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      Book Review: ‘Chita: A Memoir,’ by Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco

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      Her new memoir finds the 90-year-old singer-dancer hungry for acclaim, but generous to others on her way to getting it.CHITA: A Memoir, by Chita Rivera with Patrick PachecoHow did Chita Rivera feel when she saw Rita Moreno, another actress of Puerto Rican descent, in the movie role of Anita that Rivera had originated on Broadway in “West Side Story”?“How dare she?” she recalls thinking in “Chita,” her playful and history-rich memoir. “That is my dress, that is my earring!” The truth is she was already kicking it up with Dick Van Dyke on Broadway in “Bye Bye Birdie” at the time. So she got over it. Then, when that show became a movie, Janet Leigh took Rivera’s part of Rosie, even after Rivera killed with “Spanish Rose,” her stereotype-bashing number, on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” (Look it up on YouTube, you won’t be sorry.)Years later the steamy role of Velma Kelly that she originated in “Chicago” for Bob Fosse went to Catherine Zeta-Jones, who won an Oscar for it. “She’s the perfect choice,” she responded when Rob Marshall, its director, checked in.Cutthroat as the acting game may be, and even harder for talent with Hispanic names long before J. Lo, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Rosie Perez and Daphne Rubin-Vega hit the scene, Rivera comes off as thirsty for recognition — but not bloodthirsty — despite the urgings of her colleagues Gwen Verdon, Fred Ebb and others to up her diva game.She occasionally takes a satisfying swipe (Paul Lynde gets a dressing-down for being nasty and so does John Lennon, of all people, when she appeared with the Beatles in 1964). But most everyone else gets a pass, including Tony Mordente, her first husband, a dancer whom she met in “West Side Story”; Lisa Mordente, their daughter; and the many loves of her life that she recalls with generosity — the restaurateur Joe Allen and Sammy Davis Jr., among them.“There’s nothing wrong with ambition,” Davis once told her. It took some time for Dolores Conchita Figueroa del Rivero to understand that. A tomboy born in 1933 and raised in Washington, D.C., by a poised mother of mixed ancestry who worked for the Defense Department and a dapper Puerto Rican musician father who died when she was little, Rivera got a scholarship to the School of American Ballet when she was 16. She moved in with relatives in the Bronx and describes a heady time of bodegas, subways, public school and intimidating ballet instructors. Overcoming her fear of singing, she got into the national tour of “Call Me Madam” with Elaine Stritch, then on Broadway in “Guys and Dolls” and “Can-Can,” starring Verdon. With “West Side Story,” her career took off.Broadway-loving readers will appreciate the play-by-play (pun intended) of this fizzy book, written in collaboration with Patrick Pacheco, a theater-savvy journalist and TV host. It doesn’t take much to make the pages fly when you have a scene of Stritch in rehearsals with Rivera, “blowing” on the Scotch in her coffee cup, or a pre-rehab Liza Minnelli playing her daughter in “The Rink.” Essentially a good girl, despite her insistence that she has a fire-breathing alter ego, Dolores (who occasionally makes herself heard in the book), at 90, this national icon doesn’t seem to want to burn many bridges. If roles or songs were taken from her and given to others, all for the best. She doesn’t get too political either, although she does unload about what it means to play Latina characters “subjected to racist taunts,” and on her defining early role as a street-sassy Puerto Rican. When Rivera was suggested for “1491,” one of his lesser-known shows, Meredith Willson, who wrote “The Music Man,” asked, “Doesn’t she speak with an accent?” She allows that while she bumped into ethnic stereotypes, the theater world was more relaxed than Hollywood. “I wanted to be considered for a range of roles and for the most part I succeeded,” she writes.One role she never played, this upbeat memoir makes clear — the victim.Bob Morris is a frequent contributor to The Times and the author of “Assisted Loving” and “Bobby Wonderful.”CHITA: A Memoir | By Chita Rivera with Patrick Pacheco | Illustrated | 320 pp. | Harper One | $27.99 More

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      ‘Barry’ Is Ending. For Anthony Carrigan, That’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of

