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Mark Blum, an Obie Award-winning New York stage and screen actor whose roles ranged from highly flawed husbands to overconfident blowhards, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 69.The actor Lee Wilkof, a close family friend, said the cause was complications of the coronavirus. Mr. Blum also had asthma.Mr. Blum was an omnipresent figure in the Off Broadway world for decades, but his biggest moment in the spotlight came in 1989 after he played a time-traveling 20th-century playwright who befriends Gustav Mahler, in the Playwrights Horizons production of Albert Innaurato’s “Gus and Al.”Frank Rich, in his review in The New York Times, referred to Mr. Blum’s “appealing, weary-eyed portrayal” and saw Al’s self-martyrdom as a form of “rueful hypersensitivity to the modern world.”At the Obie ceremony, Mr. Blum was given one of 13 uncategorized Off Broadway performance awards for that season. His fellow winners included Nancy Marchand and Fyvush Finkel.He had a notable Broadway career as well, appearing in nine productions over three and a half decades. He made his Broadway debut as a particularly versatile theater professional — playing an unnamed Venetian (one of four), understudying two roles and acting as assistant stage manager in “The Merchant” (1977), set in 16th-century Venice and inspired by a certain Shakespearean classic.Other Broadway roles included Eddie, the young main character’s recently widowed and debt-ridden father, in Neil Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” (1991), with Irene Worth; Spalding Gray’s campaign manager in “Gore Vidal’s The Best Man” (2000), a role he reprised as a replacement in the 2012 revival; Leo Herman, a.k.a. Chuckles the Chipmunk, the detestable host of a children’s television show, in “A Thousand Clowns” (2001); and Juror No. 1, the reasonable foreman, in “Twelve Angry Men” (2004). More

In “Uncorked,” now streaming on Netflix, the father-son drama gets a refreshing upgrade. Elijah (Mamoudou Athie), a scattered but well-meaning young adult, has finally figured out his dream: to become a master sommelier, a designation reserved for the best wine stewards in the world. The only problem is that his father, Louis (Courtney B. Vance), wants him to focus on learning how to run their family’s barbecue joint in Memphis.At first Elijah tries to do both. He prepares for the master exam, which is administered once a year, by enrolling in sommelier school while attending to his shifts at the barbecue spot. But that becomes increasingly challenging as his course — which he spent his entire savings on — demands more of his time, and his money. Eljah’s efforts are supported and encouraged by everyone except his father, who struggles to accept that his son can and wants to do his own thing. “I just hope … that you follow through,” Louis says at dinner when Elijah announces his intentions. “You get an idea about something but when it comes time to do it … ” The implications of the unfinished sentiment hang in the air and haunt Elijah for the rest of the film.[embedded content]“Uncorked,” which is the feature directorial debut of the “Insecure” showrunner Prentice Penny, succeeds when it focuses on Elijah’s relationship with his family. In moments where they gather, the writing and cast shine in equal measure. “I went to a mixer about trying to become a sommelier,” Elijah says during one scene at the dinner table. “You trying to become an African?” his cousin, JT (Bernard David Jones) responds, confused. The characters tenderly volley for a bit before Elijah’s mother, Sylvia (Niecy Nash), calls for order. Away from the family unit, however, the film struggles a bit more. Elijah’s girlfriend, Tanya (Sasha Compere), remains so two-dimensional that her existence is more of a distraction; and a trip Elijah takes to Paris halfway through the film feels like little more than an obvious plot device.Nonetheless, “Uncorked” joins a growing body of work — cinematic and otherwise — that upends stereotypes about black people around the world. Elijah and his father’s lives are not plagued by dramatic circumstances. Their problems with each other have to do with their opposing dreams, differing communication styles and the projecting that can happen between parent and child. And while the characters interact against the backdrop of varying degrees of racism and socioeconomic stressors, they are not defined by them. In other words, they are ordinary but no less noteworthy.UncorkedNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 44 minutes. More

