long as we can keep them within the nebulous bounds of humanism but with no actionable political ideology, they’re completely harmless.”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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    What’s on TV This Week: Met Gala and ‘Wedding Crashers’

    E! covers all the looks of the first Monday in May. And Paramount airs the classic buddy movie.For those who still haven’t cut the cord, here is a selection of cable and network TV shows, movies and specials that broadcast this week, May 6-12. Details and times are subject to change.MondayMET GALA: LIVE FROM THE RED CARPET 6 p.m. on E! Some people celebrate the Super Bowl, some celebrate Derby Day. And others celebrate the Met Gala, the benefit ball for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute on the first Monday in May. This year, the exhibition is “Sleeping Beauties: Reawakening Fashion,” and the dress code is “The Garden of Time.” Zendaya, Jennifer Lopez, Chris Hemsworth and Bad Bunny are hosts of the event, alongside, of course, Anna Wintour. Live coverage from E! will feature the host Ross Mathews interviewing attendees on the red carpet and at the Mark Hotel and the Pierre Hotel beforehand.OMG FASHUN 9 p.m. on E! Julia Fox is following up her memoir “Down the Drain,” from last year, with this sustainable fashion competition show. Teaming up with Law Roach, the mastermind stylist behind Zendaya’s incredible press looks for “Challengers,” each episode features three designers creating outfits with Fox as their muse.TuesdayWEDDING CRASHERS (2005) 10:30 p.m. on Paramount. Rom-coms are making a come back this year (see: “Anyone But You”), and I hope buddy comedies are next. Take this classic starring Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn as divorce mediators who crash weddings to drink for free and meet women. “A wink-wink, nudge-nudge Trojan horse of a story, the film pivots on two cut-rate Lotharios persuasively inhabited by Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn, who love the ladies, but really and truly, cross their cheating hearts, just want a nice girl to call wife,” Manohla Dargis wrote in her review for The New York Times.WednesdayA still from “Brandy Hellville & the Cult of Fast Fashion.”HBOBRANDY HELLVILLE & THE CULT OF FAST FASHION 8 p.m. on HBO. If you were a girl growing up in the 2000s and 2010s, you probably had a piece of Brandy Melville clothing in your closet. The brand was marketed as “one size fits all,” but that one size was … tiny. This documentary dives deeper into the company’s work environment and discriminatory practices as well as sustainability concerns over cheaply made clothing.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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    Sprinter Vans Have Become a Staple for Celebrities at the Met Gala

    Famous actors, singers, athletes and housewives are fans of the Mercedes-Benz van, which has become a staple in streets outside events like the Met Gala.When Kendall Jenner attended the 2022 Met Gala in a Prada gown with an enormous flowing skirt, getting her to the Metropolitan Museum of Art required special transportation. A limousine would not do, nor would an SUV — walking in the dress was a challenge; sitting, impossible. The solution: Ms. Jenner would be driven, standing, in a Mercedes-Benz Sprinter van.On the way to the event, as a way to relieve her anxiety about running late, Ms. Jenner relieved herself in an ice bucket while standing in the van. “Best decision I ever made,” she said of that moment in an episode of “The Kardashians” on Hulu.The Sprinter van, a towering box on wheels with nearly six-and-a-half feet of head room, is a direct descendant of the earliest motorized caravans developed by Karl Benz in 1896. (Some 30 years later, he and Gottlieb Daimler founded the Mercedes-Benz company.) The Sprinter, first released in Europe in 1995, started being sold domestically in 2010. Last year, Mercedes-Benz unveiled an electric version.The van — which can be used to transport up to 15 passengers (or cargo) — is appreciated by automotive enthusiasts for its build quality, reliability and versatility, as well as for the thrust and longevity of the diesel engine in most versions.But other people have come to recognize the Sprinter for different reasons, among them its proximity to celebrities. The van has become a preferred mode of transportation for actors, singers, athletes and “Real Housewives,” and is now a staple in streets outside star-studded events like the Oscars and the Met Gala.Sprinter vans, like the one behind Amber Valletta, a model and actress, have become a staple in streets outside red carpet events. Neil Rasmus/BFAWe 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