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      Anthony Carrigan was 7 the first time he stepped onstage. And he was terrified. Debilitating stage fright, which he would struggle with for decades, would have led most children to consider alternate careers. Carrigan, a star of the tar-black HBO comedy “Barry,” was not most children.Because even that first time, he felt something beyond terror. Diagnosed at 3 with alopecia areata, an autoimmune disorder that attacks the hair follicles, he often found himself stared at, gawked at, even in elementary school.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” he said. “That’s kind of a weird dehumanizing thing, when someone is looking at a part of you.” But onstage, he felt as though he could control how people saw him — which meant he could make sure they saw all of him, or at least all of the character he was playing.They are seeing him now. On, “Barry,” which returns for its fourth and final season on Sunday, Carrigan, 40, plays the gangster NoHo Hank. Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank, powered by Carrigan’s sweeping, sunshiny, Emmy-nominated performance, has survived multiple assassination attempts and a presumed panther attack. The character has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases (“Hey, man,” “super great!”) and multiple GIFs of a Season 2 rooftop folk dance.Two days before I met him, a young woman stopped him on the street. “She just wept, like, Beatles-level mania,” he said. “She was really lovely, though, very sweet.”We were speaking on a Monday afternoon in early April at the Tin Building, an upscale food hall in Lower Manhattan. (He is based in Los Angeles, where “Barry” shoots, but his girlfriend lives nearby.) Alopecia has rendered him bald and without eyebrows or eyelashes, a look that causes a momentary neural jar, until the force of his personality — buoyant, sincere, self-actualized — takes over. Carrigan comes here often. Maybe not often enough.Originally meant to die in the pilot, NoHo Hank (Carrigan, left, with Michael Irby) has become a fan favorite, complete with catchphrases and many GIFs in his honor.Merrick Morton/HBOHe hadn’t made a reservation at the oyster counter, and for a moment it looked as if he wouldn’t be seated. I joked that he could pull a “Do you know who I am?” maneuver, and Carrigan had the decency to look appalled.“I’ve never done that!” he said. Once seated, he listened politely as a server described the oysters of the day. He declined the ones from Massachusetts. “I’m from Massachusetts; I know how salty we are,” he said, and ordered a dozen from Canada and Maine.After high school in Massachusetts, he studied acting at Carnegie Mellon University. His hair loss was still isolated to patches at that time, and professors often cast him as the longhaired bad boy, a look that determined most of his early roles. That hair and the worry that he would lose it were sources of anxiety. And after landing his first major role, as an amateur detective on the one-season Jerry Bruckheimer series “The Forgotten,” his alopecia progressed and he did lose it. At first he covered up, with hairpieces and eyebrow makeup, a must for character continuity. But when the series ended, he put the hairpieces away.“I really had nothing to lose at that point,” he said as he spooned horseradish onto an oyster. “Because I had no idea what my career was going to look like. I just knew that it was either try it with the way that I looked, or I was going to have to find a new career.”So he kept going, without wigs or false lashes, even when his representatives argued for them. He worried that this new appearance would limit the roles he was seen for. It did. But he suspected that this new self-acceptance would free him as an actor. Whatever parts did come his way, he would play the hell out of them.The parts did come. Gone was the bad boy. In its place, he discovered, was the bad guy. He began to play villains, chief among them Victor Zsasz, the psychopath he played for 20 episodes on the Fox superhero series “Gotham.” He fretted, sometimes, that he was helping to reinforce a stereotype of bald men as sinister. But it kept him in the Screen Actors Guild. And it netted him an audition for “Barry.”NoHo Hank, intended as a minor antagonist, is a member of a Chechen mob. Carrigan had little interest in playing another villain. But the script’s violent comedy delighted him. He went back to the formal exercises of his college days. How should Hank move? What animal would he be? A scorpion, he decided, which explains the puffed-out chest, the hands on hips, the scuttling walk.“He’s a lovable scorpion,” Carrigan explained at the oyster counter. “He doesn’t want to sting anyone, he doesn’t want to hurt anyone. But that’s just his nature.”He made his audition tape and sent it in. Alec Berg, a co-creator of “Barry,” recalled being struck at first by Carrigan’s atypical appearance, then by his skill and commitment.“For me, I just completely forgot that this is a guy who doesn’t have hair,” Berg said in a recent phone interview. “He just was that character so thoroughly.”When he and the series star and co-creator, Bill Hader, met Carrigan in person, they knew they couldn’t kill Hank so quickly. “He was lovely and so imaginative, he really understood the comedy,” Hader said, in a separate interview. “I was like, ‘I’d like the option that this guy lives.’”Hader described NoHo Hank as a “heavy.” But in Carrigan’s hands and in the wardrobe department’s shrunken polo shirts, he became the lightest heavy imaginable. He’s a people pleaser, a charmer. During a Season 2 near-death experience, he tells his underlings, needlessly, in his Chechen-accented English: “I know you look at me and see hard-as-nails criminal, stone-cold killer, ice man. But, uh, this is lie.” Hank should have had a career in hospitality, Carrigan said. Hank has said as much himself.Carrigan’s command of the role is exhaustive. He often devises new idioms for Hank, as when he substitutes “kid and the poodle” for “kit and caboodle” in a Season 4 episode. And he preapproves each polo shirt.“I’m playing the bad guy, but making him likable, making him winning,” Carrigan said.In playing both sides of Hank — Hank’s cheer, Hank’s sting — Carrigan complicates the stereotype of the bald villain, allowing “Barry” to pose knotty questions about good and evil, action and intention. Hank, that likable guy with the juice boxes, has killed an awful lot of people.“People would look at my alopecia and not really look at me,” Carrigan said about beginning to lose his hair as a child. But onstage, he felt as if he could control how people saw him.Evelyn Freja for The New York TimesThe complications that Carrigan brings to the part have drawn the attention of other directors. He played a robot in the 2020 comedy “Bill & Ted Face the Music.” Paul Weitz cast him as comic relief in the 2021 Kevin Hart film “Fatherhood,” attracted, Weitz said, by Carrigan’s “baked-in love of performance and love of human eccentricity.”So far, no role has rivaled Hank in its complexity or its blood-spattered joy. Carrigan knows this better than anyone. When “Barry” wrapped, just before Thanksgiving, he hung up Hank’s costume for the last time and there, in his trailer, said goodbye to him, thanking Hank for the chance to play, to experiment, to make mistakes. Then he stole Hank’s watch, a fake Rolex.Berg bet that Carrigan would find other roles. “He’s just the nicest, most genuine, friendly, lovely guy,” he said. “Part of who he is goes into Hank, but he’s not just playing himself, he’s really performing.”“I don’t think it’d be hard for him to step outside of that,” Berg added, “play other things.”When I met Carrigan at the oyster counter, he was trying to take that step. He had recently returned from a location shoot in Kentucky for a new film. And the director Alex Winter, his co-star in “Bill & Ted,” was writing a role for him in another movie. “He has heart and he has physicality,” Winter said. “And he has an incredible sense of humor.” Is the character a villain? “Everyone’s a villain in this thing,” Winter said.If Carrigan worries that no subsequent role will be as beloved as NoHo Hank, he worries less than he used to. “When I’m able to curtail my anxiety enough to feel loose and feel free, then I can go in any direction,” he said.As he ate his oysters, I noticed a signet ring on his finger, a recent gift from his girlfriend. The ring shows a rabbit. Rabbits are famously fearful animals. But this one, Carrigan pointed out, was running free. “The fear is no longer taking up space,” he said.He turned it around, showing an engraving of a trap. Would the rabbit fall into it?Carrigan shook his head. “I think he’s already escaped it,” he said. More

