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      Everett Quinton, a Force in Downtown Theater, Dies at 71

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      He took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after the death of his partner, Charles Ludlam, in 1987. His specialty was playing women, but his range was wide.Everett Quinton, a versatile mainstay of the downtown theater scene in New York as an actor, director and, for decades, leader of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company, died on Monday in Brooklyn. He was 71.The cause was glioblastoma, a fast-moving cancer, Mr. Quinton’s friend Julia Campanelli said, speaking on behalf of his sister Mary Ann Quinton.Mr. Quinton was especially adept at playing women, including the nasty stepmother in “Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” which toured the country early in this century. But he took on a range of roles male and female, onstage and occasionally on television or in films — in Oliver Stone’s prison drama “Natural Born Killers” (1994), he was an unpleasant deputy warden.It was a career he had not been expecting in 1975 when he met Charles Ludlam, a playwright, actor and director who had founded the Ridiculous company (one of several in the era that worked the campy, gender-bending genre known as Theater of the Ridiculous) in 1967 in Greenwich Village, and who was a dynamic part of the avant-garde theater world.“I was just cruising Christopher Street on a cold February night,” Mr. Quinton recalled in a 2001 interview with The New York Times. “He gave me his phone number but I lost it. I thought his name was Steven. Six months later, that August, I was back on Christopher Street and he walked out of a restaurant and said to me, ‘You do exist.’ From then on we were together.”The two became partners in life and in the theater, where Mr. Quinton designed costumes, served as assistant stage manager and, in a 1976 show called “Caprice,” took to the stage.“I was the ballerina who got kidnapped,” he told The Daily News of New York in 1993, remembering that first role. “I knew I’d found my niche.”Mr. Quinton, right, in 1986 with Charles Ludlam, his partner both onstage and off. Mr. Quinton took over the Ridiculous Theatrical Company after Mr. Ludlam died in 1987.Patrick McMullan/Getty ImagesHe played all sorts of roles in Ridiculous productions, including the title character in Mr. Ludlam’s “Beauty and the Beast”-like fairy tale “The Enchanted Pig,” which ran for months in 1979 at the Ridiculous theater on Sheridan Square.“Everett Quinton personates the oinker as a most sympathetic fellow,” Don Nelsen wrote in a review in The Daily News.The two had a sensational success in 1984 with Mr. Ludlam’s “The Mystery of Irma Vep” (the name is an anagram for “vampire”), a parody of Victorian penny dreadfuls in which they played all the roles, male and female, switching deftly and rapidly. (Mr. Quinton held down four — a maid, an aristocrat named Lord Edgar, a monster/vampire and a woman hidden in the manor house.)“Each character is such a complete, precise comic creation that it often takes one’s breath away to watch the actors move from one role to the next (and back again) with nary a pause,” Frank Rich wrote in his review in The Times. “In ‘Irma Vep,’ Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton have raised the Ridiculous to the sublime.”Mr. Ludlam and Mr. Quinton performed the show more than 330 times. But it turned out to be the peak of Mr. Ludlam’s career — he died of AIDS-related pneumonia in 1987. Mr. Quinton soldiered on with the Ridiculous theater, restaging some of Mr. Ludlam’s works while gradually expanding the offerings. By 1994, Mel Gussow, writing in The Times, found that Mr. Quinton had put his own stamp on the company.“While respecting the theatrical legacy of his mentor and longtime companion,” Mr. Gussow wrote, “Mr. Quinton has given the company his own irreverent signature: Ludlamania has been Quintonized.”He kept Ridiculous Theatrical going until 1997, by which time it had lost its Sheridan Square space and was, like other small theater companies, done in by high costs in an increasingly gentrifying part of town. Mr. Quinton, though, continued to direct and perform, including in “Drop Dead Perfect,” which played at the Theater at St. Clement’s in Manhattan in 2014 (and returned for an encore the next year).“In a sweet 1950s peach crocheted dress and matching bolero, Everett Quinton has never looked lovelier,” Anita Gates began her review in The Times.Sometimes Mr. Quinton would try roles first played by Mr. Ludlam. In 1998, at the West Side Theater in Midtown Manhattan, he directed a revival of “Irma Vep” and starred, this time taking the roles Mr. Ludlam had played (while Stephen DeRosa played the parts Mr. Quinton had originated). In 1990 he staged Mr. Ludlam’s “Camille,” a play loosely based on an Alexandre Dumas novel, taking on the role of Marguerite, which Mr. Ludlam had played in the 1973 premiere.Cheryl Reeves-Hayes was also part of the 1990 cast. “Whenever he was onstage as Marguerite,” she said by email, “I would hurry up and change so I could sit in the wings and watch him perform. He was mesmerizing to watch, and I learned so much from him as an actor.”Mr. Quinton during a dress rehearsal for the 1998 production of “The Mystery of Irma Vep.” Before Mr. Ludlam’s death, the two had performed a version of the show more than 330 times.James Estrin/The New York TimesRamona Ponce started designing costumes for Ridiculous productions in 1991. Her first assignment was for a 10-minute entertainment Mr. Quinton was staging for a trade council that was meeting at the Waldorf Astoria in Manhattan. The audience was not appreciative.“As soon as they saw the men in drag onstage they started throwing rolls,” she said by email. “Right there in the Waldorf Astoria Hotel ballroom. Rolls!!“Everett was furious, humiliated, traumatized. He turned on his heel and stalked out through the kitchen, head held high, topped by a giant mobcap, in Victorian drag. After that we couldn’t even mention the show, or the name of the hotel, for a decade after. But the show was magical and strange and daring and fun, all the things I wanted in life.”Everett James Quinton Jr. was born on Dec. 18, 1951, in Brooklyn. His father was a postal worker, and his mother, Elizabeth Frances Reardon Quinton, was a homemaker.After serving in the Air Force in Thailand, Mr. Quinton attended Hunter College for two years, but he had no thought of a theater career.“My only experience with the theater was playing Rip Van Winkle in the Cub Scouts,” he told The Daily News in 1993.Meeting Mr. Ludlam introduced him to a whole new world of possibilities. “I ran away and joined the circus” was how he put it in the 2001 interview with The Times.Although the Ridiculous troupe was known for parodies, cross-dressing and the occasional pig costume, Mr. Quinton said he gradually learned that outlandishness didn’t preclude the need for finding a character and making her, him or it real.“Even grotesques have feelings,” he told The Times in 1994.After Mr. Ludlam’s death, Mr. Quinton, who lived in the West Village, had a long-term relationship with Michael Van Meter, a member of the Ridiculous company who died in 2007 of complications of AIDS. In addition to his sister Mary, he is survived by another sister, Elizabeth Frances Quinton, and four brothers, Matthew, John Paul, Thomas and Timothy.Ms. Ponce said Mr. Quinton was well versed in and wary of theatrical superstitions, including the one that forbids whistling in a theater and the one that warns against mentioning the play “Macbeth” for fear of incurring a curse — neither of which she was aware of before working for him.“When I started whistling backstage, he came flying out from the dressing room and demanded that I leave the theater, walk around the park outside and say a line from Shakespeare before I could come back in,” she said. “He didn’t wait for me to mention the Scottish play — he decided he’d better tell me about that one before something really bad happened.”Mr. Quinton’s friend William Engel, an artist, noted that Mr. Quinton had a deeply spiritual side. He said the two of them worked together on many pageants for Grace & St. Paul’s Church on the Upper West Side.“No one could be more welcoming at the Lord’s table than Everett Quinton,” he said by email. “Especially the L.G.B.T.Q. community.”Ms. Reeves-Hayes said Mr. Quinton introduced her to that same church. When they took their production of “Camille” to London in 1991, she said, “Ev would be my church buddy, and we visited a couple of churches in the city.”On other walkabouts, they indulged a different tradition. They both admired old cartoon and comic strip characters, especially Krazy Kat, who loved a mouse, Ignatz. The mouse would constantly hurl bricks at Krazy, which she interpreted as a sign of affection.“So,” Ms. Reeves-Hayes said, “whenever we would see a cute guy, one of us would ask, ‘Got a brick?’” More

