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      ‘Ithaka’ Review: In Julian Assange They Trust

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      A frustrating new advocacy documentary about the WikiLeaks founder, with appearances by his father and wife, loses its footing on weak assertions and reporting.Julian Assange’s legal travails began in 2010, when Swedish prosecutors ordered his detention on suspicion of rape and sexual coercion. To avoid being extradited to Stockholm, Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, jumped bail and took refuge in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London; today he’s in London’s Belmarsh Prison, fighting extradition to the United States on 17 counts of violating the Espionage Act. Yet “Ithaka,” a frustrating advocacy documentary directed by Ben Lawrence and produced by Assange’s brother Gabriel Shipton, argues that Assange’s most crucial trial is in the court of public opinion.The documentary insists that the computer hacker, who’s accused of publishing classified government documents, is the victim of a smear campaign. What exactly those smears are, the film declines to specify or debunk. On your own, you may recall that viral stories about Assange have ranged from criminal to embarrassing — like when Ecuador said its increasingly unwelcome guest needed to tidy up after his cat.Free speech advocates looking to hear a strong argument defending Assange against those espionage charges will not find one here — only vague calls to protect the First Amendment. We’re told the case is unjust but never told why, or even what exactly the case is. Instead, the documentary repeats three monotonous points: Journalists lie. Regardless, Assange is a journalist who deserves protection. Also, his family misses him a heck of a lot.The film’s weak assertions hurt more than they help. Even those inclined to support Assange — like those who agree that releasing footage of a U.S. helicopter attack on unarmed Iraqi civilians is a moral good — will probably come to the documentary knowing enough to be rankled when it seeks to combat news media deception with evasions, half-truths and speculative accusations (the very weapons with which it suggests that Assange has been attacked).A sampler platter of its flimsy reporting: While Stella Moris, Assange’s wife and a member of his legal team, maintains that her husband was never charged with sexual assault, both she and Lawrence neglect to add that the statute of limitations on such a charge had expired during his seven-year embassy stay. Moris also shows the faces of several men in a parked van and declares them government assassins. Lawrence accepts this with no follow-up questions. By the time “Ithaka” makes the claim that WikiLeaks published only redacted versions of sensitive documents — yes, but only after earlier unredacted postings were met with significant outrage — the continual thumbing of its nose to the facts may make you want to issue a few unredacted words of your own.The doc is on stronger footing when it tracks the efforts of Moris and her father-in-law, John Shipton, to get their loved one home. With Assange unavailable, Shipton takes center stage as his onscreen avatar. (Father and son, Moris tells us, are “very similar.”) Bashful and soft-spoken when the film begins, Shipton strikes later as stubborn, secretive and messianic, likening his son to everything from Prometheus to a pod of hunted whales. Shipton is the kind of complex and contradictory figure who would have been fascinating under the lens of a filmmaker actually interested in unbiased journalism — one willing to press him on why he’s re-emerged in his son’s life after several decades of absence. Here, however, Shipton waves off any personal questions about their relationship as “an invasion of privacy.”IthakaNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 46 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV’ Review: Art Onscreen

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      A new documentary follows the ceaseless innovations of a man who made art out of television sets and found inspiration in disruption.Nam June Paik died in 2006, one year before the first iPhone was released. Now that hand-held glowing screens have become as dominant as television once was, one misses that influential artist’s subversive spirit. But it’s on ample display in Amanda Kim’s new film “Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TV,” which shows how Paik forged novel avenues of expression and communication in the televisual era.Born into privilege in Korea in 1932, during the Japanese occupation, Paik studied unhappily to be a composer in Germany until he was electrified by a bold and divisive John Cage performance in 1957. Over the next 10 years, he was off like a rocket: staging outré musical performances with the cellist Charlotte Moorman, joining the raucous Fluxus avant-garde collective in New York, building a robot and pioneering the use of TV sets in gallery art.Paik found many ways to mess with the banal monitors, which were stacked, worn, and, famously, plunked opposite a contemplating Buddha. But an art documentary like Kim’s also questions first principles generally, to underline the beauty and power built into objects around