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      in Movies

      5 Places to Visit in Wilmington, Delaware, With Aubrey Plaza

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      Wilmington, Del., is often in the news as the hometown of President Biden and as a hub for corporate litigation, but it’s hardly on tourists’ radar. It has no theme park, no professional sports teams, no famous regional cuisine that demands a pilgrimage.But if Wilmington occupies a kind of blank space in the American mind, that’s fine by the actress Aubrey Plaza, who grew up there. Ms. Plaza, 40, whose credits include the TV shows “Parks and Recreation” and “The White Lotus,” and the new film, “My Old Ass,” calls Wilmington “this magical little gem in the country, this little secret.”Ms. Plaza is known for her deadpan humor and weirdness, but get her talking about Wilmington and she becomes an enthusiastically earnest tour guide, telling you her favorite local cafe, Brew HaHa!, recommending the red-sauce joint Mrs. Robino’s and sharing local legends, like the one about the allegedly haunted “Devil’s Road.”Ms. Plaza is known for playing deadpan and offbeat roles in TV programs like “Parks and Recreation” and “The White Lotus” as well as the new film “My Old Ass.”Peter YangOne reason Ms. Plaza is so fond of her hometown is the way the small city of about 71,000 punches above its weight culturally and in its amenities. Wilmington has abundant green spaces, institutions such as the Delaware Art Museum and the Delaware Contemporary, and more than 40 pocket neighborhoods, including its own Little Italy.“It’s got a small-town vibe, but it has every kind of neighborhood and community in the tiniest concentrated city,” said Ms. Plaza, who now lives in Los Angeles but returns to Wilmington regularly to visit family.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares199 Views

      in Theater

      Jonathan Groff, Fresh Off Tony Win, Will Return to Broadway as Bobby Darin

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      “Just in Time,” a new musical about the “Mack the Knife” pop singer, will open next spring at Circle in the Square in Manhattan.Jonathan Groff, who won his first Tony Award in June for starring in a hit revival of “Merrily We Roll Along,” will return to Broadway next spring to play Bobby Darin in a biomusical he has been developing for years.The musical, “Just in Time,” is to begin previews March 28 and to open April 23 at Circle in the Square Theater in Midtown Manhattan. The theater, with its close approximation of an in-the-round experience, will be configured to accommodate an immersive nightclub-like staging, with a 16-person cast, an onstage big band, two stages and some cabaret-style seating.The show began its life in 2018 at the 92nd Street Y as a five-performance concert called “The Bobby Darin Story,” and has been developed through a number of workshops. In an interview, Groff said he hadn’t been sure what to expect from that initial run, but that “it lit me up.”“There is some sort of kinetic magic that happens with the live execution of his material,” said Groff, 39, who was also a Tony nominee for “Hamilton” (he played King George III) and “Spring Awakening” (his breakout role). He has worked extensively on television (“Glee,” “Looking” and “Mindhunter”) and reached global audiences with his voice work as Kristoff in Disney’s “Frozen” films.Darin, a singer-songwriter whose pop career peaked in the 1950s and ’60s, is best known for the songs “Splish Splash,” “Mack the Knife” and “Beyond the Sea.” He suffered from a heart condition, and died at the age of 37.“Dramatically he’s really interesting, because what do you do when your whole career is on borrowed time?” said the musical’s director, Alex Timbers, who won a Tony Award for directing “Moulin Rouge!” “His life was lived at high-octane speed. A woman he thought was his sister ended up being his mother. He went on a whole voyage into folk and pop and then decided he was a nightclub animal.”The musical has a book by Warren Leight (a Tony winner for “Side Man”) and Isaac Oliver and will be choreographed by Shannon Lewis. The show was conceived by Ted Chapin, who wrote the initial script and produced it at the Y as part of that institution’s long-running Lyrics & Lyricists series.“We all got invested and excited about the idea of telling his life story in this environment of a night club,” Groff said. “We’re playing with the genre of the biomusical, trying to find our own unique point of view and way into not only his story but also the genre itself. There’s a bit of experimentation happening here.”The lead producers of “Just in Time” are Tom Kirdahy, Robert Ahrens and John Frost; the musical is being capitalized for up to $12.5 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. More