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      in Movies

      ‘Close’ Director Lukas Dhont: Film’s Master Storyteller of Youth

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      At 31, Lukas Dhont already has two art-house hits to his name. The Belgian director’s latest film, “Close,” shows his skill at eliciting intense performances from young actors.As a child growing up in Dikkelvenne, a quiet, quaint village near the city of Ghent, Belgium, the movie director Lukas Dhont often felt like an outsider. Other boys saw him as too feminine and mocked his interest in dance, except one named Félicien, with whom he shared a close friendship. But as the two approached puberty, Dhont felt social pressures pulling them apart.“In that moment, that tenderness started to become looked at through the lens of sexuality,” Dhont, now 31, said in a recent interview. “People were divided into groups and boxes, and we were confronted with the idea of labels.” As they became fearful of being ostracized, their friendship evaporated, and Dhont, who is gay, was fiercely bullied for the rest of his school days.That experience as a young person struggling with expectations around gender and sexuality has shaped both of Dhont’s acclaimed feature films: “Girl,” his 2018 movie about a transgender ballerina, and “Close,” a devastating portrait of a friendship between two young boys in the Belgian countryside, which won the Grand Prix award, the equivalent to second place, at the Cannes Film Festival last year.From left: Gustav De Waele and Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close,” and Victor Polster in a scene from “Girl.”A24; Netflix“Close” is being distributed by A24 in the United States and is being released in theaters on Friday. It further establishes Dhont as a phenom of global art house cinema and one of its most observant chroniclers of adolescence. And it cements his reputation as a filmmaker who is exceptionally skilled at eliciting intensely emotional performances from young, often untrained actors.Dhont, who employs loose scripts and encourages his actors to improvise dialogue, said his method resembled that “of a choreographer, introducing movements.” He said his relatively open approach allowed young actors “to bring so much of themselves” to the films. “I create characters for them to hide in,” he said. “They are like co-authors.”That strategy helped him to coax out two astonishing central performances for “Close,” a slow-burn drama about two 13-year-old boys named Léo and Rémi (played by newcomers Eden Dambrine and Gustav De Waele) whose close bond elicits scrutiny when classmates suspect they are a couple. After a skittish Léo begins distancing himself from Rémi, a series of slights build to tragedy.The Projectionist Chronicles the Awards SeasonThe Oscars aren’t until March, but the campaigns have begun. Kyle Buchanan is covering the films, personalities and events along the way.Meet the Newer, Bolder Michelle Williams: Why she made the surprising choice to skip the supporting actress category and run for best actress.Best-Actress Battle Royal: A banner crop of leading ladies like Michelle Yeoh and Cate Blanchett rule the Oscars’ deepest and most dynamic race.‘Glass Onion’ and Rian Johnson: The director explains why he sold the “Knives Out” franchise to Netflix, and how he feels about its theatrical test.A Supporting-Actress Underdog: In “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” don’t discount the pivotal presence of Stephanie Hsu.Dambrine, a French student at a dance academy in Belgium, had never acted before Dhont spotted him on a train in 2018 and approached him about auditioning for the lead role in “Close.” Dhont explained that he when he saw the then-11-year-old, he was struck by his “angelic and androgynous” features and “very big eyes.”Eden Dambrine in a scene from “Close.” Dambrine was a student at a dance academy when Dhont approached him on a train and asked him to audition for the movie.A24In a video call, Dambrine, who is now 15, explained that it had been a “boyhood dream” to act in a movie, and that he had gotten the impression that acting could be fun from watching the blooper reels from “Avengers” films. (He added that when he called his mother to tell her that a stranger had approached him about starring in a movie, she had responded: “Get off the train! Get off the train!”)His mother ultimately accompanied him throughout the shoot, which lasted two months, in Belgium and the Netherlands. Among other challenges, the film required Dambrine to act out several intensely emotional moments in long, silent close-up. After he nailed a scene, in the first take, in which his character has a breakdown in a doctor’s office, much of the crew began weeping, Dhont recalled.Dambrine’s mother, whose name is France, said Dhont’s talent for working with young actors was partly a function of his youth. “He is not that far from being a teen,” she said, adding that Dhont’s emphasis on fostering bonds between crew and cast members before shooting, and his openness to improvisation, allowed her son to feel comfortable so he could focus on the emotional elements of his performance.She also noted that Dhont and Dambrine shared the experience of having been raised by single mothers “who had to figure out how to raise their kids.” The director, she said, “has a lot of empathy.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesDhont recalled that he had first become interested in film as a child, amid his parents’ divorce, when his mother returned home one night from seeing “Titanic,” James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster. “My mom had been gloomy, and seeing her come back, telling me how beautiful it was,” he said, “I became obsessed with the film, and the feeling that a film could change someone.”His interest in making movies was bolstered at age 12, when an incident led him to give up his childhood dream of being a dancer. Dhont said that after performing a dance to the song “Fighter,” by Christina Aguilera, at a school talent show, his classmates mocked him even more mercilessly. “I felt so ashamed that I told myself I will not dance publicly anymore,” he recalled.Shortly after graduating from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, in Ghent, where he studied film, he began making his first feature, “Girl,” at age 26. Partly inspired by Dhont’s own youthful experiences and the true story of Nora Monsecour, a transgender ballerina, the film won several awards, including the Caméra d’Or, at Cannes, but also drew a backlash from transgender people.Some were angered by the casting in the lead role of Victor Polster, a male actor who won an acting award at Cannes for his performance, while others argued that a climactic incident of self-inflicted violence in the film was exploitative. Writing in the Hollywood Reporter, the trans critic Oliver Whitney argued that “Girl” invited “the audience to react with disgust” at the main character’s body.“I just create characters for them to hide in,” Dhont said of the actors he works with. “They are like co-authors.”Kevin Faingnaert for The New York TimesThe blowback to the movie, Dhont said, was “emotionally challenging.” He added that “now, if I made a film with a trans character as the lead, I would make it differently,” but declined to get into the specifics of what he would change. “I can’t go back in time,” he said.Dhont said that his films thus far had been about the period in a person’s youth when they are “confronted with society for the first time” and “performing types of identities or stereotypes of identities.”“When you’re young, you want to belong to a group, but there are people for whom that doesn’t work,” Dhont said. “My films are about showing the world from that perspective.” More