us. Beyond eliciting truly lovely halos of eerie color from video, Paik sought to democratize technology through innovations in video production and live global broadcast. (Paik’s aphoristic writings are read in voice-over by the actor Steven Yeun.)Despite the interviews with graying contemporaries that bubble up in the stew of imagery, the film’s sense of art history is somewhat blinkered by lack of context. But Paik is undeniable, creating despite lean times (and slowing after a 1996 stroke). His dragging of a violin on a string — shown in a recurring performance — evokes an almost mystical dedication to disruption.Nam June Paik: Moon Is the Oldest TVNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 47 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘A Good Person’ Review: Zach Braff’s New Chapter

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      The filmmaker behind “Garden State” has created a fully drawn female character in Florence Pugh’s grieving addict. But this recovery drama often has too heavy a hand.An interesting litmus test of the shift in our zeitgeist’s consideration of female characters — or of female agency at large — exists in the space between the release of Zach Braff’s “Garden State” in 2004 and the reconstituted consensus around the film in the next decade.The movie remains a charming piece of mid-aughts indie quirkism, but over the years its character Sam, played by Natalie Portman, became emblematic of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope: a hollow tool, conjured by purportedly sensitive male indie fantasies, to help the protagonist on his journey toward self-actualization. That isn’t the case with “A Good Person,” Braff’s latest film. Its strongest quality, in fact, is how fully embodied and how human Florence Pugh is as the grieving Allison, a woman who is undone by a car accident that kills her sister- and brother-in-law-to-be.Yet, there’s another storytelling mechanism Braff has repurposed and coarsely dialed up. Like “Garden State,” in which Andrew (Braff, who wrote and directed the film) has been medicated and stuck his entire life after being involved in the accident that killed his mother, “A Good Person” sees Allison suffocated by guilt and desperately seeking to escape herself through opioids.Soon, she falls into addiction, a downward spiral the film handles quickly. After Allison hits rock bottom, she goes to an A.A. meeting, where she bumps into Daniel (Morgan Freeman), whose son she had planned to marry and whose daughter died in the crash. Daniel, a recovering alcoholic whose sobriety is being tested as he struggles to raise his granddaughter on his own, has always blamed Allison, who was driving the car, for the crash. The unlikely bond Pugh and Freeman create becomes the beating heart of the film, and there is rich emotion in Allison and Daniel’s shared struggles as they sketch the contours of their pain to each other.Allison’s sparkling life before and her descent after the accident are written with such a heavy hand and confused tone, however, that much of the film reads as a crassly manufactured setup for the arc of redemption and healing that follows. A climactic moment at a party involving Allison’s and Daniel’s sobriety is so bizarre and overwrought, you might find yourself shocked to learn it’s not a dream sequence.Braff is going for something broader than indie naturalism, so perhaps the film calls for less subtle brushstrokes. But the result is something that rings with far less thoughtfulness than he’s clearly capable of (particularly in light of the opioid crisis that the film mentions), despite Pugh’s remarkable attempts to ground the story.This isn’t to say that “A Good Person” is disingenuous: Braff wrote the script while wrestling with the deaths of several loved ones in the last few years. But the film would do better understanding that its core sufferings, of mourning and of self-blame, are dramatic enough. Instead it gets lost in raising the stakes to center a big-hearted tale of recovery. The real story is in the quiet moments, where the silence of grief hangs palpably between Allison and Daniel, ever-present and consuming.A Good PersonRated R for drug abuse, language throughout, and some sexual references. Running time: 2 hours 9 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?’ Review: What Goes Up

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      The rise and fall of a classic-rock band is chronicled (shakily) in this documentary.What happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears, judging by this spurious, somewhat cranky documentary by John Scheinfeld, is that the band faced the unforeseen consequences of its own bad decisions.In 1970, Blood, Sweat & Tears, the enormously popular nine-piece jazz-rock group, undertook a tour of Yugoslavia, Romania and Poland under the aegis of the U.S. State Department, inadvertently outraging the progressive, college-age fans whose enthusiasm had made the group such a stratospheric counterculture success. To make matters worse, upon their return, the members of the band — who had headlined Woodstock and spoken out against the war in Vietnam — now decried communism as “scary,” professing gratitude for freedoms they’d previously taken for granted — quite the about-face. As David