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      Kristin Chenoweth Lives for 3 A.M. FaceTime Calls and ‘Funny Girl’

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      The actress is returning for the second season of “Schmigadoon!” Reality TV and occasional shopping sprees have kept her going in the meantime.If you are Kristin Chenoweth’s friend, she will call you in the middle of the night, and it will be a FaceTime.“I love seeing people’s expressions,” she said during a phone interview from her Manhattan home, where she lives with her fiancé, the musician Josh Bryant.The Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress and singer, 54, is known for originating the role of Glinda in the Broadway musical “Wicked” 20 years ago. She will be back on the small screen, playing a witch of another sort — the moral scourge Mildred Layton in “Schmigadoon!,” which returns for its second season on April 7.Now set in a place called Schmicago, the Apple TV+ musical comedy will give Chenoweth the opportunity to show off her helium-tinged soprano — and maybe, as she did in the first season, to sing another 18-page song in one continuous take. “It was definitely one of the more challenging parts I’ve played,” she said.Earlier this year, she released “I’m No Philosopher, but I Got Thoughts,” a collection of inspirational thoughts and stories that she wrote during the height of the pandemic. “We’ve all been through a load of crap,” she said, “and the only way I could figure to stay creative, besides sing, was write.”Chenoweth talked with us about calf roping, mental health days, Kathy Najimy and the one thing she needs in her hotel rooms. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Funny Girl’I’m so proud of Lea Michele, and Tovah Feldshuh blew me away. It takes a lot to step into big shoes, and Lea did it with aplomb.2Bubble BathsI love a Nest candle, a Voluspa candle, then getting in and putting on my iTunes and just listening to music. I’ll FaceTime some of my best friends from the tub when I’m calm and getting ready to go to bed. I like being in the water; it relaxes and rejuvenates me. When I’m in a hotel that doesn’t have a bathtub, I’m devastated.3Mental Health DaysI try to do everything at a high level. But then three months ago, I crashed and burned and got wiped out. Now, I take walks on the beach, in a mall, around New York. I’ve learned the value of being by yourself, playing piano for just you, reading a book — for God’s sake, wearing elastic-waistband pants for a week straight. I’m still going to go 90 percent all the time, I’m just not going to 110 percent all the time. And that’s OK.4Reality TVI live for all the “Housewives” — “The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City” is giving me life — as well as “Below Deck,” anything on TLC and Bravo, and “Married at First Sight,” because we all know that’s a disaster. I like to be able to check out, and if I fall asleep and wake up 10 minutes later, I’m not missing a whole lot.5Cecily StrongWe were roommates for Season 2 of “Schmigadoon!” She had a big house, and I lived in the basement because I’m a vampire. We stayed up every night talking. Both of us feel like that we would be in true crime or forensic science if we weren’t actors. Of course, Cecily would probably be a great president, too — during the election, during “Schmigadoon!,” she was the one keeping us informed about everything. She opened my mind to things I didn’t know I cared about.6Making Music With JoshFor a year during Covid, we sat at home at night and wrote songs and played music and had great talks. That introspection and being together solidified our relationship. And it confirmed what I already knew to be true — I’d found my person.7JournalingI love to write what my dreams are, and also about my deepest, darkest thoughts. It might spark an idea for a book, a song or a play.8Watching My Niece Calf-RopingMy 26-year-old niece, Emily, lives in California, Mo., and she loves to rope. She is so good. It’s something I could never do — I’d be so scared.9Phone Calls With Kathy NajimyWe talk about our activism, our romantic lives, her awesome, talented daughter who’s going to be a huge star any second. I call her when I have a crisis or pain, like when Kirstie Alley died. I was friendly with Kirstie — we’d been texting just two months before. Kathy, who worked with her on “Veronica’s Closet,” was absolutely devastated, as was I.10ShoppingIf I’m feeling low, I just want to go to Nordstrom and window shop, or Saks or Bloomingdale’s, if I can stand the stairs! I love seeing what designers like Christian Siriano and Pamella Roland are doing — what’s in, will work on me, what will not work on me. It’s not great for my wallet or my bank account or my retirement, but I don’t care because it makes me happy. More

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      The Key to Gerri on ‘Succession’? ‘Inside She’s a Nervous Wreck’