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      in Television

      Lance Kerwin, ‘James at 15’ and ‘Salem’s Lot’ Star, Dies at 62

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      “James,” which followed the adventures of a sandy-haired teenager who moves with his family to Boston from Oregon, made him a teenage idol.Lance Kerwin, a former child actor who played the title role in the 1970s coming-of-age drama “James at 15” and a vampire hunter in a mini-series based on the Stephen King novel “Salem’s Lot,” died on Tuesday at his home in San Clemente, Calif. He was 62.His death was confirmed by his daughter Savanah Kerwin, who said that a cause had not been determined and that the family was awaiting the results of an autopsy.In 1977, when Mr. Kerwin was 16, he was cast in a television movie, “James at 15,” that served as the pilot episode for the NBC series of the same name. The show, which ran for 21 episodes, followed the adolescent adventures of a sandy-haired budding photographer, James Hunter, who has moved with his family to Boston from Oregon.The show tackled serious themes like sex, alcoholism and pregnancy. It also made Mr. Kerwin a teenage idol.Writing in The Washington Post a few weeks into the show’s run, the critic Tom Shales said that while “James at 15” was “not perfect, not revolutionary, not always deliriously urgent,” it was “still the most respectable new entertainment series of the season.”“And if it romanticizes adolescence through the weekly trials and triumphs of its teenage hero,” he continued, “at least it does so in more ambitious, inquisitive and authentic ways than the average TV teeny-bop.”The show ran into trouble with NBC’s censors over a script that called for James to lose his virginity, to a Swedish exchange student, on his 16th birthday (when the program would be retitled “James at 16”). The network objected to the script’s use of the word “responsible” as a euphemism for birth control, and agreed to air the episode only “if the boy suffers for it and is somehow punished,” the novelist Dan Wakefield, the show’s creator, told The New York Times in 1978.The disagreement led to Mr. Wakefield’s resignation before the episode was broadcast, on Feb. 9, 1978. “James at 16” was canceled in May of that year.Lance Michael Kerwin was born on Nov. 6, 1960, in Newport Beach, Calif., to Don and Lois Kerwin. When he was growing up, he told The Times in 1982, he was so addicted to television that he could not read when he reached the fourth grade.After his parents divorced, his mother and stepfather “unplugged the television,” he said.“Every day after school I would come home and read out loud with my mother and stepfather — stories, plays and scripts that they would bring home from work,” he said.In addition to his daughter Savanah, Mr. Kerwin’s survivors include his wife, Yvonne Kerwin, and four other children: Fox, Terah, Kailani and Justus. Complete information on survivors was not immediately available.Mr. Kerwin’s acting career began in the early 1970s with small roles on popular TV shows like “Little House on the Prairie,” “Gunsmoke” and “Wonder Woman.” From 1974 to 1976, he appeared in five installments of “ABC Afterschool Special,” the daytime educational anthology series aimed at young people.Mr. Kerwin in 2022. After dealing with a drug problem for many years, he helped run a rehabilitation program and was a youth pastor.AFF/AlamyIn 1979, he starred in the mini-series adaptation of “Salem’s Lot.” The series followed a novelist who returns to his New England hometown to write a book and encounters vampires who have invaded the town. Mr. Kerwin played Mark Petrie, a teenager who helps the author stop the vampires.Mr. Kerwin continued acting through the 1980s and into 1990s. He appeared in the 1985 science fiction movie “Enemy Mine” and the 1995 thriller “Outbreak,” about a deadly plague.By the time he was making “Outbreak,” Mr. Kerwin “was actively struggling with sobriety,” Savanah Kerwin said, which may have played a role in his decision to walk away from acting.In 2010, Mr. Kerwin pleaded guilty to a charge of second-degree theft for falsifying documents to obtain state medical assistance and food stamps in Hawaii, The Associated Press reported. He was sentenced to five years of probation and was ordered to perform 300 hours of community service.“I’ve been struggling with the sin of drug use for a long time,” Mr. Kerwin told The Los Angeles Daily News in 1999, in an interview conducted while he was in a rehabilitation center in Perris, Calif. “I’ve gotten in years of abstinence. The last time I found myself turning to drugs again, I came here to restore my walk with the Lord.”Later, his daughter said, he helped run the rehabilitation program U-Turn for Christ and was a youth pastor there for several years.“He was constantly trying to help people who were struggling to find God or become sober,” she said. “That was his focus for the rest of his life.”Sheelagh McNeill More