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      Book Review: ‘My Cousin Maria Schneider,’ by Vanessa Schneider

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      In a troubling new memoir, Vanessa Schneider contends that the sexually explicit 1972 film exploited, and irrevocably hurt, her cousin.MY COUSIN MARIA SCHNEIDER: A Memoir, by Vanessa Schneider. Translated by Molly Ringwald.For many actresses, the path of the ingénue can be treacherous. Celebrated for her beauty and youth, the ingénue is defined almost exclusively by her sexuality. An outsize amount of attention is paid to her looks and her body, little interest to her mind. As she grows older, opportunities diminish. Forced to act younger than her age and compete with newer faces, she eventually discovers that her career has hit a dead end. Among the long list of cautionary tales: Jean Seberg, the darling of French New Wave cinema, who died by suicide at the age of 40; Debra Winger, who shocked Hollywood by retiring at the height of her fame at 40; and, of course, the French actress Maria Schneider.Schneider was only 20 years old when she catapulted to fame after starring opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film “Last Tango in Paris.” In its most notorious scene, Brando, who plays a grief-stricken man named Paul, rapes Schneider, who plays a young woman named Jeanne, improvising with butter as a lubricant. Bertolucci and Brando conspired to film the scene, which Schneider claimed wasn’t in the original script, without her consent. Bertolucci later explained his reason for that decision as wanting Schneider “to respond like a girl, not an actress.” Because of its violence and frank treatment of sex, the film was a sensation, confirming Bertolucci’s status as a provocative filmmaker and cementing the comeback of Brando, who for some time had been seen as a Hollywood has-been.For Schneider, it was her “cross to bear,” writes the French journalist and novelist Vanessa Schneider in “My Cousin Maria Schneider,” a slender memoir composed in second person, directly addressed to the actress and elegantly translated from the French by Molly Ringwald. The book, first published in 2018 in France, is both a beautiful eulogy (Schneider died of breast cancer in 2011) and a much-needed corrective — an opportunity to finally set the record straight for an actress long mischaracterized and unfairly judged.The “Last Tango” scene would define Schneider for the rest of her life, explains Vanessa Schneider. Subjected to unrelenting negative publicity and attention surrounding it (a dairy manufacturer once used Schneider’s image on its packaging; a flight attendant served her a pat of butter without prompting), Schneider acted out. She spoke too candidly to the press about her personal life; she dismissed famous directors and actors; she walked off film sets.That Schneider was also addicted to heroin didn’t help, and Vanessa Schneider wonders if the drugs and partying were ways to avoid the spotlight so instantly thrust on the young actress.Growing up, Maria Schneider was unwanted. Her father, the French actor Daniel Gélin, was not involved in her childhood, and her mother, Marie-Christine Schneider, sent Schneider to live with a nursemaid when she was 8. Her mother’s “sex life was never a secret,” writes Vanessa Schneider. “A story often told … is of the time your mother was in bed with a man and called out for you to fetch her diaphragm.” She also reveals that Schneider’s mother “elected not to take the trip from Nice to Paris” for her daughter’s funeral, “saying she was too tired.”Vanessa Schneider’s parents took in Maria as a teenager. From an early age, Vanessa worshiped her older cousin, saving every clipping of her from magazines and newspapers in a red plastic binder. As a result, this memoir is written with a rare sense of intimacy and devotion. It warmly captures the highlights of Maria Schneider’s life: her enduring friendships with Brigitte Bardot and Nan Goldin, her pride in starring in films such as Michelangelo Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and her later advocacy for women in film.It is also, at moments, unsparing, describing Schneider’s struggles with addiction, financial woes and other embarrassing family drama. At one point Vanessa Schneider questions whether her cousin would like such an unvarnished portrayal of her life, and deletes what she’s written. “I often worry that you won’t approve of the story I’m telling, Maria,” she explains. “You won’t like that I’m speaking of the drugs, of your mother and father and brothers.” Yet in this post-#MeToo era, Vanessa Schneider’s evenhanded portrayal of this daring actress of the 1970s is a refreshing one. For once, a young woman is not placed on an impossibly high pedestal, where she is unfairly worshiped for her beauty and then cruelly defiled for our entertainment. Instead, Maria Schneider is presented with both her faults and her charms. In that way, this is a generous account of a rare and complicated cinematic star.Thessaly La Force is a freelance writer and frequent contributor to The New York Times Styles section. Previously, she was the features director at T: The New York Times Magazine.MY COUSIN MARIA SCHNEIDER: A Memoir | By Vanessa Schneider | Translated by Molly Ringwald | 160 pp. | Scribner | $26 More