CLASSICAL MUSICExperimental and LuminousThe saxophonist and composer Roscoe Mitchell is best known as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. But even when operating outside that pan-stylistic group, his approach contains multitudes. When I reviewed Mitchell’s concerts at the Park Avenue Armory in 2019, I marveled at his solo-saxophone heroics and meditative chamber music designs.The composer’s latest record, released this week on the Wide Hive label, affords us an even broader view. Most jaw-dropping is the 20-minute title track, “Distant Radio Transmission,” performed here by Mitchell and a 33-piece orchestra conducted by Petr Kotik. Like many of Mitchell’s recent orchestral opuses, this one has its roots in earlier, improvised trio recordings. (After the improvised version of this track was transcribed and partially orchestrated by associates of the composer, Mitchell completed the full orchestration in 2017.)“Distant Radio Transmission”Audio recordingWhat was once sparely avant-garde is now luminously experimental. Electronics join with tart wind harmonies and resonant pitched percussion during the opening. The baritone Thomas Buckner — a veteran of Robert Ashley’s operas — brings abstract, ghostly exhalations to the mix, later on. Around the halfway point, when a stretch of Mitchell’s striated soprano-saxophone ornamentations gives way to jaunty patterns in the wider orchestra, there is a sense of a singular intelligence at work.It never sounds like easy listening. Though when focusing on the finer details in this “Distant Radio Transmission,” it’s easy to be transported by the intensity of this broadcaster’s imagination.SETH COLTER WALLSTHEATER/TELEVISIONBreak a LegThe world of theater can be moving, soul-stirring and thought-provoking.Also vain, backbiting and downright ludicrous.“Slings & Arrows” captures all of these facets in all their glory. And the cult Canadian series has recently become available for streaming on Acorn TV, which just extended its free-trial offer from seven to 30 days (enter the code FREE30).“Slings & Arrows,” which ran in 2003-2006, is not just the best show ever made about the stage: The insightful, bitingly observed and very funny series belongs in the television canon, period.Each of the three seasons focuses on a different Shakespeare play produced at the New Burbage Theater Festival (loosely inspired by the real-life Stratford Festival, in Ontario). Created and scripted by Susan Coyne, Bob Martin (the co-book writer and star of the musical “The Drowsy Chaperone”) and former Kids in the Hall member Mark McKinney, the series brilliantly weaves backstage shenanigans — never underestimate the self-importance of actors and directors — with astute insights into the perils and joys of art-making. At heart, “Slings & Arrows” is a workplace comedy: A community tries to get through another op’nin’, another show while battling commercialism and egos run amok.Bonus: Watch a pre-fame Rachel McAdams find her footing as an actress in the first season.ELISABETH VINCENTELLIDANCECelebrate ItalyTourist trips to Italy. Evenings at the ballet. Those could be random selections from the long list of unavailable pleasures right now. But I can recommend a way of virtually combining both, and it goes through Denmark. As a gift to the housebound, the Royal Danish Ballet is streaming “Napoli” on its website for free.“Napoli” is a three-act ballet from 1842 by the great Danish choreographer August Bournonville. On the Royal Danish Ballet’s website, the company’s artistic director, Nikolaj Hübbe, explains the choice to stream “Napoli” now by calling it the “most life-affirming work” in the Royal Danish’s repertory. That’s an understatement: It’s one of the most life-affirming, joy-giving ballets in any company’s repertory.Set in Naples, the tale is a standard one of poor young lovers overcoming obstacles — not just a mama after money but also a possessive sea god in the underwater second act. (There was a tradition, among Danish ballet regulars, of sitting out that second act in the theater restaurant; online, you can just fast-forward.)This production, filmed in the 2013-14 season, is Hübbe’s 2009 update. He’s advanced the time to just after World War II, so there are cigarettes and mafia allusions and a Vespa. Essentially, he’s swapped one cartoon idea of southern Italy for another, and it’s vivid fun either way.What’s preserved, in any case, is the really good stuff, the dancing in Bournonville style. With arms held low, the dancers shoot up like geysers, their legs crossing quickly underneath them. The combination of modesty and effervescence is the special tonic, and this cast delivers it neatly, especially the gorgeous, buoyant Alban Lendorf as the fisherman hero.BRIAN SEIBERTTHEATERUrban TraveloguesNew York City is in the midst of a forced slumber — even the subways are scaling back. Lucky for you, three of its lines, the N, L and 7, are the settings of the wondrous “Subway Plays,” a trilogy of site-specific audio plays by This Is Not a Theatre Company. The entire trilogy is available as a mobile phone app for less than $5.Each play is split into two parts, depending on where you decide to begin your journey, and tells stories connected to the subway line where they take place. But they also invite the listener to engage with the world beyond the ride using their imagination and senses. Quite appropriate given the current need to social distance.Part history lessons, part urban travelogues, the plays written by Jenny Lyn Bader, Jessie Bear and Colin Waitt, are populated with New York archetypes, including lost tourists, annoyed locals and idiosyncratic passengers.Besides being technical marvels (the director Erin B. Mee’s precise timing is impeccable, the city seems to be working with her at all times) the plays now feel like bittersweet phantasmagoria. Snapshots preserved in sounds and feelings, of a city that may never