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      in Television

      Justin Roiland Leaves ‘Rick and Morty’ After Domestic Abuse Charges

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      The title roles will be recast because Adult Swim has severed ties with Justin Roiland, the animated show’s co-creator.The animated sci-fi comedy “Rick and Morty” will recast its title roles after severing ties with Justin Roiland, a voice actor and the show’s co-creator, who has a pretrial hearing in April for felony domestic abuse charges from 2020.Adult Swim, Cartoon Network’s nighttime adult programming block, announced on Tuesday that it had “ended its association” with Roiland. “Rick and Morty will continue,” the statement said. “The talented and dedicated crew are hard at work on Season 7.”Roiland has also been removed from the animated Hulu comedy “Solar Opposites,” according to a statement by 20th Television Animation and Hulu Originals. He co-created the show, which was renewed for a fifth season in October, and voiced one of the main characters, Korvo.“Rick and Morty,” which debuted in 2013, follows the antics of Rick Sanchez, an alcoholic mad scientist, and his anxiety-riddled grandson, Morty Smith, as they travel to other planets and through myriad dimensions. Marie Moore, the senior vice president of communications at Warner Bros. Discovery, which owns Cartoon Network, said in an email on Wednesday that the title characters would be recast but that she had ​​no additional information on the recasting.Roiland developed the show with Dan Harmon, the creator of “Community,” who did not immediately respond to a request for comment.Roiland faces one felony count of domestic battery with corporal injury and one felony count of false imprisonment by menace, violence, fraud and/or deceit against an unnamed woman he was dating in 2020, according to Orange County Superior Court records. The charges were earlier reported by NBC News, which said most of the California court records are sealed under a protective order.There is no trial date for Roiland, 42, who has pleaded not guilty. He has had more than a dozen pretrial hearings, including one this month.Roiland’s lawyer, T. Edward Welbourn, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Wednesday. In a statement to Rolling Stone, he said: “It is hard to overstate how inaccurate the recent media coverage of this situation has been. To be clear, not only is Justin innocent, but we also have every expectation that this matter is on course to be dismissed.”In addition to his television departures, Roiland recently resigned from the video game studio he co-founded, Squanch Games, which released High on Life last month.In 2018, “Rick and Morty” landed a 70-episode renewal deal from Adult Swim that it is halfway through. At that time, Adult Swim said the third season had earned the block’s highest ratings ever. More

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      in Theater

      Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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      The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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      in Television