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      Keith Johnstone, Champion of Improvisational Theater, Dies at 90

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      The theatrical games and performance techniques Mr. Johnstone developed became a familiar part of the acting arsenal.Early in what became a career in theater, Keith Johnstone was commissioned to write a play for a new company in England and studied up for the job by watching the troupe’s actors rehearse someone else’s play. What stood out to him was not the rehearsal techniques, but the fact that he found the sessions boring — “until the actors broke for coffee or stagehands began moving sets around the stage.”“It was only at these times that there seemed to be moments of truth on the stage,” he told The Calgary Herald many years later, in 1982. “When they resumed acting, the performers abandoned their kinetic dance and entered separate glass cages.”That realization helped fuel Mr. Johnstone’s determination that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity, and from emphasizing the quest for truth over the mastery of actorly techniques.He spent the rest of his career preaching the gospel of improvisation, developing games, exercises and live shows that were the opposite of tightly scripted theater. His 1979 book, “Impro: Improvisation and the Theatre,” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater, and the Loose Moose Theater Company, which he created in 1977 after relocating to Canada, became an institution in Calgary.Mr. Johnstone died on March 11 in Calgary. He was 90.Theresa Robbins Dudeck, his literary executor and the author of “Keith Johnstone: A Critical Biography” (2013), confirmed the death.Mr. Johnstone didn’t invent improv, and he wasn’t alone in promoting the technique; the actress and educator Viola Spolin published “Improvisation for the Theater” in 1963, and troupes like the Second City in Chicago, founded in 1959, were also working the territory. But his contributions were considerable. Among Mr. Johnstone’s liveliest innovations was Theatresports, an idea he began to develop in England when he and some colleagues at the Royal Court Theater took notice of the liveliness of audiences at professional wrestling matches.“Our Royal Court audiences were like whipped dogs in comparison,” he wrote in an essay about Theatresports, “probably because once an event is categorized as ‘cultural,’ it becomes a minefield in which your opinion can damn you.”So he began honing a sort of competitive event in which teams of improvisers would try to outdo each other, with audience howling and booing encouraged and judges rating the efforts.“The judges award points by holding up cards that range from one to five,” he wrote in another book, “Impro for Storytellers” (1999). “Five means excellent, one means bad, and a honk from a rescue horn means ‘kindly leave the stage.’”He introduced Theatresports once he had relocated to Canada, and the concept caught on; variations of the games were soon being performed all over the world.“If the performance has gone well,” he wrote, “you’ll feel that you’ve been watching a bunch of good-natured people who are wonderfully cooperative, and who aren’t afraid to fail. It’s therapeutic to be in such company, and to yell and cheer, and perhaps even volunteer to improvise with them. With luck you’ll feel as if you’ve been at a wonderful party; great parties don’t depend on the amount of alcohol, but on positive interactions.”Mr. Johnstone in the mid-1960s. Early in his career, he determined that theater and the people who practiced it could benefit from more spontaneity and creativity.Mary Evans/Roger Mayne, via Everett CollectionDonald Keith Johnstone was born on Feb. 21, 1933, in Brixham, on England’s southwestern coast, to Richard and Linda (Carter) Johnstone. When he was 9 or so, he decided to stop taking things at face value.“I began reversing every statement to see if the opposite was also true,” he wrote in his 1979 book. “This is so much a habit with me that I hardly notice I’m doing it anymore. As soon as you put a ‘not’ into an assertion, a whole range of other possibilities opens out.”He trained as a teacher at St. Luke’s College in Exeter and began teaching at a primary school in South London. When he won a prize in a short-story contest, the English Stage Company, a new troupe based at the Royal Court, invited him to write a play for it, which he did: “Brixham Regatta,” which Patrick Gibbs of The Daily Telegraph thought was, for a 25-year-old novice, “a creditable — and ambitious — first play.” More important, he joined a writers’ group at the Royal Court and found himself leading improvisational exercises for the group.Published in 1979, Mr. Johnstone’s “Impro” is among the most widely used texts in the world of improvisational theater.He spent 10 years at the Royal Court, leading classes and workshops, screening scripts and producing plays. In July 1959 Mr. Johnstone and William Gaskill produced a largely improvised one-night show called “Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp,” featuring Black actors ad-libbing scenes about an infamous 1959 massacre of detainees by British troops in Kenya. Alan Brien, reviewing the performance in The Spectator, was not on board with the concept, saying that it “shows the Royal Court in its most militant, inept, radical, ambitious and pretentious mood.”“‘Eleven Men Dead at Hola Camp’ was neither good rhetoric nor good theater,” Mr. Brien wrote. “But if it sent the audience home to study the facts, it will have been worthwhile. And if it sent the producers home reconvinced that acting discipline and writing economy are the heart of drama, then it will also have been worth while.”It did not “reconvince” Mr. Johnstone of that. He continued to develop his improvisation exercises and in the mid-1960s formed an improvisational troupe, the Theater Machine, which performed all over England as well as abroad.In 1972 Mr. Johnstone was offered a two-year visiting professorship at the University of Calgary in Alberta. He ended up staying at the university for 23 years, taking emeritus status in 1995.An early performance by his Loose Moose company, in 1977, was a version of “Robinson Crusoe” that, from Louis B. Hobson’s enthusiastic review in The Calgary Albertan, sounds as if it came close to replicating that professional-wrestling excitement Mr. Johnstone had longed for.“The audience, which is seated in a semicircle, becomes everything from shark-infested waters to offstage spirit voices,” he wrote. “It is a stormy, noisy sea that surrounds Crusoe’s island, and one that never calms down for the play’s 40 minutes.”Mr. Johnstone’s marriage to Ingrid Von Darl ended in divorce in 1981. He is survived by a son from that marriage, Benjamin; a son from another relationship, Dan; and a grandson.Mr. Johnstone’s books and methods have been used in high school classrooms and drama clubs, professional acting workshops and anyplace else where creativity needs to be unlocked and spontaneity encouraged. A passage in his 1979 book describes what set him on the improvisational path.“I began to think of children not as immature adults,” he wrote, “but of adults as atrophied children.” More