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      For decades the New York theater world paid homage to J. Smith-Cameron, a veteran stage actress who has often been compared to Carole Lombard for her precise timing and comic verve. When she wasn’t doing Molière or Shakespeare, she was impressing critics and her fellow actors with her performances in plays by Paul Rudnick, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley.Now her hard-won local fame has been eclipsed by her breakout role on “Succession,” the HBO drama about a venal Murdoch-like family locked in a “King Lear”-like power struggle. As Gerri Kellman, the long-suffering general counsel and consigliere to Logan Roy, the vicious, vacillating patriarch played by Brian Cox, Ms. Smith-Cameron has turned an ancillary player into a surprisingly complex character. It’s a grown-up role for a grown-up woman.Gerri’s cool gaze, raised eyebrows and clipped interjections, along with her shrewd analyses of corporate shenanigans, have made her an avatar of female power for women of all ages, especially young professionals who find that attaining success in their fields may require them to tiptoe around monstrous male egos. As a result, Ms. Smith-Cameron has gone from a darling of the stage to social media star, with memes galore and Twitter accounts dedicated to Gerri’s every eye roll.“Characters like hers are often written as these barracuda businesswomen or hard-boiled lady detectives, people who are impenetrable or invincible,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “What I like about Gerri is she’s very powerful, but inside she’s a nervous wreck. She’s not impervious to things. That’s why I think she strikes a note. There’s a vulnerability to her and a jittery, thinking-on-her-feet quality. She’s not just coming in and blasting people.”On a brisk March afternoon, Ms. Smith-Cameron, who goes by “J.,” settled in with a cup of coffee onto a squashy blue velvet sofa in her living room. Brownie, a grizzled and wary 12-year-old terrier mix, was napping, fitfully, among the pillows, occasionally rousing herself to bark at a guest.For the last eight years, Ms. Smith-Cameron and her husband, Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright, screenwriter and director, have rented this cozy, two-story apartment in a Federal-style townhouse in downtown Manhattan from the actor Matthew Broderick. Mr. Broderick and Mr. Lonergan have been pals since high school, and they and Ms. Smith-Cameron have worked together, on and off, for decades.Ms. Smith-Cameron with Mr. Broderick in a 1999 production of Emlyn Williams’s “Night Must Fall” at the Lyceum Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s been thrilling to watch J. cross over from a fixture on the New York stage into the collective consciousness,” Mr. Broderick said in a phone interview. “She’s so smart and her humor is so slyly funny. She doesn’t miss a joke.”There are a few Broderick touches in the apartment, notably paintings by Mr. Broderick’s mother, Patricia. “This one is called something like, ‘No matter how old or sick they are, no one likes to look a wreck,’” Ms. Smith-Cameron said, pointing out a piece above the fireplace, an expressionist image of a stately woman in disarray. “Isn’t it great? It’s so thought through.”Gerri has been good to the Smith-Cameron-Lonergan household.“She’s been supporting us for the last six years,” said Mr. Lonergan, who is known for the films “Manchester by the Sea” and “You Can Count On Me.” “No qualms with her whatsoever. Whatever she needs to get done it’s fine with me.”He mused about what, if anything, the character has in common with his wife.“J. has pointed out that Gerri is very anxious,” he said. “J. is sometimes anxious but not in a maneuvering way — she just gets anxious and overwhelmed. Her wheels are always turning. When you hug her, she’s very nicely hugging you back, but you get the sense she’s thinking of other things.”“I’m sorry,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said.It was Ms. Smith-Cameron’s rapport with Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, the youngest, sassiest Roy, that inspired a “Succession” subplot that completely unhinged the internet. Gerri and Roman were in a jousting and affectionate mentor-mentee relationship as she took him under her wing. But the show’s writers, noting the actors’ off-camera banter, pushed the relationship further. (Off the set, the prankish Mr. Culkin teases Ms. Smith-Cameron as relentlessly as Roman does Gerri. This summer, during a cast dinner, she said, she was so exasperated with him she threw a drink in his face.)Ms. Smith-Cameron, with Kieran Culkin, in a scene from Season 3 of “Succession.” She went off script to call his character a “little slime puppy” in one episode.HBOMidway through the second season, Roman’s Gerri-baiting and his off-color jokes, and Gerri’s snappy retorts, had morphed into a queasy dominatrix-submissive scenario. During a phone call with Roman, Gerri realizes, to her horror, that her tart insults are turning the conversation into phone sex, at least on his end. Ms. Smith-Cameron found herself improvising, which was how the phrase “little slime puppy,” a put-down she coined on the spot, entered the popular lexicon. Or at least the vernacular of “Succession” fanatics.By the end of Season 3, things had gone completely off the rails. Roman tried to text Gerri a close-up of his anatomy, only to misfire, sending the photo to his father. For the first time in her career, Gerri found herself in a vulnerable position. That precariousness, and her response to it, will define her path in the show’s fourth and final season, which has its first episode Sunday.“Gerri is in a restless, insecure place through the whole season, but also, I feel, getting wise to her heft,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “I always felt like there was something kind of on the boil with her. I can say that it’s the first time in her career that she’s not felt on solid ground — and she’s angry about it. She’s angry with both Roman and Logan. She’s of an age and has accrued money and could easily retire, but she’s not the type. She’s a workaholic and I think she feels like she’s in her prime. People are always asking me, ‘Why does she take it?’ I think it’s thrilling for her, it’s a high, like surfing in a dangerous sea.“I don’t know that I could be Gerri in real life, and yet acting is very insecure,” she continued. “You have to go out and kill for food every time.”Ms. Smith-Cameron started acting in plays in New York in the 1980s. “I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show,” she said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMs. Smith-Cameron, 65, was born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Ky., the youngest of three children, and grew up in Greenville, S.C. Her father was an architect and engineer; her mother worked at Head Start and as an assistant librarian. Ms. Smith-Cameron studied at the Florida State University School of Theater in Tallahassee but dropped out, because she was working so much in regional theater and small films.She changed her name in stages: First to J. Smith, because Jeannie, as she was known, seemed too flimsy for an actor. She then exchanged Smith for Cameron, a family name, for additional heft. The hyphenate Smith-Cameron came a bit later, and by accident, after a director printed her name on a film poster that way.In the early 80s, Ms. Smith-Cameron moved to Manhattan and has worked to growing acclaim ever since. In the 1997 Off Broadway production of Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” she played an irresistible con artist, delivering a manic mash-up of Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly in a role that won her an Obie. Ben Brantley called her performance “deliriously pleasurable” in his review for The New York Times.“In my 60s, to have this attention, it’s just weird,” she said. “It’s not like I didn’t have notice before, but I always did these off-the-beaten track things. I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show.”Ms. Smith-Cameron has long been a booster of independent film. You can see her right now in “The Year Between,” by Alex Heller, a comedic drama based on the filmmaker’s own experience with bipolar disorder, which caused her to drop out of college and move back home with her parents. Ms. Smith-Cameron plays the tart Midwestern mother, and Steve Buscemi is her kindly husband. It’s not the first time they have been married onscreen. “He’s so great,” she said of Mr. Buscemi. “We both love to champion independent movies because they’re not built on the premise of making money. They’re exhausting, you have to work really hard fast, but when it fits, it’s a joy.”The actress in an ensemble scene from the 2022 film “The Year Between.”Gravitas Ventures“J. lifts people up,” said Zoe Winters, another fine stage actor scooped up by the “Succession” team who plays Kerry, Logan Roy’s immaculate assistant. “I’ll get texts from her that say, ‘You’re quite something. You’re dazzling.’ She has an endless capacity for that. Ultimately, I think what she’s always trying to do is make people feel good and make really good art.”Ms. Smith-Cameron and Mr. Lonergan met cute, as she put it, while working on a series of one-act plays in the mid-90s. She said she found him appealingly grumpy and quietly hilarious.As she recalled, “I was like, ‘Why have I never met this actor? He’s of an age, he’s really good, he’s really smart! Is he gay? Is he married?’ I began to do a little research.”She learned he was a playwright, acting in another’s scene, who had also written what she thought was the best play of the program. When they collided one night on the stairs of the theater, she complimented his work, comparing it to a William Inge play. When he looked blank, she challenged him, saying, “Don’t you know who William Inge is?”“I had been married and divorced in my 20s,” she said, “and I was going through a chilly spell. I didn’t think I’d fall in love or get married or have kids. So I was a little bitter and a little saucy. But I had never been this brazen.”The couple married in 2000; their daughter, Nellie, is 21.Ms. Cameron-Smith and Mr. Lonergan at the Season 4 premiere of “Succession” at Lincoln Center this month.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“There’s something conspiratorial about J., as if she can’t wait to let the world in on the most delicious secret,” said Mr. Rudnick, who cast her in his 1994 Off Broadway comedy, “The Naked Truth.”“She was helplessly, magnetically funny,” Mr. Rudnick continued. “I kept making this one speech longer, just so I could watch J. perform it. She developed a brilliant set of almost balletic gestures, which she informed me were called ‘puppet hands.’ And over the course of an especially long rehearsal, we developed a system where if J. performed her monologue flawlessly, I’d give her a chocolate chip cookie. She of course ended up with an entire bag of Chips Ahoy!”Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and an executive producer of “Succession,” said he had taken delight in Ms. Smith-Cameron’s stage work for years. Even though she has often been known for playing more flamboyant characters, he is not surprised by the nuanced quality she has brought to her character.“For Gerri, J. found this astringent comic tone that suggests she’s in on the joke of working for these entitled jerks who think they know what they’re doing but often have no idea,” he said. “She’s their corporate babysitter even as she has to be subordinate to them. There’s a tragicomedy to her situation, and J. is an actor who can deliver on that.”Ms. Smith-Cameron at home.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMr. Lonergan, who had been puttering in the kitchen, wandered back into the living room, still mulling over the question of whether his wife has anything in common with the Waystar Royco general counsel.“The other thing I was going to say is, J. doesn’t take full command of things but they kind of go the way she wants them to go, sooner or later,” he said. “She’s very strong-willed. At first I would have said there wasn’t any similarity between J. and Gerri, but they both have their eyes on the main point. Both are extremely observant and notice shifts in what’s going on around them. They’re both interested in substance, and neither of them needs to be the center of attention in a room — and nobody is smarter than either of them in a room.”Ms. Smith-Cameron was beaming. “Thank you,” she said. More