Felton wrote acidly in a 1970 issue of Rolling Stone, it sure sounded like “the State Department got its money’s worth.”The backlash was swift and, the documentary argues, effectively career-ending. “I felt canceled,” Steve Katz, the band’s guitarist, confesses dolefully, and indeed the movie is a pharisaical effort to paint the musicians as victims of what we now call cancel culture: misunderstood, unreasonably maligned and never afforded a chance to explain themselves, until now. But like many laments of the self-identified canceled, what’s being complained about is really just a form of accountability — of having to stand by and answer for actions they evidently didn’t think much about. (“We were just musicians, man,” is the lead singer David Clayton-Thomas’s lame justification.) The film frames them as having been somehow embroiled in a political situation, rather than actively, knowingly engaged in it — and its attempts to remain apolitical and focus on the music are as naïve as the band’s.What the Hell Happened to Blood, Sweat & Tears?Not rated. Running time: 1 hour 52 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Lost King’ Review: A Royal Obsession

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      Sally Hawkins lights a fire under this droll dramedy about the search for the final resting place of Richard III.Sally Hawkins is a gift, to directors and audiences alike. When she smiles, it’s a face-splitting beam, so contagious that we would likely love her even if she were playing a murderer. And while her character in “The Lost King” is firmly tethered to a dead man, she didn’t kill him: She’s trying to dig him up.As Philippa Langley, the single mother from Edinburgh who, in 2012, spearheaded the successful search for the grave of King Richard III, Hawkins lends wings to this otherwise languid dramatic comedy. In a transformative moment, Philippa attends a production of Shakespeare’s “Richard III” and becomes mesmerized by the handsome actor playing the King (Harry Lloyd). This could easily have read as romantic attraction; but as Zac Nicholson’s camera zooms in on Hawkins’s wonderfully unguarded features, we see instead the stirring of a mission, one that will upend her life and alter history: to find Richard’s grave and disprove his reputation as a hunchbacked nephew-killer and unworthy usurper.That’s a tall order for a dissatisfied woman who suffers from chronic illness and whose ex-husband (played by Steve Coogan, who wrote the screenplay with Jeff Pope) is only marginally more tolerant than her co-workers. Yet Philippa, small and sensitive and herself a little lost, feels an affinity with the maligned monarch, gobbling up history books and finding common cause with the Richard III Society, whose members have long wondered if Richard’s twisted mind and body were fictions concocted by the Tudors and corroborated by Shakespeare. Let’s find out!Coogan and Pope, working once again with the director Stephen Frears (the alliance that brought us the unexpectedly moving “Philomena” in 2013), have shaped Philippa’s story into an easily digestible underdog tale. Vulnerable yet adamant, Philippa bulldozes bureaucrats and scientists into supporting her plan to excavate the parking lot where she believes the King is buried. She’s an immovable force, a battering ram of niceness, and Frears (now 81, and with a stunningly varied back catalog) is beguiled by the wonder of her tenacity and intuition. Her occasional chats with Richard’s ghost might be a sugar cube too far; but the movie’s sweetness is cut with enough acid — including subversive digs at academic pomposity and rampant sexism — that it never becomes cloying.Though raising serious questions about the way history is written, and by whom, “The Lost King” isn’t a polemic, or even a biopic. It’s a quietly droll detective story, a warm portrait of a woman who lost her health and found her purpose, exhuming her self-respect along with Richard’s bones. Those quibbling about factual liberties may be missing the point: This is a movie that’s less about rehabilitating a monarch than reinvigorating a life.The Lost KingRated PG-13 for a few cheeky words. Running time: 1 hour 48 minutes. In theaters. More

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      ‘The Five Devils’ Review: The Scent of the Past

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      Part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, the uncanny second feature by Léa Mysius follows a young girl with a magical sense of smell.Vicky (Sally Dramé), the creepy kid at the center of “The Five Devils,” has a strange power: her sense of smell is so strong, she can track her mother, Joanne (Adèle Exarchopoulous), from dozens of yards away with her eyes closed; can detect the scent of chlorinated swimming-pool water and spilled coffee in the pages of an old journal. Smell is perhaps the most opaque of the five human senses; the one that’s hardest to put into words. No wonder it’s key to the uncanny intrigues of the film, part queer love story, part supernatural psychodrama, by the French director Léa Mysius.Vicky literally sniffs out trouble with the arrival of her enigmatic aunt, Julia (Swala Emati) — the sister of her father, Jimmy (Moustapaha Mbengue), and the local pariah. Joanne seems particularly