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      Cannes Film Festival 2023 Lineup Includes Wes Anderson and Todd Haynes Movies

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      Over 50 movies will be screened at the event, including Johnny Depp’s first major film since a defamation trial and Martin Scorsese’s latest epic.Movies by Wes Anderson, Todd Haynes and Ken Loach will compete for the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, the event’s organizers announced during a news conference on Thursday.Also in the running for the festival’s top prize will be films by the returning winners Wim Wenders, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Nanni Moretti.But Martin Scorsese will not compete at the festival, which opens May 16 and runs through May 27. Instead, his eagerly anticipated movie “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which stars Leonardo DiCaprio and is about the murder of Osage Indians in 1920s Oklahoma, will appear out of competition. Thierry Frémaux, Cannes’s artistic director, said during Thursday’s news conference that the festival wanted “Killers of the Flower Moon” to play in competition, but Scorsese had turned him down.The Wes Anderson picture in competition is “Asteroid City,” about a space cadet convention that is interrupted by aliens; Todd Haynes will show “May December” a love story about a young man and his older employer, starring Julianne Moore.Ken Loach, whose movies focused on working-class life in Britain have twice won the Palme d’Or, will present “The Old Oak,” about Syrian refugees arriving in an economically depressed English mining town.A jury led by the Swedish director Ruben Ostlund will choose the winner. Ostlund won last year’s Palme d’Or for “Triangle of Sadness,” a satire of the international superrich; he also took the 2017 award for “The Square,” a sendup of the art world.Of the 19 titles in competition, five are directed by women, including the Cannes veterans Jessica Hausner and Alice Rohrwacher, and Ramata-Toulaye Sy, a French-Senegalese newcomer.Many of the highest profile titles at this year’s event will be shown out of competition. The festival will open with “Jeanne du Barry,” a period drama about a poor woman who becomes a lover of King Louis XV of France. It stars Johnny Depp in his first major role since he won a defamation trial against his ex-wife Amber Heard.Other high-profile movies scheduled to premiere at Cannes’s 76th edition include “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny,” directed by James Mangold — the final movie in the Harrison Ford adventure series about a globe-trotting archaeology professor — and Pedro Almodóvar’s “Strange Way of Life,” the Spanish director’s second movie in English. Starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal, that movie is a short western about a reunion between two hit men.Wim Wenders, the German director who won the 1984 Palme d’Or for “Paris, Texas,” has two films in the official selection. In the main competition, he will show “Perfect Days,” which Frémaux said was about a janitor in Japan who drives between jobs listening to rock music. Out of competition, Wenders will show a 3-D documentary about Anselm Kiefer, one of Germany’s most revered artists.Frémaux said that over 2,000 movies were submitted for the festival, although only 52 made Thursday’s selection. Of those, one other notable title is Steve McQueen’s “Occupied City,” about Amsterdam under the Nazis. Frémaux said that McQueen, the director of “12 Years a Slave” and “Widows,” had made a “very radical” film that was several hours long. But, Frémaux added, watching it, “you won’t fall asleep.” More