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      Toheeb Jimoh on ‘Ted Lasso’ and His Pretty Good Few Years

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      In the Season 2 finale of “Ted Lasso,” Toheeb Jimoh’s character, Sam Obisanya, stands in front of the vacant storefront he has just bought. “What’s it going to be?” asks the woman who has handed the soccer player his keys. “A Nigerian restaurant,” he says, a broad smile on his face. This moment is a turning point of sorts for Sam, a mark of his ambition and growth from the young man viewers met in the “Ted Lasso” pilot who had recently arrived in Britain.So it’s fitting that Jimoh, 25, chose Enish, a West African restaurant in Brixton, in South London, a stone’s throw from the actor’s childhood home, for an interview. Dressed in a black sweater and matching cargo pants and tucking into rice and ayamase, a spicy meat stew, Jimoh said that Sam has had a “beautiful arc” over the past two seasons.“If you had told me at the start of Season 1 that Sam would be a business owner, one of the stars of the team, and dating the boss, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. Sam has also gone from a minor character to one of the show’s leads, with his positive attitude and strong work ethic making him a favorite among fans.The past couple of years have been pretty good to Jimoh, too, who graduated from drama school in 2018. Last year he was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Sam, and this month he can be seen onscreen in two major TV shows: the third season of “Ted Lasso,” which started airing on Apple TV+ on March 15, and “The Power,” adapted from the British writer Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel of the same name, which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on March 31.In the upcoming Amazon Prime Video show “The Power,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian journalist.Amazon Prime Video“The Power” is a science fiction drama that considers what would happen if women became more physically dominant than men. Jimoh plays Tunde, a young journalist documenting the revolutions that come as women gain new strength, and his character embodies the vulnerability of men in the face of this female power.Tim Bricknell, an executive producer on “The Power,” said in a recent interview that there were two sides of Jimoh “that made him perfect for this particular role.” The first, he said, is the actor’s “natural charm,” which is integral to Tunde’s character. But the second is Jimoh’s curiosity. “He wants to know what everybody on the crew is doing and is always asking questions,” Bricknell said. “That is quite rare in successful young actors, which makes him perfect for playing a journalist.”In preparing for the role, Jimoh spoke to his female friends “about routine things that they do to make sure that they’re safe when they go out,” he said. “I was a bit sheepish because I hadn’t realized that.” He sees the book and the TV adaptation as containing “many really interesting questions about the relationships between men and women, society’s relationship with power and how power corrupts people.”In both “The Power” and “Ted Lasso,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian. The actor — whose parents are Nigerian and who spent some time in the country when he was growing up — is attracted to roles like these that allow him to “speak about my family and culture,” he said. But he also likes to choose roles that explore wider societal topics. His first major acting role came in 2020, when he starred in “Anthony,” a 90-minute BBC drama about  Anthony Walker, a teenager who was killed in a racist attack in England in 2005.“You can tell from the roles I’ve ended up doing in my career that I was also a kid who would have done politics if I wasn’t an actor,” Jimoh said.To become an actor, “I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesHe studied politics in his final years of high school, along with law and history, with acting as his “easy subject on the side,” he said. He didn’t consider it as a career option until a teacher pulled him aside to suggest he could be an actor.“I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said. He didn’t know anyone in the acting world, and his parents both worked in hospitals — his father as a caterer and his mother as a health care assistant. “All the grown ups that I knew had very, very normal jobs, and that was the blueprint,” he said.Soon he was performing in youth productions and had a gig as an usher at the Young Vic theater. One day, sitting across from his friend at school during a lunch break, Jimoh threw his history homework in the trash and decided to pursue acting seriously. “I refused to have a Plan B,” he said, adding that he “harassed my teachers into watching my audition speeches.”In a school newsletter at the time, one of Jimoh’s teachers wrote that, “In all the years that I have been teaching, never have I come across someone who has such raw talent at such an early age” as Jimoh.He went on to get an undergraduate degree in drama from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which has an abundance of high-profile alumni, including Orlando Bloom and Michaela Coel.Sam (Jimoh) and Roy (Brett Goldstein) in “Ted Lasso.” Goldstein said Jimoh had “integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Apple TV+The actor and comedian Brett Goldstein, who plays the former soccer player Roy Kent on “Ted Lasso” and is now a close friend of Jimoh’s, said he believed that the younger actor’s success was partly because of his selective approach to work. “He turns down as much as he takes,” Goldstein, 42, said in a recent interview. “He has integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Between bites of ayamase, Jimoh said he hoped future opportunities would allow him to show different sides of himself. “I’m just interested in what the story is for that young man, and why it is interesting to tell,” he said of how he chooses his gigs. “There’s a plethora of work out there, and I just want to dip my toe in everything.”From June, he will be starring in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” at London’s Almeida Theater. He sees the play’s meaning as rooted in “believing young people and their feelings,” noting that he had a friend who died by suicide when he was 15.“When you’re young, you feel things so deeply,” he said, “and older people might look at that and think it’s a bit naïve, but it leads to stuff like this.”At the moment, Jimoh said he often finds himself having to perform like Sam when he meets people who recognize him from the show.“But there is more to me than the squeaky clean ‘Ted Lasso,’” he said, “and I’m excited to show that part of me as well.” More