      In ‘Shrinking,’ Jason Segel Does the Work

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      Jason Segel knows that you like him.It’s the sad eyes. The pained smile. The shambling 6-foot-4-inch frame that he diminishes by caving in his chest. It’s his single season on the critics’ darling “Freaks and Geeks,” playing a puppyish high schooler; his nine seasons on the audience favorite “How I Met Your Mother,” as a loving, excitable husband and dad; his slate of rom-coms. If you saw the 2008 film “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” which he also wrote, you spent 73 frames opposite his exposed penis during a mortifying breakup scene. And, most likely, you came out still liking him.“I’ve built up some currency, some good will,” Segel said. “Like, ‘Oh, he’s a good guy; he wouldn’t do anything intentionally mean.’” This was on a January video call, and Segel was recounting an early conversation he’d had with Bill Lawrence and Brett Goldstein about their Apple TV+ sitcom “Shrinking.” The first two episodes premiere on Friday; eight more follow weekly.Segel, 43, who joined the series as a writer, executive producer and star, opposite Harrison Ford and Jessica Williams, plays Jimmy, a cognitive behavioral therapist crushed by personal grief. A year after the sudden death of his wife, Jimmy self-medicates with pills, booze and some very polite sex workers. He is a neglectful father and a bad neighbor. His approach to patient care would make an ethics panel weep. Another comic actor might have tried to protect his likability. Segel, in this role, wanted to squander it.“We have to use that for evil,” he recalled telling Lawrence and Goldstein. “We should spend that currency.”Segel, who grew up in a comfortable, beach-adjacent neighborhood of Los Angeles, became a professional actor by inclination and deceit. He was an anxious kid, burdened from an early age, he said, by “a sense of impending doom.” Acting classes were a rare space in which he felt comfortable. By high school, though, his basketball schedule (he was, as his height suggests, a star) kept him from auditioning for most school plays. His theater teacher persuaded him to star in a three-night run of Edward Albee’s “The Zoo Story.” Without telling Segel, that teacher invited a leading casting director from Paramount, who liked what she saw.“I’m baffled by people who take the bus to L.A. and say, ‘I’m gonna make it,’” Segel said, moving his thickly stubbled face closer to the camera. He wore a gray plaid shirt, his brown hair cresting high above his forehead, a wave that never broke. “That’s bravery. Me, I got really lucky.”Segel and Linda Cardellini in “Freaks and Geeks,” which only lasted one season but remains a critical favorite.Chris Haston/NBCHe landed a role on “Freaks and Geeks” not long after. Precocious, he had a quarter-life crisis at 20, when that series ended after 18 episodes. He was too old and too tall to play more high schoolers and too young for anything else. Judd Apatow, the executive producer of “Freaks and Geeks,” encouraged him to write. A few years later, just after he was cast in “How I Met Your Mother,” he had begun “Sarah Marshall.”Nicholas Stoller, who directed that movie, admired the script’s sweetness and Segel’s sweetness, too. The character Segel played, like many he had played and would play, verged on creepy and pathetic without tumbling over. “He’s willing to have his characters do bad stuff because it’s human, it’s relatable,” Stoller said. “But he just grounds it in kindness.”That movie set the template for the next six years: Film the sitcom for eight months and then make a movie during the hiatus, often one that he had written or co-written. But when “How I Met Your Mother” ended in 2014, Segel, then 34 and still precocious, had his midlife crisis. This one felt more existential. He’d been acting for half of his life and figured he was good at it. And he’d written films he was proud of, like “Sarah Marshall” and the 2011 Muppets movie. But was this his purpose? Writing and delivering joke after joke after joke?Segel explored the alternatives. Newly sober, he left Los Angeles, moving several hours north, to a property with orange groves. He chose projects more sparingly. To begin, he signed on to star in “The End of the Tour,” a movie about the writer David Foster Wallace. He hadn’t really done a drama since “The Zoo Story.” But he recognized parallels between himself and the film’s version of Wallace, who has just published his masterwork, “Infinite Jest.”“It’s this moment where everyone is saying, ‘You’ve won life,’” Segel said. “And you are feeling so scared. Like, Oh, no. What’s next?”“An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift,” said Brett Goldstein, one of the “Shrinking” creators.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesHe didn’t know. He wasn’t writing, and he didn’t find anything funny. But maybe he just didn’t want to write comedy, he realized, which led him to create “Dispatches from Elsewhere,” a 2020 limited series about four adrift souls ensnared by an alternative reality game.“While it wasn’t the most commercial thing I’ve ever written, it was maybe the most meaningful,” Segel said. “I proved I could make something again.” He began to theorize that maybe he needed to make work that let him use more of himself — the comedy stuff and the not-so-comic stuff. He sought projects that encouraged him to be what a therapist might describe as “integrated.”“Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said. “That’s maybe what the point of all of this has been about.”That revelation led him first to “Winning Time,” the flashy drama about the Los Angeles Lakers (Segel plays an unflashy, melancholic coach), and then to “Shrinking.” Lawrence and Goldstein, who met on “Ted Lasso,” had each been roughing out separate shows about grief and therapy before deciding that they should make a show together. Segel was their first choice to lead it.“Because he has that thing: He’s funny, he’s a great actor, inherently likable,” Goldstein said, adding a few expletives. “An audience will follow Jason Segel very far before they turn on him, and that’s a gift.”Lawrence, on a separate video call, agreed. “He’s got this underlying vulnerability and it makes him so empathetic,” Lawrence said. “Even when he does something lousy, as his character, you go, ‘Oh, I wonder why he did that. Is he OK?’” Lawrence, who has multiple projects in the works, also liked the idea of an actor who could do some heavy lifting in the writers’ room.Segel and Harrison Ford on the set of “Shrinking.” The show’s creators valued Segel’s ability to write as well as act.Apple TV+In the series, Segel wanted to subvert his inherent likability. (With Luke Tennie.)Apple TV+They pitched him the show. Segel was quiet on the call, so quiet that Goldstein worried that he didn’t like the idea. After a day or two, Segel accepted. He explained this delay as the upside of that midlife crisis: Now he takes his time choosing his jobs. But he knew he would take the part as soon as he heard the pitch. “Shrinking,” he realized, would require both nanosecond comic timing and deep sensitivity. He would have to make an audience believe that this was a man overwhelmed by grief, and then make that grief funny without ever cheapening Jimmy’s pain.Pain interests him. It’s often the first question he asks himself about a character: How is this person suffering? And he figured that years into a pandemic, the audience for “Shrinking” might also be in pain. He has always seen himself as the kind of actor who functions as an audience surrogate — he mentioned Tom Hanks, Jimmy Stewart, Kermit the Frog. If a viewer could see Jimmy working through his pain, maybe that viewer could do some work, too.“What a crazy, sad couple of years,” he said. “To find a way to laugh about this together is really hard and potentially really special.”This is where the evil comes in — Segel didn’t want to make safe choices. The character had to feel volatile, even dangerous, if only to himself. Only by showing Jimmy at his absolute worst could he show the character starting to build himself back up again. On set, Segel leaned into this, so far that he sometimes fell over. Lawrence recalled shooting a scene in an early episode, in which Jimmy shouts at his next-door neighbor Liz (Christa Miller, Lawrence’s wife).“He was, like, ‘I feel like I can yell at her more here,’” Lawrence recalled.That antagonism was only for the camera. “I was surprised at how comfortable he is to act with,” Williams, his co-star, said. “There was nothing that I could do that he didn’t understand and that he wasn’t able to catch.”Segel has increasingly sought out projects that blended his comic and dramatic abilities. “Like, let’s make this one weird guy,” he said.Daniel Dorsa for The New York TimesNearly everyone I spoke to described Segel as a man who had “done the work”: who had become comfortable enough in his own skin, with or without professional help, that he could extend generosity and compassion to himself and others. He didn’t speak much about his personal experience of therapy (which suggests the kind of healthy boundaries that a good clinician would encourage), except to say that it had helped alleviate some of that existential dread and that he was thankful for it.James Ponsoldt directed Segel in “The End of the Tour” and in several episodes of “Shrinking.” Looking at Segel through the camera’s lens, he said, “I see someone who’s grateful to be alive, someone who has lived and knows that being alive is better than not being alive.”An actor is not necessarily the characters he plays, but Segel understands nearly all of his roles, Jimmy included, as versions of himself. He views his life (and this is arguably a little less healthy) as a series of minor and major embarrassments that he can funnel into art. The other day, he said, on vacation, he’d gone for a run on the beach and fallen on his face in front of several onlookers. Another man might have felt shame; Segel figured he could probably use it.Probably he will. The stage and the set are the places where he has always felt best able to transmute dread or low-key humiliation into something that might make someone else feel a little better. It makes him feel better, too.Williams recalled their first day of shooting. It was a tense scene and she felt nervous, awkward. But Segel reassured her. Soon they were riffing.When “cut” was called, she turned to him and said, “Acting is really fun.”He looked at her, she recalled, and thought about it for a while. And then he said, “Yeah, it really is. It’s like the funnest thing on earth.” More