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      Jung Chae-yull, South Korean Actress, Is Found Dead at 26

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      Though the cause of the unexpected death of Jung Chae-yull was not disclosed, it has renewed concerns about mental health in the country’s highly competitive entertainment industry.A young South Korean actress still early in a promising career was found dead in her home on Tuesday, according to the production company she had been working with. Although no cause of death was disclosed, the episode has renewed concerns about the mental health of young people working in South Korea’s highly competitive entertainment industry.The actress, Jung Chae-yull, 26, is the most recent instance of the phenomenon of celebrities in their 20s dying suddenly. Some, though not all, of the cases have been acknowledged as suicide.“Actress Chae-yull has left our side on April 11, 2023,” Management S, Ms. Jung’s agency in Seoul, said in a statement on Tuesday. “We pray that Chae-yull, who has always been sincere about acting, is able to rest in peace in a warm place.”Two years ago, another 26-year-old actress, Song Yoo-jung, was also found dead at her home in Seoul. Both Ms. Song and Ms. Jung’s careers had begun only a few years before they died. Ms. Song’s agency did not disclose the cause of her death either.In October 2019, Sulli, 25, a member of a K-pop girl group, was found dead in her home after facing repeated instances of bullying. Officials determined it was suicide. A few weeks after that, Goo Hara, 28, another K-pop singer, was found dead in her home, and her death was likewise ruled a suicide.“Unless the entertainment industry and media change, South Korea will be first place on celebrity suicide,” one K-pop fan wrote on Twitter. South Korean authorities recently announced that instances of bullying will now be reflected on college applications, as the country struggles to put a stop to such abuse.Ms. Jung stepped into the spotlight in 2016 in a fashion competition show in South Korea called “Devil’s Runway,” which grouped rookie and veteran models into teams to compete on the catwalk. She scored multiple endorsements with popular brands like Etude, a large cosmetics company in South Korea, and U.S. fashion labels such as Jill Stuart.Ms. Jung on the set of the movie “Deep,” a thriller in which she had a leading role.HajunsaMs. Jung branched out into acting in 2018, when she landed a leading role in the movie “Deep,” a thriller set in the Philippines. She would go on to act in at least one more film and two series, including “Zombie Detective,” which took home a prize at the 2020 KBS Entertainment Awards in South Korea.Recently, Ms. Jung had been filming a new series called “Wedding Impossible,” based on a web novel. Filming has been temporarily suspended, according to Studio 329, the company that was working with her on the project.Ms. Jung was born in 1996 and enjoyed boxing and snowboarding, according to social media posts. Since Tuesday, fans have flooded her Instagram account to pay tribute.“I love you, Chae-yull, I’ll pray for your happiness in heaven,” one fan wrote after the announcement.Ms. Jung’s family plans to hold a private funeral, according to her agency.If you are having thoughts of suicide, call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resources. More

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      The Broadway Star Phillipa Soo Sings Her Favorite Pop Song

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      In a new revival of “Camelot,” updated by Aaron Sorkin, the actress finds humanity in the legend of King Arthur and Guenevere.Phillipa Soo enjoys fantasy stories: “Lord of the Rings,” “House of the Dragon,” anything magical with kings and queens involved. That’s partly why, she says, she was drawn to this season’s Broadway revival of “Camelot,” based on the Arthurian legend and opening April 13 at Lincoln Center Theater. Soo, 32, stars opposite Andrew Burnap as Guenevere, King Arthur’s wife and ally — a role that’s long been associated with Julie Andrews, who originated the role onstage in 1960.But her interest went beyond the show’s mystical underpinnings. “Most poignant to me was this idea of Camelot [as] something that we are, as a society, striving toward — this ideal place where we can have democracy and justice and freedom,” she says. “We are grappling with this question of: What is human nature? Are humans fundamentally good? Are we fundamentally bad? Why are we here?”Those themes are central to the writer Aaron Sorkin’s new book for the musical, which is woven around the classic songs from Lerner and Loewe’s sweeping score. (Sorkin has stripped away the supernatural elements of the original — no more nymphs or sorcerers — to ground the play in a medieval-era reality.) Soo’s goal, then, is to make Guenevere “a real person,” someone driven above all by a desire to be loved. She sees Andrews’s iconic performance, with her gentle soprano that cemented the cast album as a musical-theater essential, not as a dare but an invitation: “She brought a lot of herself and her charm to her roles,” Soo says. “That was an inspiration for me to do the same.”Revivals are fresh territory for Soo, who began her professional career originating characters in new works: Natasha in “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” Off Broadway in 2013; the namesake heroine in the 2017 Broadway adaptation of “Amélie”; and, most famously, Eliza in “Hamilton,” which debuted at New York’s Public Theater in 2015. But this past year, she joined the “Into the Woods” Broadway revival as Cinderella, and then did a brief run as Sarah in “Guys and Dolls” at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.Yet the new “Camelot,” directed by Bartlett Sher from a rapidly paced Sorkin-esque script, feels less like a remake than a hybrid of a golden-age classic and a contemporary play. (Sorkin also wrote “A Few Good Men,” which premiered on Broadway in 1989, and more recently adapted “To Kill a Mockingbird” for the stage in 2018.) “The book has a tempo in itself: Those deep debates and discussions that Guenevere and Arthur get to have with each other [are understood] in a different way because they’re not through song,” Soo says. “It feels more immediate … I have to focus in a way that I haven’t before.”Ahead of opening night, T asked Soo to sing and discuss one of her favorite songs: Regina Spektor’s “Samson” (2002). More