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      in Television

      Aaron Sorkin Battled a Stroke as He Reimagined ‘Camelot’

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

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

      by

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

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      The Problem With Celebrity Travel Shows? The Celebrities.

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      What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up.In the resplendent green of Costa Rica, a peak reaches toward the clouds. Eugene Levy gazes up at it in awe. “That’s a volcano,” his host explains, adding that it last erupted about 10 years ago. Levy looks unsettled. “I was hoping it would be more dormant,” he says. The understated delivery is classic Levy, but it feels different, less endearing, in this context. The premise of Apple TV+’s “The Reluctant Traveler” is that the celebrity actor hasn’t liked to travel in the past, but is now pushing himself out of his comfort zone with televised trips to places like Finland, Italy and Japan. With that, he joins an increasingly established subgenre: the celebrity travel show. Netflix has “Down to Earth With Zac Efron.” TBS had Conan O’Brien’s “Conan Without Borders.” CNN had “Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy,” which was both a celebrity travel show and a celebrity food show — another thriving subgenre, with entries from Selena Gomez, Amy Schumer, Jon Favreau and Paris Hilton.The idea behind these programs is the same as ever: You settle in and watch your host learn about new places. It’s just that, in these shows, it’s the host’s very celebrity that inevitably becomes the star around which everything revolves. Consider Levy and that Costa Rican peak: You’re offered one moment to admire a beautiful scene before the active volcano becomes the setup for celebrity quipping. The shows’ stars can rarely help drawing attention this way, whether it’s with solemn head-nodding or relentless cleverness. O’Brien, traveling in Armenia, is so shameless in his pursuit of laughs that he almost seems to embarrass his Armenian-American assistant. Stanley Tucci, eating cantucci in Florence, has to remark that “anything that ends in ‘tucci,’ I like.” The celebrity travelogue doubles as proof of just how hard it is for performers to subordinate themselves to their surroundings.The point of featuring celebrities seems obvious enough; in a crowded TV market, a familiar host can lure people to watch a new show. The trade-off, of course, is that the format and subject matter — whether travel or food or, say, home renovation — will find itself drifting toward the formal demands of a reality show, sacrificing its capacity to inform to its host’s own shtick or charisma. The things we see must serve the narratives and characters of the stars, providing opportunities to play to or against their images, drawing out their particular moods or charms. A result is a suffocating and often superficial take on how fascinating or delicious everything is. Eventually you come to suspect that each show would feel functionally identical no matter where you sent the celebrity — that Stanley Tucci could tour America’s bowling alleys, or Zac Efron could sample Midwestern diners, or vice versa, without much changing. This is happening across the TV world: What used to be meaningfully informative programming, delivered by personable but only tangentially notable hosts, is gradually being swallowed up by celebrity.I still remember the first time I traveled abroad, and the feeling I had emerging from the Paris-Nord train station to behold one of the world’s most beautiful cities. It made me feel alien and bracingly helpless. I was an outsider. That was the whole point of my being there. That decentered feeling never really went away, neither on that trip nor on later ones. I wouldn’t want it to.Celebrity travel shows tend to evoke something close to the opposite of that feeling. This is not to say that you can’t learn anything from them. It’s just that the celebrity at the center will