be the same.JOSE SOLÍSKIDSLaughter Without LewdnessIn stressful times, children especially need a good laugh. But if you’re a parent who has already forbidden Comedy Central, you know that most adult stand-up is too coarse for kids.Let me introduce Billy Kelly. A comic, singer-songwriter and dad, he specializes in humor that the generations can enjoy together. (No dumb knock-knock jokes.) Embracing a wry worldview that will be incomprehensible to preschoolers but delightful to audiences 8 to 12, Kelly has just released “This Is a Family Show,” a 90-minute special from Audible Stories, a new digital library of audiobooks and entertainment for young people that Audible is offering free during the public-health crisis. (The selections also comprise not-so-uproarious titles like “Jane Eyre.”)Kelly’s comedy, which incorporates both stand-up and song — you can catch a Facebook Live set on Friday at 7 p.m. — evokes understated provocateurs like Steven Wright. A recurring riff, “Random Things I’ve Noticed in My Life,” includes observations on the honesty of the name Milk Duds and the absurdity of the term meteorologist. (Ever hear a forecast for meteors?) I laughed out loud at his bit about how Nature seemingly assembled bats from other animals’ leftover parts.Never using profanity, Kelly is not above bathroom humor. Reflecting on restroom as a euphemism (“I don’t know who we’re trying to trick”), he mentions entering a public toilet. “There’s a sign out, says ‘wet floor,’” he recalls. “So I did.”LAUREL GRAEBERMoviesIndie CreepsThe horror genre is enamored of escaped lunatics and haunted sanitariums, so it’s rarely the place to turn for empathetic depictions of mental illness. That’s why “They Look Like People,” a 2016 low-budget indie feature on Tubi, written and directed by Perry Blackshear, is such a pleasant departure — it’s as tender as it is terrifying in its depiction of paranoia and its consequences.The film begins as two old friends, Christian (Evan Dumouchel) and Wyatt (MacLeod Andrews), randomly reconnect in New York. Christian invites Wyatt to live with him, but soon Wyatt’s emotional state unravels as strange visions and unnerving voices turn his reality into a hellscape, and he begins making preparations for war with perceived alien antagonists. Blackshear depicts Christian’s response to his friend’s deeply unsettling emotional state with creeping alarm but also with a touching sensitivity that puts compassion on par with fear. The film culminates in a shocking — and shockingly affectionate — final scene that may have you covering your eyes with one hand and wiping a tear away with the other.ERIK PIEPENBURGComedyHelpful HumorInstagram users undoubtedly have noticed a spike in live videos from their friends and accounts they follow, broadcasting into the void to keep connected during our collective coronavirus quarantine. The trend is particularly rampant among stand-up comedians, who need an audience to thrive.Mike Birbiglia, with four stand-up specials to his credit — most recently filming his 2019 Drama Desk winning solo Broadway show, “The New One,” for Netflix — turned his IG account last week into a mouthpiece for his funny friends to riff on new material while raising money for those laid off from comedy clubs shuttered across America.Tip Your Waitstaff began March 19 with Roy Wood Jr., a correspondent for “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” starting a GoFundMe for his hometown club, the StarDome near Birmingham, Ala., while Birbiglia supported the Comedy Attic in Bloomington, Ind., where he had been slated to headline. Each weekday afternoon he welcomes a new comedian and adds two new clubs, with IG Live shows available for viewing for 24 hours. “We started this up on a whim and thought, well, waitstaffs don’t have any cash coming in right now and the economy has, I think, stopped. Is that the technical term?” Birbiglia said during his broadcast Tuesday with Maria Bamford. “It’s been bungled,” Bamford replied.By Wednesday morning, the GoFundMe campaigns had raised almost $52,000 for the staffs at 12 clubs, from Carolines on Broadway near Times Square to the Lyric Hyperion in Los Angeles, and, in between, clubs and theaters in Alabama, Indiana, Iowa, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Missouri, New York, Ohio and Washington, D.C.SEAN L. McCARTHY More

Even those of us who have devoted tens of thousands of hours to watching films have blind spots — important pathways of cinema history that we’ve never ventured down, or, perhaps even more embarrassingly, major movies whose greatness we’ve never quite grasped. But being shut in is the perfect time to open doors. So here is a new column, focusing on gateway movies. If you’re unfamiliar with an essential director, I will recommend the ideal place to start. If you’ve always felt a particular type of movie was not for you, the goal is to change that.Let’s start with wide-open spaces and a genre that has repeatedly been written off for dead: the western, which undoubtedly lives on in revisionist variations (“Unforgiven,” “Deadwood”) and the most enduring of all parodies, “Blazing Saddles.” When people say they hate westerns, I always think they’re imagining something like “Bonanza” or a movie like “Shane.” Without too much disrespect to “Shane,” the best westerns are rarely so clear-cut in their delineations of right and wrong. They deal in moral gray areas; they take place when society is still establishing basic laws and codes of honor.The cycle of westerns that the director Budd Boetticher made with the actor Randolph Scott from 1956 to 1960 are a great entry point.They are brisk (all run fewer than 80 minutes), they are master classes in tight screenwriting and suspense, and, while they can be watched in any order, they illustrate how westerns’ meaning often lies in theme and variation.Cinephiles argue over whether the cycle’s official count should include all seven Boetticher-Scott collaborations or just six (excluding “Westbound,” a 1959 dud that Boetticher had signed on for in a hurry). All but their final movie are available on major services.“Seven Men From Now” (1956): Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play and iTunes.“The Tall T” (1957): Rent or buy on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Decision at Sundown” (1957): Stream it on Tubi.“Buchanan Rides Alone” (1958): Rent on Google Play, iTunes and Vudu; also available to buy on those services as well as Amazon.“Ride Lonesome” (1959): Streaming on Flix Fling, or available to buy or rent on that service as well as Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Westbound” (1959): Buy or rent on Amazon, Google Play, iTunes and Vudu.“Comanche Station” (1960): Not available yet.Tough to the bone, Boetticher’s films were B movies in their day. They are not the most poetic westerns (for that, see “My Darling Clementine” or nearly any other John Ford outing). But they may be the most archetypal, and watching them in close succession takes you almost over the range of the genre, from a portrait of a righteous lawman to the darker corners of revisionism. (Though most famous for westerns, Boetticher also directed superb noirs like “The Killer Is Loose.”)One key to the movies is simply to observe the outwardly stoic Scott, whose accent and attitudes vary from picture to picture. In “Seven Men From Now,” he plays a former sheriff tracking the men who murdered his wife, killed at a job she took only because he refused to work as a deputy. Just two movies later, Scott’s cause is less clearly righteous in “Decision at Sundown,” which signals that something is amiss with the leading man by introducing him with a stubble-covered face. The movie takes the power of vengeance away from Scott’s character, a swaggering cuckold named Bart Allison, and gives it to the residents of Sundown, who have their own reasons for running the villain (John Carroll) out of town.As with all of Boetticher’s films, it is hard not to marvel at the economy of the storytelling, which in “Decision” follows a large ensemble over a single day (a day that, yes, ends in a sundown). The depiction of the self-deluded townsfolk has a faintly Eugene O’Neill-like bleakness. A saloonkeeper sums up the atmosphere: “If you’d been tending bar as long as I have, you wouldn’t expect so much out of the human race.”“Ride Lonesome,” with the sweeping, wide-screen vistas of CinemaScope, has the feel of a culmination. Scott is Ben Brigade, a remorseless bounty hunter and (again) a dead-wife avenger, but this time an abandoned frontier homemaker (Karen Steele) pushes him to question whether his latest bounty ought to be hanged. Narratively, the movie follows a strategy introduced in “Seven Men From Now,” having Scott’s character team up with a natural enemy (the gold-chasing Lee Marvin in “Seven Men”; Pernell Roberts and James Coburn as amnesty-seeking outlaws in “Ride Lonesome”) for a common cause, postponing an inevitable showdown. Even with the men in constant motion, the film plays like a feature-length standoff.The plots, typically scripted by Burt Kennedy or Charles Lang (“The Tall T” comes from a story by Elmore Leonard), are almost Socratic in the way they layer on complications. As others have suggested, Boetticher’s westerns are also unusually claustrophobic. The have a habit of isolating characters in campsites, stables, jail cells and clearings, inverting the possibility of escape and travel inherent in the genre. But that is another way of saying that these films bring out the versatility of westerns. They are the opposite of wagon train movies.You will occasionally have to put up with cringe-worthy racial attitudes. The depiction of Native Americans as horse-eating, husband-killing savages doesn’t sit well in modern eyes, and the name of Henry Silva’s character in “The Tall T” is so offensive it cannot be printed.But Boetticher also won credit for his progressivism, which can be seen in the misleadingly titled “Buchanan Rides Alone,” which finds Scott, as a roving West Texan named Tom Buchanan, forging a friendship with a Mexican man, Juan (Manuel Rojas), whose father is widely regarded as a populist benefactor in Mexico. But Juan — and initially, Buchanan — is scheduled to hang for murder in a corrupt border town, run by a self-dealing family whose members include the sheriff and the judge.If the central question of a western is how we live together in a fair society, then Boetticher’s movies play like a continuing, ever-deepening argument. More