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    ‘Heathers: The Musical’ Returns to New York, Fueled by a Devoted Fandom

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    When the pitch-black comedy “Heathers” came out in 1989, a review in The New York Times said it was “as snappy and assured as it is mean-spirited.” An early scene was said to have “the air of a demonic sitcom.” This may explain why the composer Laurence O’Keefe initially had reservations about working on a musical adaptation.“I thought it was too nihilistic,” O’Keefe said of the movie, in which a frustrated senior (Winona Ryder) and her murderous boyfriend (Christian Slater) dispatch members of their high school’s bullying elite with theatrical violence. “This material is in some ways more despairing than ‘Sweeney Todd.’”Yet O’Keefe still thought there was a way to make the story palatable for the stage. He was right: These days, “Heathers: The Musical,” the adaptation he created with the writer Kevin Murphy and the director Andy Fickman, is gaining cult-classic status in its own right.It took a decade, but in December the Off Broadway production’s cast album, from 2014, went gold. Packed with a mercilessly catchy mix of bangers (“Candy Store”) and ballads (“Seventeen”), the recording was instrumental in fueling a “Heathers” craze in Britain, where the show has had several West End runs and tours, which were further immortalized in a second cast album and a live capture.From left, Winona Ryder, Kim Walker, Lisanne Falk and Shannen Doherty starred in the pitch-black high school comedy “Heathers.”Moviestore Collection Ltd/Alamy Stock PhotoNow “Heathers: The Musical” has returned to New World Stages, where it had its original New York engagement back in 2014. This version incorporates changes, including new songs, made to the show in the intervening decade. It will open on July 10 with a sterling cast list led by Lorna Courtney (“& Juliet”) as the arty senior Veronica; Casey Likes (last seen on Broadway in “Back to the Future: The Musical”) as the vengeful J.D.; and McKenzie Kurtz, Elizabeth Teeter and Olivia Hardy as the school’s queen bees, all named Heather.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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      How a Show About Truly Terrible People Became the Defining American Sitcom

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      As one of my last acts as a suburban teenager, about two weeks before moving out of my parents’ house for college, I watched the pilot episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” in my family’s living room. This would have been Aug. 4, 2005, a Thursday. A comedy about a group of malignant narcissists who own a trashy bar in Philly called Paddy’s, “Always Sunny” was, from Day 1, offensive even for an era in which offensiveness was so ingrained in our culture that it went largely unremarked upon. George W. Bush was seven months into his second term as president. You could still smoke in most bars. If you watched cable TV past 9 p.m., you would reliably see long infomercials for direct-to-video series like “Girls Gone Wild” or “Bumfights,” both of which were somehow less offensive than “Entourage,” then considered one of the smarter shows on HBO.Listen to this article, read by Robert PetkoffMy high school friends and I had all just received .edu email addresses from the colleges that accepted us, which was a prerequisite for joining a new social network called The Facebook, a website founded only the year before by a computer-science major in his Harvard dorm room; he made it shortly after creating another website, Facemash, a campuswide ranking system of female coeds by order of attractiveness. In a parking lot at NBC’s studios in Los Angeles, Donald Trump, who was the host of a reality show on that network, spoke into a hot mic during an interview with a host from “Access Hollywood” — who was George W. Bush’s first cousin — and remarked upon how he treats the women he encounters: “I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”You can do anything. That was just how it was then. “Always Sunny” stood out to me immediately as the greatest sendup of a time when the bad guys kept getting away with it and the ignorance of an American culture that was happy to let them. Being so young, I didn’t know at the time that this would remain an evergreen topic 20 years later. Nor did I realize that “Always Sunny” would become — as it begins its 17th season this month on FX — the longest-running live-action sitcom ever to appear on television by a fairly wide margin.Our very method of viewing TV has changed immeasurably and continually over this period. Being a chronic “Always Sunny” watcher, I can track time, in a big-picture sort of way, by recalling how I viewed certain seasons of the show — basic cable, DVD box set, pirated online, streaming. And I’ll forever remember the spring of 2025 as the year I interviewed the show’s main cast over a series of Zoom calls and watched its 17th season in an early-look unfinished copy somewhere deep in the bowels of the Disney corporation’s online library. Through everything — mergers, acquisitions, wars, a life-altering pandemic, seismic technological and ideological shifts — the show remained itself, on the same network, using the same sets and writers and production staff, with the same actors doing the same characters.The series creator, Rob McElhenney, plays Mac, a closeted and deeply insecure man who serves, poorly and unnecessarily (because there are rarely any customers), as the bar’s bouncer. Last month, McElhenney legally changed his last name to Mac. But Charlie Day has always shared a name with his character, Charlie, the bar’s janitor, an illiterate stalker who suffers from what the DSM-5 has labeled pica, or the compulsive consumption of inedible objects, especially viscous chemicals like paint, bleach and suntan lotion. Working behind the bar are Dee (Kaitlin Olson), a failed actress with no self-worth, and her fraternal twin, Dennis (Glenn Howerton), who is the closest thing the group has to a true leader but is also a Ted Bundy-esque tyrant who keeps a kill kit in a hidden compartment in the trunk of his car. Worst of all is Dennis and Dee’s father, Frank, played against type by national treasure Danny DeVito, who is a little bit of all of the above. In his first appearance on the show, as part of a story line in which all members of the main cast fake being disabled, each for a distinctly idiotic reason, he pretends to be paraplegic in order to receive special treatment from the dancers at a strip club.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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      in Television