generally steal the spotlight from the locale itself. Levy, interestingly enough, seems to exhibit some self-awareness about this phenomenon; per his show’s premise, he seems, at times, to progress from fear of travel to an embrace of travel’s helplessness. In southern Utah, he spends time with his guide in the quiet of night, discussing the stars and the spirituality of the desert. It’s a striking contrast to your typical celebrity fare, in that it seems to capture Levy giving himself over to the unfamiliar in a strikingly vulnerable way.But it’s fleeting. The show has Levy spending a lot of time at luxury hotels, where fame affords him deferential treatment. Earlier in the Utah episode, he spends breakfast chatting with a chef (who is making one very elevated pancake) about whether he’s ever cooked for Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Much of the series revolves around this kind of celebrity-centric riffing. The show’s entire premise, after all, revolves around Levy’s own experiences and hang-ups, not the curiosities of a viewer or a would-be traveler. Offered “crocodile schnitzel” at Kruger National Park in South Africa, Levy tells his guide, “I’m going to enjoy watching you eat that,” and quips that he’ll just take a vodka-tonic. In Lisbon, his guide tells him the Portuguese people like to explore the world, and asks if Levy does, too. The actor says that “adventure is my middle name,” and that world exploration is “in my nature,” but he’s then seen confessing his deceit to the camera: “That’s where acting comes in. You know, when you can hide ineptitude on a scale like that, give me an Oscar.” He is traveling as a character in his own travel series, all while ostensibly trying to break free from that character’s limitations and experience new places — which he can never quite do, because the show is ultimately about the character, not the places.Travel stories have often benefited from a guide, from Matsuo Bashō’s “The Narrow Road to the Deep North” in the 17th century to Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” or Pico Iyer’s “The Lady and the Monk” in the 20th to Anthony Bourdain’s “No Reservations” and “Parts Unknown” in the 21st. (Bourdain became a celebrity, but he had a curiosity and humility, an authenticity in his travels that could make him feel like he wasn’t.) These figures serve as proxies and narrators and cultural synthesizers, both standing in for us and offering us their impressions. When we come to trust them, it’s often precisely because they know how to step out of the way and help us engage with the places they’re exploring. The same goes for any other topic. We know names like “Julia Child” and “Bob Ross” because of how compellingly those people served their subjects, not because of their pre-existing star power. And, I suppose, because nobody at the time thought to develop “Learning to Paint With Mr. T.”I’m inclined to say the ideal travel show would merely be a video montage with someone reading a guidebook over it. The less narrative basis, the better. “Rick Steves’ Europe” and “Big City, Little Budget,” with Oneika Raymond, may be two series that come closest to that ideal, in that they’re basically video guidebooks. The hosts subordinate themselves to the places they visit. They aim to show people why to travel, and what it’s like — not to entertain them along the way.Not so today. In one episode of “The Reluctant Traveler,” Levy visits the Maldives, where he meets a local who seems eager to dispense some wisdom. “You really need to connect — remove your shoes, feel the sand,” he tells Levy, as the camera shows his bare feet and Levy’s footwear. You get the distinct feeling he’s saying this, in part, because it’s what Levy wants to hear. Still: Point taken. To center the place, you must decenter yourself. In travel, as in all things, fame is a distraction.Source photograph (Levy): Maarten De Boer/Contour by Getty Images.Nicholas Cannariato is a writer living in Chicago. He last wrote about common birds for the magazine. More

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      Lauren Ambrose Just Wants to Go to French Clown School