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      in Television

      No Lie: George Washington Is Funny Now

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      The first president is usually at the margins of popular culture. As a recurring character on “Saturday Night Live” and a trend on TikTok, is he finally having a moment?Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr and Thomas Jefferson were immortalized in “Hamilton.” John Adams had his own HBO mini-series, and Samuel Adams is a beer. Ben Franklin often appears experimenting with his kite when characters travel back in time to Colonial America.And then there’s George Washington.He might be the first president, but the stoic general who led the Americans to an unlikely Revolutionary War victory doesn’t exactly lend himself to memes and caricatures in popular culture. Other founders immersed in drama and scandal (Hamilton, Jefferson) or at least more quotable (Franklin, Adams) have gotten more attention.But Washington — “a marble man of impossible virtue and perfection,” as the New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani once called him — might finally be having his moment.Over the weekend, “Saturday Night Live” brought back “Washington’s Dream,” one of its biggest hits last season. The comedian Nate Bargatze, known for his deadpan delivery, plays a subdued, earnest Washington who is trying to inspire his soldiers with his peculiar vision of a free America. In the original version, at camp, he dwells on a new, confusing system of weights and measurements (while consigning the metric system to “only certain unpopular sports, like track and swimming”).In the latest, Washington leads his soldiers across the Delaware River as he yearns to Americanize the English language, proclaiming: “I dream that one day our great nation will have a word for the number 12. We shall call it a ‘dozen.’”A soldier asks what other numbers would have their own words: “None,” Bargatze replied. “Only 12 shall have its own word, because we are free men.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      Jenna Fischer, ‘The Office’ Star, Reveals Breast Cancer Diagnosis

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      “I am now cancer free,’’ the actress announced on Instagram, noting that she was diagnosed with Stage 1 cancer in December and that early detection had played a key role in her successful treatment.Jenna Fischer, the actress best known for her role as Pam Beesly in the popular television series “The Office,” said on Tuesday that she was diagnosed with Stage 1 triple-positive breast cancer in December but that she was now cancer free after successful treatment.“I am now cancer free,’’ Ms. Fischer, 50, of Los Angeles, said in her announcement, imploring her nearly four million Instagram followers to consult with their doctors and schedule annual mammogram appointments.“If I had waited six months longer, things could have been much worse,” Ms. Fischer said. “It could have spread.”She said that she had surgery in January to remove the tumor that doctors had found. That was followed by “12 rounds of weekly chemotherapy” and “three weeks of radiation,” her post said.“I’m happy to say I’m feeling great,” said Ms. Fischer, who is also an author and the co-host of a popular podcast about “The Office” with Angela Kinsey, a former co-star from the show. Ms. Fischer said she was continuing a treatment plan that includes infusions of targeted therapy.A representative for Ms. Fischer declined a request for an additional comment from the actress on Tuesday.In addition to her role in “The Office,” a television show that ran on NBC for eight years and is among the most popular shows in television history, Ms. Fischer has also acted in popular comedic films, including “Blades of Glory” and the movie musical version of “Mean Girls,” playing the main character’s mother.Sprinkled within her post were jokes and references to her character on “The Office.”“‘Take care of your ticking time bags,’” Ms. Fischer wrote, referencing a quote from Michael Scott, the boss of the paper company Dunder Mifflin in Scranton, Pa., where “The Office” takes place.News of Ms. Fischer’s cancer diagnosis shocked fans, who wrote thousands of supportive messages in the comment section of her Instagram post. Ms. Fischer said she wore wigs to hide her hair loss so that she could keep her diagnosis private until she was ready to share the news.Dr. Cesar Santa-Maria, a medical oncologist and associate professor of oncology at Johns Hopkins, reviewed Ms. Fischer’s post and said she had been diagnosed with an “aggressive subtype of breast cancer.”“But because of the treatments we have now,” Dr. Santa-Maria continued, “it’s the most curable. Twenty years ago? Not the case.”Catching the tumor early on, when it was in Stage 1, was critical for her to have a successful treatment, Dr. Santa-Maria said. Women at average risk for breast cancer should talk to their doctors about getting their annual mammograms beginning at age 40, he added.“Again, don’t skip your mammogram,” Ms. Fischer wrote, reminding her followers that October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month. She said that Michael Scott “was right. Get ’em checked ladies.” More