      Julian McMahon, ‘Nip/Tuck’ and ‘Fantastic Four’ Star, Dies at 56

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      He played the half-human, half-demon Cole Turner in the WB supernatural series “Charmed” and a self-destructive playboy in the FX series “Nip/Tuck.”Julian McMahon, an actor known for playing the promiscuous plastic surgeon Dr. Christian Troy in the television show “Nip/Tuck,” as well as the egoistical evil scientist Dr. Victor Von Doom in two “Fantastic Four” movies, died on Wednesday in Florida. He was 56.His death was confirmed by his wife, Kelly McMahon, who said in a statement that the cause was cancer.Mr. McMahon began acting in Australian soap operas in the early 1990s and first found success in the United States on the NBC soap opera “Another World” in 1993.After switching to prime-time television, his breakout role came when he played the half-human, half-demon Cole Turner on three seasons of the WB supernatural series “Charmed.”Mr. McMahon achieved leading-man status when he began starring in the FX series “Nip/Tuck” in 2003.His performance as Dr. Christian Troy, a self-destructive playboy, contrasted with Dr. Troy’s strait-laced best friend, Dr. Sean McNamara, played by Dylan Walsh.On the show, which ran from 2003-10, the pair ran a plastic surgery practice, first in Miami and later in Los Angeles, and frequently sparred over the morality of their profession.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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      in Movies

      Michael Madsen, Actor Known for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Kill Bill,’ Dies at 67

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      He had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies,” he said.Michael Madsen, a sledgehammer of an actor who became one of Hollywood’s reigning bare-knuckled heavies thanks to indelible performances in Quentin Tarantino’s “Reservoir Dogs” and “Kill Bill” series, as well as in the critically acclaimed mob film “Donnie Brasco,” died on Thursday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 67.The cause was cardiac arrest, said his manager, Ron Smith.Mr. Madsen never achieved true leading-man status like his soul mates Charles Bronson and James Gandolfini — but perhaps, measured by volume, he did. A tough guy’s tough guy, he seemed ubiquitous in his 1990s heyday, one of those guy-who-was-in-everything actors, like Don Cheadle and Luis Guzmán.His Internet Movie Database entry cites 346 acting credits. By comparison, Mr. Bronson, a longtime marquee-topper known for star vehicles like the “Death Wish” series, had 164 when he died in 2003 at 81.With a whiff of Mickey Rourke, a hint of Sylvester Stallone and a linebacker’s physique, Mr. Madsen had the air of a timeless Hollywood bad guy who seemed to have stepped out of a 1940s film noir.This point was abundantly clear to the actor himself.“Maybe I was just born in the wrong era, man,” he said in a 2004 interview with The Guardian. “I’m a bit of a throwback to the days of black-and-white movies. Those guys back then, they had a certain kind of directness about them. A lot of the screenplays, the plots were very simplistic — they gave rise to a type of antihero that maybe I suit better.”If the role called for a sprinkle of sadism, Mr. Madsen was your man, as showcased in “Reservoir Dogs” (1992), Mr. Tarantino’s breakout thriller about a crew of slick-suited thieves bungling a diamond heist in the bloodiest possible fashion. He was part of an ensemble cast that also included Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Chris Penn and Steve Buscemi.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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      in Movies

      Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman on Injuries, Action and ‘The Old Guard 2’