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      The actress, who is joining the cast of “Yellowjackets,” talks about British sitcoms, the “On Being” podcast and gardening at night.“What creature is that?” Lauren Ambrose asked, craning her neck during a video interview from her home in the Berkshires. “I see this, like, crazy hawk sitting on a tree outside my window. It just caught my eye.”The setting was fitting, since Ambrose is about to become bonded with, and haunted by, the natural world. Joining the cast of “Yellowjackets,” Showtime’s thriller about a girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness and pushed to the extremes, she plays the adult version of Van, short for Vanessa, one of the lucky and savvy few to make it to middle age.Ambrose, who also stars in the Apple TV+ series “Servant,” was excited by the opportunity to help create a character (played in her teenage years by Liv Hewson) and by the women she said she’s grown up watching.“I love looking at the call sheet and seeing that the top chunk is all of these incredible women who I’ve admired and whose careers I’ve followed — who’ve influenced me so much as actors,” she said.“I’ve also never had the experience of being the fan of something and then going in and joining it,” Ambrose added.Before the show kicks off its second season on Sunday, she talked about what moves and comforts her, including crying at the French circus, her love of gardening and the podcast that puts her at ease. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1‘Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment’There’s this guy Michael Lipson who’s one of the smartest men alive — a true sage. He worked with Mother Teresa in Calcutta and worked at Harlem Hospital in the pediatric AIDS unit. He’s a scholar and a teacher and he wrote this book “Be: An Alphabet of Astonishment,” which synthesizes his lifetime of wisdom and learning. It’s sort of this miraculous little thing. It’ll fill you.2Domi and JD BeckThey’re both young, both prodigies. My son just turned 16 and he’s a very serious jazz guitar player. We had a blast at their concert. In this attention economy, what I love about them is to see young people who have obviously logged so much practice. And that they’re making the music they want to make.3‘The Trip’This British sitcom gives me a feeling of being backstage or being at the bar after the play. I love it. It’s got everything I want. It’s got impressions and big ideas and ego. The egoism of being an actor is wonderful to laugh at. And it’s just painful and funny and sublime. There are people in my life who I speak to almost exclusively in lines from “The Trip.”4Cirque D’HiverWe were just in Paris and went to the French circus, and it was the best thing we did. The band was unbelievable, the acts were unbelievable. The clowning was, like, the greatest I’ve ever seen in my life. I’m such a nut, I was the only one there crying because I was so moved by the clowns, who are such geniuses in their silent storytelling. I’m like, I have to go to French clown school. Basically, it’s all I want to do, to be a clown in the French circus.5GardeningIt’s a big part of my life, and of my year. There were times last year while I was working on “Servant” when I was racing home and planting seeds with a headlamp at night. I was like, I’ve got to get this stuff in! It’s been a humbling venture, maybe the most humbling there is. Just watching the garden change throughout the seasons is an amazing thing. That first day when you get salad is kind of a holy day because there’s really nothing like it. It’s like a whole other food, salad from the garden.6Krista TippettI basically can’t imagine my life without “On Being.” She’s such an inspiration to me, and I love that her brand of journalism, her brand of interviewing, is a conversation. Krista holds the space and lets there be silences. For me, with traveling for work, it’s been really important. I get really carsick, and sometimes I’ll play the same episode over and over and let it drift in and out of my consciousness.7Children’s BooksOur kids are a little older now — 10 and 16 — but there are books that we’ve read thousands of times in our house. Some of them are so deeply in our DNA that sometimes we speak in children’s books, to the point where we have a game of who can guess what book that’s from? “Pippi Longstocking” by Astrid Lindgren, “Frog and Toad” by Arnold Lobel, “In the Night Kitchen” by Maurice Sendak — these are essential in our family, not only the words but the imagery as well.8The Center for Humane TechnologyThe people behind this organization have an optimism that we can have a healthier relationship as a society to tech, which can be unhealthy and destructive to people’s lives and democracies. I am just so grateful for the work that they’re doing, especially as a mother of a teenager and a soon-to-be teenager.9Grateful LivingAs much as I eschew technology, there are some pretty great things out there. The top is grateful.org, which was started by an Austrian monk who purports that gratitude and noticing all of the small, tiny moments is the key to life. There are all kinds of wonderful practices and videos and blessings and mediations. A morning ritual for me, or as close to one as there is, is looking at the word for the day. It’s one of the great interweb experiences.10CatsWe’ve always had cats; they’ve taught my children and me gentleness. I love that a little tiny house cat has the exact same behaviors as a lion or tiger. I love the idea of living with a predator. And they’re just so funny. Each cat has such a distinct personality. I’m so grateful that life on earth includes the ability to inhabit the world with kitty cats. More

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      ‘Rye Lane’ Aims to Show You a Real London Love Story