affected; she implores Jimmy to send Julia away. A decade prior, around the time Vicky was born, Julia was exiled after an episode of pyromania. Her actions left Joanne’s friend, Nadine (Daphné Patakia), permanently disfigured.As the sexual tension between Joanne and Julia become increasingly apparent, Vicky’s abilities take on a new dimension. Julia’s scent causes Vicky to experience visions of the past, and in woozy flashbacks, we see the origins of her family history alongside her: the unspoken racism and homophobia that swirls around Julia, a skilled gymnast who seems to be blamed for Joanne’s sexual orientation.At the same time Vicky, who is multiracial, is aggressively bullied by her provincial peers. Like her aunt, she’s a modern-day witch, even spending her free time concocting perfumes out of dead crows.The film cleverly relies on color, physicality and elemental symbolism to express these tensions: the repressed Joanne swims daily in freezing waters; the untouchable Julia lights things aflame. The story’s various interpersonal frictions are rarely detailed in the dialogue — a distance that resonates with Vicky’s peculiar coming-of-age. She doesn’t know what the adults are going through, but she intuits how they feel.The Five DevilsNot rated. In French, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 43 minutes. In theaters. More

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      John Wick Sure Has a Lot of Friends for a Lone Assassin

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      How does a taciturn solo killer have so many pals? The films’ creators can’t really explain, but each character has a raison d’être in this world.Over a run of three stunt-laden films, John Wick has dispatched his enemies with rifles, pistols, swords and knives, as well as an assortment of things that just happen to be nearby. On one occasion, he took out several foes by slamming into them with his ’69 Ford Mustang; on another, he beat a man to death with a library book. And then there was that time Wick slaughtered three men in a bar with a pencil, a feat that his fellow killers can’t seem to stop talking about. Wherever Wick goes, folks die.So why does John Wick, that most lethal of assassins, have so many friends?In a clear break from the tradition of cinematic lone-wolf assassins with few if any pals — Clint Eastwood as the Man With No Name; Chow Yun-fat in a series of John Woo films — Wick seems to have dozens. Everybody knows him, from beat cops and mechanics to club bouncers and hotel concierges.“Wick has so many friends in this world because, at the end of the day, he’s inherently a good man,” the screenwriter Michael Finch explained. “And he’s Keanu, so it’s very hard to dislike him.”That would be Keanu Reeves, who has played the franchise’s titular hero since the first Wick film in 2014. Now considered one of the greatest action films ever made, “John Wick” started a nearly $600 million franchise that has been praised for its imaginatively over-the-top action sequences. And over the years, Wick’s friend circle has only grown.“John Wick: Chapter 4,” the latest installment of the series directed by Chad Stahelski, premieres Friday, and features even more of Wick’s chums. The franchise has always drawn top talent for its supporting cast, like Halle Berry, Laurence Fishburne and Willem Dafoe, and this sequel is no different. Joining this time around are the martial arts film veterans Hiroyuki Sanada (“The Last Samurai,” “Ring”), playing a close friend from Wick’s distant past, and Donnie Yen (“Hero,” the “Ip Man” series), starring as a blind swordsman enlisted to kill Wick.John Wick’s universe includes Donnie Yen, center, as a blind swordsman and Scott Adkins as Killa.Murray Close/Lionsgate“We spent three movies showing how lethal John is,” the producer Basil Iwanyk said. “So we thought to ourselves, we’ve got to give him a nemesis that you believe he can’t beat.”For newcomers to the franchise, the setup is simple: Wick is a former assassin who has managed to get out of the business, only to be drawn back in by the rash actions of one very stupid guy who kills his dog, the last gift from his recently deceased wife, and steals his car. Wick comes out of retirement to murder the man, and thus our story, and the franchise, begins.Before long, we meet an ever-growing series of pals (present and former), acquaintances and longtime associates. In the first minutes of the original film, we meet Marcus, an old friend played by Dafoe. Not long after, a police officer, Jimmy (Thomas Sadoski), stops by because Wick’s neighbors are complaining that he’s been murdering people too loudly. “Evenin,’ John,” Jimmy greets him. Soon after, yet another friend, Charlie (David Patrick Kelly), comes to cart away all the corpses and mop up the blood. “Good to see you, John,” he says, doffing his cap.On a purely practical level, Wick’s many friends exist to infuse some humanity into this otherwise fearsome killer of men. “The action sequences are phenomenal,” said Caitlin G. Watt, the co-editor of “The Worlds of John Wick: The Year’s Work at the Continental Hotel,” an ambitious collection of academic essays. “But if you don’t like John Wick or sympathize with him, the movies don’t work.”The plethora of friends also provides a nod to the long