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      Ke Huy Quan Says His Oscar Nomination Is ‘So Unbelievably Surreal’

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      On Tuesday morning, Ke Huy Quan, Michelle Yeoh and their “Everything Everywhere All at Once” co-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert met on a video call to watch the announcement of the Oscar nominations together, and as the sci-fi hit racked up each of its stunning 11 nominations, the group would toast, gasp, cheer and yell.“It was so loud, we could barely hear what anyone was saying,” said a laughing Quan, who received his first Oscar nomination Tuesday for playing Waymond Wang, the sweet-natured husband to Yeoh’s multiverse-saving laundromat owner. How did he react when his name was read?“I was jumping up and down, screaming at the top of my voice, exactly the same way that I did when I got the phone call from my agent that the Daniels wanted me to play Waymond,” Quan said during a phone interview conducted a half hour after the announcement. He described Tuesday as one of the happiest days of his life. “It’s so surreal. I am ecstatic.”“Everything Everywhere” represents a major career comeback for Quan, who rose to fame as a child actor in films like “The Goonies” and “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” but quit acting for decades when he found roles for an Asian actor hard to come by. While watching “Crazy Rich Asians” in 2018, Quan began to mull a return, and two weeks after asking an agent friend to represent him, he was sent “Everything Everywhere” and went out on his first audition in years.Now, he’s Oscar-nominated for it, and alongside Yeoh, his co-star Stephanie Hsu, and “The Whale” actress Hong Chau, history has been made: There have never been so many actors of Asian descent nominated in the same year.Interviews With the Oscar NomineesMichelle Yeoh: The “Everything Everywhere All at Once” star, nominated for best actress, said she was “bursting with joy” but “a little sad” that previous Asian actresses hadn’t been recognized.Angela Bassett: The actress nearly missed the announcement because of troubles with her TV. She tuned in just in time to find out that she was nominated for her supporting role in “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.”Ke Huy Quan: A former childhood star, the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” actor said the news of his best supporting actor nomination was surreal.Austin Butler: In discussing his best actor nomination, the “Elvis” star said that he wished Lisa Marie Presley, who died on Jan. 12, had been able to celebrate the moment with him.“I’ve been watching the Oscars for more than 30 years now, and every single year, I would imagine myself being on the red carpet, being in that room with everybody,” Quan said. “Of course, as the years went by, the chance of it ever becoming true slowly dissipated. And when I stepped away from acting for so long, I didn’t think that dream would ever come back. So to be here today, to hear the announcement, it is so unbelievably surreal. It’s crazy, and I’m speechless.”Opposite Michelle Yeoh in “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” Quan planned to spend the day celebrating with family: “For so many years, they were so worried about me. To see how happy they are means the world to me.Allyson Riggs/A24, via Associated PressLike the “CODA” star Troy Kotsur last year, Quan has cruised through the season picking up every supporting-actor trophy in sight, from the Gothams to the Golden Globes to the Critics Choice Awards. It’s an outcome he never could have foreseen when he wrapped the film in early 2020 and then, over the pandemic, failed to book even a single follow-up role.“That year and a half was horrible because every tape we would send in, we would get no response back,” he said. “I was so afraid I was going to lose my health insurance. I called my agent, saying, ‘Get me anything, it doesn’t matter what, I need to make the minimum to get health insurance.’”But Quan’s taped auditions still came to naught, and he lost his insurance just a few months before “Everything Everywhere” came out in March 2021. “I was so dispirited,” he said, remembering a desperate call he placed to “Everything Everywhere” producer Jonathan Wang: “I said, ‘You’ve seen the movie. Can you please tell me, am I any good in it?’ He said, ‘Ke, why are you asking such a stupid question?’ And I said, ‘Because nobody wants to hire me.’ And Jonathan says, ‘Well, you just wait. Just wait until the movie comes out.’”Since then, Quan said, it’s been a sea change in how he’s been perceived. People who used to stop him on the street and ask, “Are you the kid from ‘Indiana Jones’?” now recognize him as Waymond from “Everything Everywhere,” and he will soon be seen in Season 2 of “Loki” and the forthcoming series “American Born Chinese.”“It’s been the greatest, wildest ride,” said Quan, who was eager to celebrate the day’s success with his wife, Echo — “We didn’t think a day like this would ever, ever happen” — and to call family members who had stuck by him and sent proud texts all through awards season.“For so many years, they were so worried about me,” he said. “To see how happy they are means the world to me, so I just want to spend the day with my family.”As I brought our call to a close, something new dawned on Quan, and he began to talk … well, all at once.“Kyle! From this day forward, I will always be ‘Oscar-nominated actor Ke Huy Quan’!” he said. “How great is that? Oh my gosh, I see it all the time when I go watch trailers, when people talk about actors — ‘Oscar-nominated actor Leonardo DiCaprio.’ It sounds so nice. And now, my name is going to sound like that, too.”He laughed in disbelief. “Awesome!” Quan said. More