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      Sean Hayes Returns to the Piano in Broadway’s ‘Good Night, Oscar’

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      The version of Sean Hayes who arrived at a Midtown Manhattan rehearsal space on a Wednesday morning last month was the one everyone knows from his years as a television star on the series “Will & Grace” and as an entertainer. The effervescent Hayes tossed off a quip about the perceived snobbishness of the Hamptons. (“It’s like Shake Shack,” he said. “Anybody can go. It’s not that fancy.”) With similar ease, he sat at a piano and played a few measures of “Rhapsody in Blue.”But the Hayes who a short while later entered through the door of a set made to look like a 1950s-era TV dressing room was markedly different. His eyes were squinted and his posture was hunched. He occasionally twitched his head or shook his hands. He spoke with the defeated voice of a jowly man, sometimes dropping a one-liner (“Gee, I wonder who died,” he said, contemplating the flowers in his room) and sometimes becoming so vehement that his face turned red and a vein bulged from his neck.This is how Hayes alters himself to play Oscar Levant, the pianist and raconteur, in the new Broadway play “Good Night, Oscar,” which opens on April 24 at the Belasco Theater. Levant, who died in 1972, was as renowned for his interpretations of George Gershwin’s music and his roles in films like “An American in Paris” as he was for his dyspeptic appearances on TV game shows and talk shows, jesting ruefully about his struggles with mental health and prescription drug addiction.The play, written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson, imagines Levant on a fateful day in 1958 when he has finagled his way out of a psychiatric hospital to be interviewed on Jack Paar’s “Tonight Show.”Beneath its Eisenhower-era period details, “Good Night, Oscar” sets out to comment on enduring ideas about the burdens of celebrity and creative genius. Whether it succeeds will depend largely on Hayes’s ability to embody the dour Levant, a sort of public neurotic who may no longer be familiar to contemporary audiences.Oscar Levant circa 1947. He’d crack wise about the fragile state of his mental health, and once said, in answering a question about what he did for exercise, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”FPG/Archive Photos, via Getty ImagesBut as Hayes explained, these kinds of challenges are exactly what makes the play compelling to him.“If you’re not scaring yourself as an actor, what are you doing?” he said. “If everything’s safe, then the results will show that.” With this play, he added, “I’m going to swing for the fences. If it works, great. If it doesn’t, I’m still alive, right?”Hayes, 52, was sitting in a small room at the rehearsal space. He wore a zip-up sweatshirt and playfully shook his hair, a mixture of copper and silver strands, which he has grown out so it can be styled like Levant’s wavy coif.Though he rose to fame in his Emmy Award-winning role as Jack McFarland, the irrepressible “Will & Grace” sidekick, Hayes has his own complicated history as a pianist. When people in the industry are surprised to discover his musical roots, Hayes reminds them — with mock chagrin — that he played piano when he hosted the 2010 Tony Awards. “I’m like, did you not watch the Tonys?” he said. “I thought we all watched them together.”The youngest child of a mother who raised him on her own, Hayes started receiving piano training at age 5 from a neighbor in Glen Ellyn, Ill. (When his mother asked if he wanted lessons, Hayes said he replied, “I’m not doing anything else.”)By his teens, Hayes was playing Mozart sonatas and performing in competitions. But during high school and college (and a stint as music director at a dinner theater), he could feel himself being pulled away by the allure of acting — and weighed down by the pressure of classical performance.During concerts, Hayes said he found himself thinking: “The notes are the notes. These are the notes Beethoven wrote. These are the notes Chopin wrote. These are the notes Rachmaninoff wrote. And if you miss one of those notes, everybody notices.”With acting, he said, “I released myself of that pressure — and found a new pressure of always having to deliver on good material.”Similar anxieties — though amplified — prey upon the Levant depicted in “Good Night, Oscar.” Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright of “I Am My Own Wife,” described his incarnation of Levant as a Jazz Age Salieri, in thrall to George Gershwin and crushed by a self-imposed perception that he never measured up to his idol.Levant’s interviews with Paar are their own little sliver of TV history — shocking to audiences in their day and still potent for their candor. Levant would crack wise to Paar about his hospitalizations, the prescriptions he was taking or abusing, and the fragile state of his mental health. In a 1963 appearance, Paar asked him what he did for exercise. Levant answered, “I stumble and then I fall into a coma.”When Levant returned to the program a few months later, the host opened the show by telling his audience that Levant was “much better now” and that he would never “use or bring somebody out on this stage who was not completely well.”During that interview, Levant said his recent behavior had been “impeccable”: “I’ve been unconscious for the past six months,” he explained. “I’ve been doing extensive research in inertia.”Hayes starred with Debra Messing, left, and Eric McCormack, center, in “Will & Grace,” playing the irrepressible Jack