and harrowing career Wick had before we first met him, including the legendary “impossible task” that allowed Wick to retire and burnished his reputation as the fearsome Baba Yaga. “Chad and Keanu created a character whose life you simply drop into,” Finch said. “You don’t know anything about what happened. We still don’t know what the impossible task was.”It’s largely through these friends that we learn about the very complex world Wick inhabits: its communication systems, rules of etiquette, international chain of deluxe hotels (the Continental, preferred lodging for the world’s most discriminating assassins), and currency. You certainly aren’t going to learn much about this through our taciturn hero, whose most impactful lines generally run only a few syllables long: “I’m going to need a gun,” for instance, or “Yeah.”To be fair, nobody wants a chatty Wick. “These action films about mythological, larger-than-life characters die when you ask your lead to be expositional,” Finch said.Watt, who has written about the franchise’s ties to Russian folklore, tales of knights in exile and the idea of the “monstrous hero,” agreed. “You don’t go to John Wick for the dialogue,” she said, adding that no one expects it “to be like a Noël Coward play. But the dialogue does a lot of work in establishing these characters, their relationships and this very strange world where all of this takes place.”As for just how many true friends Wick has: “I think there are Continentals in most major cities, so there are probably roads that lead to John wherever he goes,” the producer Erica Lee said. “I don’t think he’s the guy who has a surprise 60th birthday and there’s a room full of people. But he does have a select handful of trusted people he can call out to.”Halle Berry played — what else? — a former friend in “John Wick 3.”LionsgateBeginning with the first film, the creators pulled from their own circle of friends to cast Wick’s. Stahelski met Kelly when both were working on “The Crow,” the 1994 superhero film. “I was a new stunt guy and he was in the cast, and he took time to talk to me,” Stahelski said. “So when I needed a Charlie, he was in my head.” A similar thing happened with Randall Duk Kim, the doctor who patches up Wick’s wounds — Stahelski had worked with him on “The Matrix Reloaded.”The franchise’s Manhattan setting also played a role in casting. “We were so below the radar, just an independent movie that didn’t even have distribution,” Iwanyk said of the first film. “But we shot in New York City, and there are so many actors there. That’s how we got John Leguizamo, Bridget Moynahan, Lance Reddick,” who died March 17 at age 60 but played Charon, concierge of the New York Continental, owned by Winston (Ian McShane), in all four chapters.When the characters — and the film — hit, the creators kept many of them on for the sequels. Others soon followed. “When we were talking about ‘2,’ someone said, wouldn’t it be cool if we got Laurence Fishburne, so it would be like Neo and Morpheus?” Lee said of the actor who plays the Bowery King in three of the installments. Berry, who played Sofia Al-Azwar in “3,” asked Stahelski for a part before a script was even written.In this latest installment, friendship again plays a major role. Old friends return to protect Wick, or hunt him.But just how, when and why Wick befriended all of these people is still largely a mystery, even to the creators. For the most part, histories for the characters, even for Wick himself, were created on the fly, if at all. “We never wanted to get into John’s back story,” Iwanyk said. “You know these people have a shared experience with John, and you know it was something intense and often violent, but you don’t know what it is specifically.”Even so, the stories wouldn’t work without these characters. A John Wick movie sans friends? “I wouldn’t know how to tell that story,” Finch said. “There would not be a successful franchise without a Winston, without a Charon, without a Bowery King.”John Wick’s Friend CircleAnjelica Huston as what passes for a maternal presence in John Wick’s world.Niko Tavernise/LionsgateBeing friends with John Wick isn’t easy. Over the years, people who have helped out Wick have been sliced seven times with a sword (Laurence Fishburne); smothered and shot in the head (Clarke Peters); tortured, then killed (Willem Dafoe); and asked to resign from their places of business (Ian McShane). There are friends whom Wick has shot at (Claudia Gerini), and others who have fired on Wick (McShane, Halle Berry). There are still others who want to be pals with Wick (Shamier Anderson, Mark Dacascos), but they’ve been hired to assassinate him, which tends to sour things in Wickworld, but often not for long.With all the bullets flying, who can keep track? Here’s a quick primer to a handful of Wick’s friends.WINSTON (IAN MCSHANE) He is the owner of the New York Continental, a swanky hotel for assassins. The establishment’s primary rule: absolutely no killing on the premises. When Wick does, it puts him at odds with Winston and the High Table, the shadowy crime council that oversees the world’s Continentals. “Winston is empathetic toward John’s quest, but I think he’s always trying to guide him toward his better instincts and away from danger,” the screenwriter Shay Hatten said.CHARON (LANCE REDDICK) The trusty, resourceful concierge of the New York Continental, Charon gets arms and ammo for Wick, fights alongside him and even breaks hotel rules by taking care of his (second) dog when the assassin is away. Even so, Charon doesn’t seem all that broken up when Winston shoots Wick in the chest at the end of the third installment. “Charon is an inherently decent man,” Finch said. “But even the nicest guy in the series has an edge to him.”THE DOCTOR (RANDALL DUK KIM) Called upon to patch up Wick’s wounds, the Doctor takes a bullet for Wick — two, in fact, from Wick’s own gun, to cover up the fact that he is helping Wick against the direct rules of the High Table. “We excuse a lot of what John does because people like the Doctor, who are inherently OK and decent, seem to respond positively to him,” Finch said.THE DIRECTOR (ANJELICA HUSTON) The leader of the Ruska Roma, another crime organization, the Director was a maternal figure to the orphan Wick. For helping him escape punishment in “3,” the Director’s hands are ritually skewered by the High Table. “I wouldn’t call them friends, at this point,” Lee said. “I think she’s probably annoyed at John.”THE BOWERY KING (LAURENCE FISHBURNE) As the self-anointed sovereign over a network of seeming panhandlers and vagrants who act as his eyes and ears, the Bowery King is an invaluable source of intel for Wick, as well as a major supplier for Wick’s other needs. “The Bowery King is an anarchist,” Lee said. “So when John had to go off grid, he was there to help him get guns, supplies and bulletproof suits.” More

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      ‘Camelot,’ Beloved but Befuddling, Gets the Aaron Sorkin Treatment

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      “Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, an eagerly anticipated new musical from the makers of “My Fair Lady.” But happily-ever-aftering took a while.Out-of-town, while trying to trim the overlong production, one writer was hospitalized with an ulcer, and the director collapsed of a heart attack. In New York, despite starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so following a televised segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is remembered as one of the last of Broadway’s Golden Age shows, but its traditional narrative — Arthurian legend with all of its romance, politics, swordplay and sorcery — has never quite clicked.“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” the New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. That assessment has persisted. “It has one of the great scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, “but the plot starts to go haywire.”On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is scheduled to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is familiar to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing,” and he won an Oscar for writing the movie “The Social Network.” He is also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a hit film, and whose most recent Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a critical and commercial success.Clockwise from top left: Aaron Sorkin, Phillipa Soo, Jordan Donica and Andrew Burnap.But musicals have not been part of his repertoire, until now. He earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly overstated words, is “the first time I’m putting it to use.” (He tried writing a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)This rewritten “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady”) as Lancelot, is now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a large production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical — even Lerner and Loewe reworked it post-opening, and others have tried, too — but his deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from T.H. White’s fantasy novel, “The Once and Future King,” has made the production one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theater mavens eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.“People think the show is about a love triangle, which of course it is,” said Alan Paul, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company and director of his own production of “Camelot” a few years back, “but I really think it’s about the birth of democracy, and when you look back at ‘The West Wing,’ which is one of my favorite shows, that is a TV show that believes government can work for the people.”‘You’re supposed to be dead.’Just getting to this point is an unexpected relief for Sorkin.In November, two months before rehearsals were set to begin, he woke in the middle of the night and noticed that, while walking to the kitchen, he was crashing into walls and corners. He thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the orange juice he was carrying to his home office kept spilling.Sorkin called his doctor, who told him to come in immediately; his blood pressure was so high, Sorkin said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” The diagnosis: Sorkin, 61, had had a stroke.For about a month afterward, he was slurring words. He had trouble typing; he was discouraged from flying for a few weeks; and until recently, he couldn’t sign his name (he has just discovered, thanks to “Camelot” autograph seekers, that that’s improving). Those issues are now behind him, and the main lingering effect is that he still can’t really taste food.