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      In the Netflix film “The Old Guard 2,” Charlize Theron and Uma Thurman play immortal warriors blessed — or cursed, depending on your outlook — with incredible recuperative powers. Stab them in the back, shoot them in the face, and wham-o, they heal in seconds. Theron’s character, Andromache of Scythia (Andy for short), has been fighting the good fight, and several bad ones, for over 6000 years; her archnemesis Discord, played by Thurman, is even older.The action epic marks Theron’s return to the franchise five years after the critically acclaimed first film (the Times’s A.O. Scott praised the movie’s action sequences and “tone of hard-boiled melancholy.”) It also marks Thurman’s high-profile return to the action movie genre, 21 years after she starred in Quentin Tarantino’s “Kill Bill: Volume 2.”The actors created two of the most celebrated action heroines of all time: Thurman’s The Bride, the vengeful, katana-wielding assassin of the “Kill Bill” films, and Theron’s Imperator Furiosa, the buzzcut-sporting, big rig-driving heroine of “Mad Max: Fury Road.” “Fury Road” was one action film among many for Theron (others include “Atomic Blonde,” “The Italian Job,” and the “Fast and the Furious” franchise). After the “Kill Bill” films, however, Thurman eschewed the action film genre for rom-coms, TV and a run on Broadway, among other things.The two recently got together at the Netflix offices in Hollywood to discuss women in action films, on-set injuries and what they won’t do in a picture. Below are edited excerpts from the conversation.Uma Thurman, left, with Charlize Theron in New York.Uma, it’s been a while since you’ve done an action movie. Why now, and why this one?UMA THURMAN Well, I find Charlize to be very mysterious. I feel like she keeps a tight circle around her. But she’s revered and admired, and her work speaks for itself, so this was a special opportunity. Getting to work with a great actress is a precious thing, and projects are usually not designed to bring multiple heavyweight women together, as Charlize has done with this franchise. Every once in a while you see these great ensembles with, like, seven great actresses, and you always feel bad that you weren’t included! You look at them with, like, hunger.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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      in Theater

      Review: Rachel Zegler Delights in an ‘Evita’ for the Masses

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      The actress is making her West End debut in Jamie Lloyd’s latest take on an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.“She’s a diamond in their dull gray lives,” sings the Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón of his wife in “Evita,” Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s sung-through musical about Eva Perón. She was a former matinee star whose popularity among the working classes bolstered support for her husband’s government, and “Evita” expresses some skepticism about political populism. Yet a new revival, directed by Jamie Lloyd and running at the London Palladium through Sept. 6, is emphatically populist in its relentless bombast, heavy symbolism and button-pushing grandiosity.The initially moody staging — industrial gray metal stairs, smoke effects, dark costumes — belies the sensory overload ahead: Balloons are popped; lights are turned up blindingly bright; blue and white confetti rain down on the audience. Rachel Zegler (“Snow White” and “West Side Story”), making her West End debut, is a delight in the title role, strutting bossily in a black leather bra and hot pants while a chorus — representing soldiers or ordinary citizens — cavorts elaborately around her to a brassy tango-inspired soundtrack, delivered by an 18-piece band. (Choreography is by Fabian Aloise, lighting is by Jon Clark and set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.)The show begins and ends with Evita’s death from cancer, at the age of 33, in 1952. In the intervening two hours she is goaded and reproached in song by Che (Diego Andres Rodriguez), a wisecracking Everyman in a black T-shirt and cargo shorts, who teases Evita for cozying up to an authoritarian leader and sleeping her way to the top. In one song he quips bitterly, “Don’t you just love the smack of firm government?” (For this impertinence, he is later killed — doused with fake blood, then with blue and white paint, the colors of the Argentine flag.)Diego Andres Rodriguez as Che, Zegler, center, and James Olivas as Juan Perón. The set and costumes are by Soutra Gilmour.Marc BrennerEvita is portrayed as a cynical, ruthless social climber, and the audience is invited to sympathize with the people she hurts along the way. She unceremoniously dumps a boyfriend — the tango singer Agustín Magaldi (played with hangdog charm by Aaron Lee Lambert, who sings beautifully) — once he has ceased to be useful to her. And she breezily steals Perón (James Olivas, physically imposing but stiff — and thus convincingly military) from his girlfriend (Bella Brown), who sings a doleful song before vanishing, never to be seen again.Much preshow hype surrounded Lloyd’s decision to stage the famous scene in which Evita sings the show’s signature tune, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina,” on the theater’s exterior balcony; members of the public see the spectacle in the flesh, while theatergoers make do with video footage beamed onto a big screen in real time.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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      in Television