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      in Movies

      Al Pacino Is Still Going Big

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      Al Pacino has been one of the world’s greatest, most influential actors for more than 50 years. He’s audacious. He’s outrageous. He’s Al Pacino, and I’m pretty sure you know what that entails.Listen to the Conversation With Al PacinoA conversation with the legendary actor about, well, everything.Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube | Amazon | iHeart | NYT Audio AppSo I’d like to talk about some aspects of him that merit fresh discussion. Did you know, for example, that he is cinema’s greatest-ever swearer? (This is fact, not opinion.) He delights in those words. He lustily chomps on them. This zest for delivering colorful language, I suspect, is a source of the criticism that he has become a scenery-chewer. Which isn’t nearly the whole picture. Fans of his layered, subtle work in “The Godfather” or “Dog Day Afternoon” need to immediately see more recent films like “The Humbling” or “The Insider” or “Manglehorn” to understand his enduring range. But also, the parts of Pacino movies where Pacino goes big are always the best parts of Pacino movies! Did anyone want him to underplay Satan in “The Devil’s Advocate”?Though he can go small and internal, Pacino’s ability to really emote is one of his singular gifts. That’s why, secretly, the best Pacino is crowd-pleasing Hollywood movie star ’90s Pacino. Given the revolutionary work he did in the ’70s, this is akin to claiming that the key work of a critically acclaimed, groundbreaking band occurred after it went pop. But ’90s Pacino is when his gargantuan skill, volcanic charisma and joyful desire to entertain all coalesced magically.“Hoo-ah!”The first time I ever consciously noticed a Pacino performance was also the first time I ever consciously saw an actor in a movie and thought, That’s good acting. It was 1990, I was only 8 years old and I’d just seen Pacino play the grotesque gangster Big Boy Caprice in “Dick Tracy.” (Don’t scoff. Pacino earned an Oscar nomination for the part.) Hidden under garish makeup and a hunchback, Pacino was kinetic and uninhibited and, most of all, believable in a way that registered to even a child. That lusty emotionality and passionate exuberance — his sense of being truly alive to each moment in his character’s life — is what Pacino brought with such distinction to his movies in that period, which was also the period when I grew from a child to a young man.Pacino’s engagement with his art was a model for how passionately — and variously — you could engage with the world. He has always been brilliant at playing cops and criminals like Big Boy. But he has also played biblical kings, cockney sociopaths, sharkish salesmen, a short-order cook and a Gucci. He’s done Mamet and Brecht and Shakespeare. (His majestic, tragic Shylock was the best theatrical performance I’ve ever seen.) He has played Phil Spector, Jimmy Hoffa, Jack Kevorkian, Joe Paterno, Roy Cohn and, on two occasions, versions of himself. He did it in the artfully self-reflexive documentary “Looking For Richard,” then in the somewhat-less-artful Adam Sandler vehicle “Jack and Jill.” Has he always been perfect? No. He strives for something riskier and more alive than perfection. Is he always perceptive, free, unmissable? God, yes. More