McFarland.THOUGH FRIENDS HAD SUGGESTED he consider playing Levant, Hayes was not especially familiar with the pianist. As it emerged in 2009 that DreamWorks was developing a possible Gershwin biopic, intended for the director Steven Spielberg, in which Levant was a minor character, Hayes said he went so far as to commission his own hair and makeup test to see if he could at least look like Levant. (The film was not produced.)As he learned more about Levant, Hayes said he began to feel an affinity for him. “The mental health issues are in my family,” Hayes said. “Addictions are in my family. I thought, maybe I can wrap my head around this thing. As an actor, that’s what we do.”After Hayes’s Tony-nominated run in the 2010 Broadway revival of “Promises, Promises,” he and the show’s executive producer, Beth Williams, began discussing a possible Levant project for the stage. They later brought in Wright, who had been the screenwriter of the Gershwin film.Wright said he, too, was fascinated by Levant, having grown up with “a really entertaining, outrageous, brilliant father who was severely bipolar and refused medication, so Oscar’s mood swings were really familiar to me.”After a lunch meeting where Hayes demonstrated how he would play Levant, Wright said, he left “more passionate about it than ever before.”Asked how he gets himself into character, Hayes told a story of himself as a novice actor, playing an elf in a Kenny Rogers Christmas stage show. As the director increasingly asked the elf-actors to take on more of the duties of stagehands, Hayes said he told her, “You know we’re not really elves — we’re just playing elves.”In similar fashion, Hayes said, “I’m not really Oscar Levant. I’m playing Oscar Levant. This is my interpretation of Oscar Levant.”Long before the play’s 2022 debut at the Goodman Theater in Chicago, Hayes said he had been working on Levant’s voice, mannerisms, tics and physical bearing. He continues to refresh himself on those elements even now, though Hayes said he is not one of those actors who remains in character outside of rehearsals and performances.Reviewing that production for the Chicago Tribune, Chris Jones wrote that Hayes “displays talents here most of his fans will have no idea he had at his disposal,” adding that he delivers “a stunner of a lead performance: moving, empathetic, deeply emotional and slightly terrifying.”The announcement last year of the play’s Broadway transfer drew a rebuke from the playwright David Adjmi, who wrote in a Facebook post that he had persuaded Hayes to take on Levant and was commissioned by Williams to write a play for the actor.When Adjmi refused to “lighten the material,” he said Williams and Hayes replaced him with Wright while using their option on Adjmi to prevent him from further developing his play.At that time, the “Good Night, Oscar” producers said Hayes and Adjmi had parted ways over “different creative visions.” Hayes, in his interview, declined to revisit the matter. “We’ve already responded to that,” he said.Wright said that he had spoken with Adjmi “to ensure that it would not be awkward if I proceeded with the project, and he couldn’t have been more generous.”“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” Hayes said of playing the piano onstage. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”Luisa Opalesky for The New York TimesAdjmi wrote in an email that though he felt Hayes and Williams’s actions were “morally objectionable,” he told Wright that “it was not my place to tell him or any writer what job to take.” Adjmi said he later learned from his agents that Wright had taken the job.THERE REMAINS THE QUESTION of whether Hayes felt a personal connection to Levant that made him want to play him, but the actor seemed comfortable cultivating this air of ambiguity.Jason Bateman, a longtime friend of Hayes’s and a co-host of their popular SmartLess podcast, said he did not necessarily notice that Hayes was striving to play damaged dramatic figures.“If you’re asking, have I sensed a darker, more mysterious side of him, I would say no,” Bateman said. “Being able to sincerely be in a place of joy, openness and honesty already takes a great deal of emotional and spiritual intelligence.”Having made his own transition from comedies like “Arrested Development” to thrillers like “Ozark,” Bateman said it can be sufficiently satisfying for an actor “just sticking around long enough to show audiences the rest of what’s in your trick trunk.”Wright proposed an explanation rooted in a connection he felt he shared with Hayes. “We both have cultivated some pretty affable, convivial exteriors,” Wright explained. “But I think that’s a survival mechanism, being gay men in a hostile world and needing to be liked, to keep ourselves safe a lot of times. That conviviality conceals some darker waters, and that’s how he accesses Oscar.”Hayes remained coy. “In order to play the darker side of Oscar, I do tap into certain aspects and experiences of my life,” he said, “but those are between me and Oscar.”In the rehearsal studio, Hayes said he found it fitting and illuminating that, having set aside his musical career so long ago, he should choose a role that requires him to play piano in the guise of someone filled with self-doubt about his own proficiency with the instrument.“I have to now perform in front of a live audience,” he said. “But it’s different this time. Because I don’t care if I miss a note.”If Hayes makes a mistake, he can always say that he was doing it in character. “It’s organic to the material in the play,” he said. “And I’ve finally realized, nobody’s perfect.” More