“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” he said during one of several interviews for this article. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”After the stroke, he quit cold turkey, cleaned up his diet and started working out twice a day. And, he said, “I take a lot of medicine. You can hear the pills rattling around in me.”“If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault,” Sorkin said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesSorkin told me about the stroke almost in passing, when we were having a get-acquainted cup of tea in a hotel lobby (he loves writing in hotels) earlier this year. Trying to understand his creative process, I asked whether he prefers to write longhand or on a device. That’s when he said writing by hand had become difficult.At first he told me about his stroke only off the record; we agreed we’d revisit the subject the next time we met, so he could think through the implications of going public. By then, he had decided he was ready to describe what he had been through, in the hopes that his experience might be a cautionary tale. “If it’ll get one person to stop smoking,” he said, “then it’ll be helpful.”He is aware how lucky he is to have recovered, and to be able to continue to do the work he loves. “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again,” he said, “and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”Now he’s commuting between Los Angeles, where he lives, and New York, where he’s trimming the script, offering pointers to actors, refining word choices that don’t strike him quite right. “Let me make this very, very clear,” he said. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”‘Now with no magic!’For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”Four years ago, Lincoln Center Theater, which is a nonprofit, staged a fund-raising concert performance of the show, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Arthur. It went so well that the creative team began talking about a full-scale production.“The music is so good, and it’s incredibly fun, and I don’t know of any other pieces set in the Middle Ages with knights,” said Bartlett Sher, a veteran of Golden Age revivals (“South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady”) who directed the concert and is now directing this revival. “I realized how extraordinary the score was,” he said, “and how complicated the experience of the book was.”Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, center, starred in the 1960 production of “Camelot.”Pictorial Press Ltd / Alamy Stock PhotoSher was debriefing with Miranda when Sorkin’s name came up. “I knew Sorkin was a fan of ‘Camelot,’ because he quotes it in ‘The West Wing’,” said Miranda, who grew up hearing songs from the musical, a favorite of his mother’s, and memorized them while a passenger in her car.Sher and Sorkin already knew each other because they had collaborated on “Mockingbird,” and they were eager to work together again.“You would think we would have sat and talked for hours about the problems we had with the existing book, or what we were hoping for, but we didn’t,” Sorkin said. “I just got to work.”He made one key early decision that has guided his approach to the show: no supernatural elements. That means Merlyn, who in the original is a magician who can remember the future and can turn Arthur into a hawk, is now a wise tutor; Morgan Le Fey, who in the original can build invisible walls, is now a scientist; and the nymph Nimue is gone. Even Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone origin story is questioned.“It wasn’t that I don’t like magic — I do,” Sorkin said. “Nor were there commercial reasons — no producer wants to put on a marquee, ‘Now With No Magic!’ It was because I feel that this story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real. If a problem can be solved by waving a magic wand, it doesn’t feel like much of a problem.”‘Musicals can get tangled with.’“Camelot,” like many older musicals, has its complications for a modern audience. “From a contemporary perspective, it’s very problematic,” said Stacy Wolf, director of the music theater program at Princeton University. “The musical is about heterosexual adultery ruining a visionary government, and the woman is ultimately blamed for it.”Nonetheless, Wolf is eager to see the revival. “The music that Lerner and Loewe wrote is just incredible,” she said, “and in the same way that Shakespeare gets tangled with, and operas get tangled with, musicals can get tangled with.”Sorkin quickly realized that two songs, in particular, posed problems: the sexist-sounding “How to Handle a Woman” and the classist-sounding “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”“When I first started writing it, I thought, there’s an easy way to solve this: Don’t sing the songs,” Sorkin said.But Sher asked Sorkin to reconsider, given fan fondness for the score. “There’s a reason we see ‘Camelot’,” Sorkin acknowledged, “and the reason isn’t me.”So he came up with an alternative solution: humor. The songs are back, preceded by dialogue in which Guenevere preemptively defuses their sting with Sorkin-esque wit.