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      Like so many great romantic comedies, “Rye Lane” opens with a meet-cute.In the stalls of a unisex bathroom at an exhibition opening, Dom (David Jonsson) is stalking his ex-girlfriend on his phone and weeping. Yas (Vivian Oparah), in a nearby stall, hears his tears and asks if he’s OK. This brief exchange through the cubicle walls begins an unexpectedly long, and eventful, day for the Londoners.The film’s writers, Nathan Bryon and Tom Melia, felt “Rye Lane” needed to somehow open in an art gallery, the pair said in a recent interview. Bryon said that Black people — like Yas and Dom — are rarely shown in the art world on film and TV.Opening the movie “in that space, with this group of cool, beautiful-looking Black people, that to me feels so special,” he said.Dom (Jonsson) and Yas (Oparah), foreground, meet at an art exhibition, a setting in which the writers felt it was important to see the characters.Searchlight PicturesThis opening is one of many ways the creators of “Rye Lane,” which opens in theaters in Britain on Friday and will come to Hulu in the United States on March 31, aim to tell a love story set in South London that feels true to their experiences, and their city.“The story is really simple. It’s two people walking around, talking about their breakups,” said Raine Allen-Miller, the film’s director, in an interview. “They meet at the wrong time, but also the perfect time.”Dom, who is heartbroken after his girlfriend left him for his best friend, is timid and openly emotional, which Jonsson particularly admires. “I love his vulnerability. I think that there’s something quite gorgeous about a young Black man being straight-up heartbroken,” Jonsson said in an interview. “I’ve been heartbroken, but would I have allowed myself to go into a restroom and cry my eyes out? Probably not.”In contrast, Yas — who has also recently come out of a relationship, for reasons that unfold as the film does — is energetic, and prefers to offer a more curated version of herself.The pair spend the day wandering around Peckham and Brixton, two lively and multicultural South London neighborhoods a short bus ride from each other. “Rye Lane” takes its title from a main street in Peckham, and these two neighborhoods become central characters in the film.Dom and Yas stumble across scenarios and tableaus that celebrate the area’s quirkiness: a man dressed in mismatched clothing, including large animal jewelry, hands out social justice fliers; a woman in a bunny costume, reminiscent of Bridget Jones, smokes a cigarette outside a large house; at one point, a person in a cowboy outfit skips past.The film’s director, Raine Allen-Miller, said she was “trying to make a film that is a funny, happy day in South London.”Suzie Howell for The New York TimesBryon and Melia said they initially envisioned the two characters strolling through Camden, a popular part of north London, also known for its exuberance. But when they sent Allen-Miller the script, she said she would only join the team if the film (her directorial debut) was set in South London. She wanted to “almost write a love letter” to the area, she said, having moved there at 12 to live with her father and grandmother. “One of my fondest memories is walking around Brixton Market with my grandma and getting Jamaican spices,” she said.Melia had previously lived in Brixton, and felt the location still “matched what we were going for.” The script’s first draft “was a bit more like ‘Before Sunrise,’ insofar as it could almost be one shot,” he said. “By the time Raine read it, it had developed a bit further away from that anyway.”The finished film is shot in a saturated color palette, and in parts with a fisheye camera lens. The dreamy, joyful atmosphere is in stark contrast with how Peckham and Brixton were once depicted in the mainstream British press. In 2007, The Guardian reported that “for more than a generation,” Peckham had “been linked with drugs, gangs and violent murders.”Recently, these areas in South London have also experienced significant gentrification, with house prices rising and wealthier people moving in, inadvertently hurting longstanding locals. In the upcoming book “All The Houses I’ve Ever Lived In,” the journalist Kieran Yates details how, while living in Peckham in 2017, she witnessed “the sheer speed at which wealthy property developers saw an opportunity to move in.” She later moved to Brixton, where an “influx of restaurants, farmer’s markets, galleries, cafes and bars has led to a spike in rent,” she wrote.The film has a dreamy, joyful atmosphere and is shot in a saturated color palette.Chris Harris/Searchlight PicturesIn making “Rye Lane,” Allen-Miller said she was “trying to make a film that is a funny, happy day in South London,” before the effects of gentrification made the area completely unrecognizable. “I just wanted to put it on a plinth, and capture the bits of it that are beautiful and special,” she added.This celebration is helped by cameos from well-known figures in Britain: the comedians Munya Chawawa and Michael Dapaah, the “It’s a Sin” actor Omari Douglas and the reality TV star Fredrik Ferrier. But one actor will be familiar to all viewers: Serving burritos in a shop named Love Guac’tually is the godfather of rom-coms himself, Colin Firth.Early in production, having a Firth cameo felt like a pipe dream to the writers. But the film’s executive producer, Sophie Meyer, had worked with the actor on the 2007 British comedy “St. Trinian’s,” and sent him a text. “We were like, ‘Yeah, good luck’,” Melia said. But Firth agreed, and was “such a good sport,” Byron said. “It is also such a lovely nod to rom-coms for us.”A small service-industry role like that “would normally maybe be the only person of color in a different film,” Melia said. Here, a white Oscar winner is playing it.Whatever the viewer’s knowledge of London and its various neighborhoods, the creators of “Rye Lane” hope the film will offer a fresh (and fun) perspective on the city.“The more traditional rom-coms show Londoners by the London Eye or Tower Bridge. But, let’s be honest, most Londoners are not having a pint by Tower Bridge because it will cost you 15 pounds,” Bryon said. “We wanted the movie and the location to feel personal to the audience who know it, and also to introduce Rye Lane to those coming to London.” More