      Brianne Howey Feels a Presence Through Her Bracelet

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      Brianne Howey has a supernatural connection with her late grandmother, who’s “come through” by way of mediums, and a one-time séance that used her grandmother’s bracelet to guide otherworldly energy into the room.The star of Netflix’s hit show “Ginny & Georgia,” currently in its third season and remains one of the network’s top 10 shows after two weeks, wears a gold serpentine heirloom most days. “It just makes me feel like I’m with my grandma,” she said of the transcendental link. In an interview, Ms. Howey reflected on the bracelet that is, as she put it, “a physical manifestation” of her memories and her love.This interview has been edited and condensed.How did this bracelet find its way to you?After my grandma passed in 2022, one of my aunts told me that she had left it for me with my name on it, on a Post-it with the bracelet. It’s so, so special to me.Did your grandma wear lots of other jewelry, or was this her main piece?Not that much, actually. She was kind of a minimalist. My grandma was a really practical woman. She had eight kids. She was a nurse, very Catholic, not a lot of bells and whistles. So that makes this even more sentimental. My grandma was also the kind of person who, anytime she lost something, she would whip out her St. Christopher beads. She had a lot of rosaries. That was more her jewelry. There would be a rosary around her neck, in every pocket, and she would know exactly who to pray to if you lost something, if you were sick, if I was nervous about a test, anything.Do you wear it every day?It’s like a wedding band, almost: I feel kind of naked without it on, and it’s so delicate and comfortable and it lays so flat, and it makes me feel so close to my grandma because my parents had me super young. I was really raised so much by my grandparents, so it’s just extra special.I have sort of a roller coaster of a past with my jewelry collection. Twice in my life I’ve been robbed. And all my jewelry got stolen. So I’ve sort of been rebuilding. But both times, my grandma’s bracelet, I’ve always had it. It never got stolen, so that’s why it’s extra sentimental.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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      in Movies

      Priyanka Chopra Jonas Is OK Sitting With Idris Elba and John Cena

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      A scene in their new movie “Heads of State” involved a car chase and close quarters. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with,” she said.Priyanka Chopra Jonas gets a kick out of action — the stylistic long shots, the slow-motion explosions, the stunts.And if there are a couple of hilarious sparring partners in the mix, all the better.In her new film “Heads of State,” which begins streaming on Prime Video on July 2, Chopra Jonas plays Noel Bisset, an MI6 operative on a mission to rescue the prime minister of Britain (Idris Elba) and the president of the United States (John Cena) from a global menace.After starring in shows like “Citadel” and “Quantico,” “I trust myself when it comes to action, and I get to do some really fun things,” she said. “I love learning from the stunt department. Their experience and expertise is very exciting to me.”But the most insane scene to shoot in “Heads of State” involved Elba, Cena and a tight squeeze into a vehicle known as the Beast.“It’s just the three of us and a couple of bad guys, and it’s raining bullets and bombs at us, and we’re driving through the streets,” she said. “It was the smallest space for the two biggest guys I’ve ever worked with. We used to chat about everything because you couldn’t leave the vehicle in between shots often.”In a call from her home in Manhattan, Chopra Jonas sent Malti Marie, her 3-year-old daughter with her husband, the singer and actor Nick Jonas, out on a play date before revealing why self-care days, Magna-Tiles and signature scents top her list of essentials.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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      in Theater

      Diana Oh, Passionate Voice for Queer Liberation in Theater, Dies at 38

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      Mx. Oh’s politically provocative and often playful works, including the Off Broadway production “{my lingerie play},” asserted the right to be oneself while having fun.Diana Oh, a glitter-dusted experimental artist-activist whose theater works intertwined political provocation with profound compassion in rituals of communion with audiences, died on June 17 at their home in Brooklyn. Mx. Oh, who used the pronouns they and them, was 38.The death was confirmed by Mx. Oh’s brother Han Bin Oh, who said the cause was suicide.A playwright, actor, singer-songwriter and musician, Mx. Oh created art that didn’t fit neatly into categories. Mx. Oh was best known for the outraged yet disarmingly gentle Off Broadway show “{my lingerie play},” a music-filled protest against male sexual violence; it was performed in a series of 10 installations around New York City.A concert-like play — with Mx. Oh singing at its center — “{my lingerie play}” percolated with an angry awareness of the ways restrictive gender norms and society’s policing of sexual desire can leave whole groups vulnerable. It was an emphatic and loving assertion of the right to be oneself without worrying about abuse.“I was born a woman, to immigrant parents,” Mx. Oh said in the show. “That’s when my body became political. That’s when I became an artist.”Mx. Oh’s Infinite Love Party, which the Bushwick Starr theater in Brooklyn produced in 2019, was not a show but rather a structured celebration with a sleepover option. It was a handmade experience, including music and aerial silks, designed to welcome queer people, people of color and their allies.Mx. Oh in The Infinite Love Party, which was not a show but rather a structured celebration with music.Nina Westervelt for The New York TimesMx. Oh in 2019 during The Infinite Love Party, which had a sleepover option.Nina Westervelt 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