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      Julian Sands, ‘Room With a View’ Actor, Is Missing on Hike in California Mountains

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      The search for Mr. Sands, a British actor known for the 1986 film “A Room With a View” and other roles, is an avid trail hiker. His disappearance follows weeks of devastating weather across California.The British actor Julian Sands, known for his role in the critically acclaimed 1986 film “A Room With a View,” among others, is one of two missing hikers the authorities are searching for in the San Gabriel Mountains in Southern California following a period of heavy rain and snow across the area.Mr. Sands, 65, of North Hollywood, was reported missing on Friday after hiking alone on a trail on Mount Baldy, more than 40 miles northeast of Los Angeles, Mara Rodriguez, a spokeswoman for the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Department, said on Thursday. The trails there are popular but also labeled challenging and strenuous on hiking websites.Search efforts had been affected by “trail conditions and the risk of avalanche,’’ Ms. Rodriguez said.“However, we continue to search by helicopter and drones when weather permits,’’ she added.Elsewhere in the San Gabriel Mountains, the authorities are searching separately for another missing hiker, Robert Gregory, 61, of Hawthorne, Calif. That search is being handled by the Hawthorne Police Department, supported by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office San Dimas station.Mr. Gregory was reported missing on Friday evening by his wife after he had not returned that day in the Crystal Lake area. The police said his vehicle was found Saturday outside a cafe in front of a trail head in the area.Early on Jan. 13, Robert Gregory left his Hawthorne, Calif., residence to go hiking. When Mr. Gregory failed to return home, his wife contacted the police.Hawthorne Police DepartmentLt. Louis Serrano of the San Dimas station said on Thursday that search and rescue teams were on the ground and that aerial patrols were continuing.More on CaliforniaStorms and Flooding: A barrage of powerful storms has surprised people in California with an unrelenting period of extreme weather that has caused extensive damage across the state.New Laws: A new year doesn’t always usher in sweeping change, but in California, at least, it usually means a slate of new laws going into effect.Facebook’s Bridge to Nowhere: The tech giant planned to restore a century-old railroad to help people in the Bay Area to get to work. Then it gave up.Wildfires: California avoided a third year of catastrophic wildfires because of a combination of well-timed precipitation and favorable wind conditions — or “luck,” as experts put it.Representatives for Mr. Sands did not immediately return requests for comment on Thursday.A stream of atmospheric rivers, storms that are narrow in shape and carry a tremendous amount of water, have slammed much of California in recent weeks, causing flooding, power outages and widespread evacuations. At least 19 people have died.On Friday, when Mr. Sands was reported missing, another round of storms was just beginning to sweep across Southern California, lasting through the holiday weekend.By Wednesday, conditions had not improved and the sheriff’s office urged hikers to “think twice and heed warnings,” adding that rescue teams had responded to 14 rescue missions on Mount Baldy and the surrounding area in the last four weeks.The rescue missions were for lost, stranded and injured hikers, two of whom did not survive after falling and injuring themselves, officials said. The recent storms brought snow and ice to the mountain, and conditions were not favorable for hikers, even those with experience, the authorities added.Mr. Sands, a British performer who has appeared in more than 150 films and television shows, including “Arachnophobia,” “Naked Lunch,” “Warlock” and “Ocean’s Thirteen,” is known to enjoy the outdoors. He is best remembered for his starring role at 27 opposite Helena Bonham Carter in “A Room With a View,” the Oscar-nominated Merchant Ivory adaptation of E.M. Forster’s novel, which often makes lists as one of the best British films of all time.In an interview with The Guardian in 2020, Mr. Sands said he was happiest when close to a mountain summit on a cold morning and had aspirations of climbing a remote peak in the Himalayas. He also described a time in the early 1990s when he was caught in a storm above 20,000 feet in the Andes. “We were all in a very bad way,” he said. “Some guys close to us perished; we were lucky.”In another interview that year with Thrive Global, a company started by Arianna Huffington that provides behavior change technology, Mr. Sands said that he had spent time in mountain ranges in North America and Europe.Mr. Sands said that people who don’t climb mountains assume it’s about a “great heroic sprint” to the summit and an ego.“But actually, it’s the reverse,” he said. “It’s about supplication and sacrifice and humility, when you go to these mountains. It’s not so much a celebration of oneself, but the eradication of one’s self consciousness. And so on these walks you lose yourself, you become a vessel of energy in harmony, hopefully with your environment.” More