“When I joined, ‘How to a Handle a Woman’ wasn’t there in the script, but then one day it was,” Soo said. “But there was also a beautifully written scene — and this is another reason why Aaron Sorkin is brilliant at what he does — that explores the song in a new way.”The revival has been extensively nurtured — there were four developmental workshops along the way, and Sorkin estimates that he has written about 10 drafts of the script. Lancelot “went from being a buffoon, like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to a three-dimensional person.” Arthur struggles to define his feelings for Guenevere, whom he marries as part of a peace treaty. And Guenevere is now a strategic helpmate, periodically outthinking her husband.“The ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country,” said Donica, left foreground, who plays Lancelot.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There have been rewrites at each stage of workshop, and there are even more rewrites still going on,” said the actor Dakin Matthews, who is playing Merlyn and another character.A case study: Morgan Le Fey, who in the original is a sorceress with a sweet tooth, and a threat to Arthur’s reign. At first, Sorkin simply cut the character — as Lerner had done for some post-Broadway productions — but, Sorkin said, “she found her way in, and she got better.”In an early workshop, the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in “Rent”), read the role, when Le Fey was little more than a spurned ex-girlfriend. “She, in a very nice but direct way, said I could do better,” Sorkin said. “She was right.”He made Le Fey a scientist, an unmarried mother, and, for a time, an opium addict. (Sorkin has been clean for 23 years after battling his own addictions.) Now she makes and sells brandy. “People coming in and auditioning — they were just leaning into being high on opium, and it wasn’t working,” Sorkin said.Marilee Talkington, who plays Le Fey, has embraced the character’s evolution.“The old version of ‘Camelot’ felt distant, but also fun and entertaining,” she said. “This version is inviting the audience to ask themselves who they are, what they want, and where there’s hope.”How much “West Wing” is there in “Camelot”? Sorkin said the screenwriting device for which he is most famous — the so-called walk and talk, in which characters converse while in motion, is a.) “probably exaggerated” and b.) a screen technique that “has no implications for the stage.” Having said that: Arthur has his best ideas while pacing.One trick Sorkin did transfer from filmdom: He intercut three scenes together, as in a movie, held together with scoring, and challenged Sher to figure out the staging. “Give Bart something like that,” Sorkin said, “and he’s a happy guy.”And there are lines that can clearly be heard as allusions to our contemporary challenges.“All of his films are about game-changers, and ‘Camelot’ is no different, because Arthur is a game-changer,” said Donica, the actor playing Lancelot. “And the ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country.”‘I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it.’I sat down with Sorkin the morning after the first preview performance, and he was obviously pleased. It struck me that this was the first time he had seemed happy with his work. “That’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s the most positive I’ve been during the process. I feel ashamed I didn’t have more confidence in everybody.”There was still work to be done over the five-week preview period — the show was running too long (“I’m sure I’ll be called upon to make some cuts, and I’m not looking forward to that”), and Sorkin was still wrestling with various bits of language (Would it be exciting or distracting if he changed an “or” to a “like,” with the effect of implying that Guenevere might be agnostic?).But until that first performance before an audience, Sorkin had repeatedly fretted about what might go wrong, remembering that at one point he told a group of young librettists, “If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault.”I found it hard to understand how someone as successful as Aaron Sorkin could be so worried, so I asked him about it.“I have had some success, and I’ve also had plenty of experience feeling anxiety about what I’m doing,” he said. “Am I going to have an idea? Am I going to be able to write this?”One startling example: “I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”Is that kind of worrying a liability, or a strength, for an artist like Sorkin? “I hope it wasn’t a waste,” he said. “And I do think to myself, as I try to relax myself a little bit, I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it. That it’s the worrying that’s driving me to do it.”Sorkin, who has already begun having meetings about possible next musicals, even while dreaming up a Jan. 6 movie he is contemplating writing and directing, said he has come to see “Camelot” as a narrative about narrative.“Ultimately, the show is a valentine to storytelling,” he said.“I like that Arthur thinks if we can just keep telling these stories, then people will be inspired and they’ll believe that we do have greatness in our grasp, and that you have to keep trying,” he added. “The greatest delivery system for an idea ever invented is a story.” More