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      in Movies

      Saoirse Ronan Has Lived, and Acted, Through a Lot

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      “I wish I could live through something,” says the teenage title character in the 2017 movie “Lady Bird,” yearning for a life beyond suburban Sacramento.The actor playing her, Saoirse Ronan, had, at that point, already lived through enough for several lives. Then 23, she’d been acting since she was 9, and had already garnered two Oscar nominations. “Lady Bird,” Greta Gerwig’s debut as a solo director, would earn Ronan a third. Another followed, in 2019, for her role as Jo March in Gerwig’s “Little Women.”This year, Oscars buzz surrounds Ronan once again, thanks to her leading roles in Nora Fingscheidt’s “The Outrun,” which opens in theaters Friday, and Steve McQueen’s “Blitz,” out Nov. 1st.Ronan’s career reads as a series of evolutions, pushing into new territory with every role — over the years, she has also played a 1950s Irish immigrant in New York, a child assassin, a vampire, Lady Macbeth and Mary, Queen of Scots. Now 30, with over two decades of experience in front of the camera, the Irish actress has committed herself in “The Outrun” to a character containing multitudes: a woman raised in a remote island community, who returns to recover from her addiction to alcohol.In “The Outrun,” Ronan’s character, Rona, returns home to the Orkney Islands in Scotland to recover from her alcohol addiction.Martin Scott Powell/Sony Pictures Classics“It was so much more than just making a film for me,” Ronan said, in a video interview from New York. She described an experience that was both physically and emotionally demanding: “I think actors are sponges, you’re able to open yourself up to everything around you.” For “The Outrun,” that meant swimming in the icy sea, delivering lambs on-camera and going deep into the psyche of a woman in crisis.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 113 Shares159 Views

      in Television

      When John Amos Had Enough of the ‘Good Times’

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      The actor, whose death was announced this week, made it known he didn’t like the direction the hit show was going. His character was then killed off.It was the role John Amos had worked toward his entire acting career. For three seasons, to many accolades and impressive ratings, Amos played the patriarch, James Evans Sr., on “Good Times.” The character was hardworking, earnest and serious-minded — traits largely unseen in Black television characters up to that point in the mid-1970s. And “Good Times” was a hit, part of a string of sitcom successes from the executive producer Norman Lear.But suddenly, Amos was no longer a part of the cast. The groundbreaking show explained the absence to viewers by having Evans die in an offscreen car accident while preparing the family for a move to Mississippi.“Damn! Damn! Damn!” the actress Esther Rolle, who played Evans’s wife, Florida, famously lamented while mourning his death.“Good Times” rumbled on for another three seasons without its fatherly anchor, and with diminishing viewership each season until it concluded in 1979.The actor’s actual death, at the age of 84, was made public on Tuesday although he died in August. The lag between his death and the announcement has widened a longstanding rift between his two children, Shannon Amos and K.C. Amos His daughter, Shannon, said that she had only learned of her father’s death through media reports.“This tragic news has left us in shock and heartache,” Shannon Amos said in a statement attributed to her, close friends and family members. “We are deeply concerned that our father may have been neglected and isolated during his final days.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Ken Page, Who Starred in ‘Cats’ and Voiced Oogie Boogie, Dies at 70

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      His career on Broadway spanned decades. But he has probably best known for providing the voice of the boogeyman in “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”Ken Page, whose extensive Broadway career included standout roles in “The Wiz” and “Cats,” but whose rich baritone voice reached its widest audience as Oogie Boogie in the perennial hit animated movie “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” died on Monday at his home in St. Louis. He was 70.His death was confirmed by Dorian Hannaway, a longtime friend. She did not cite a cause.Mr. Page, a St. Louis native, arrived on the New York theater scene in 1975 as the understudy, and later the replacement, in the role of the Lion in “The Wiz.” The next year, his showstopping rendition of “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat” as Nicely-Nicely Johnson in a revival of “Guys and Dolls” brought him his first acclaim.Mr. Page revisited the role of Old Deuteronomy, which he had originated on Broadway. in the St. Louis Municipal Opera Theater’s 2010 production of “Cats.”The Muny“Sometimes it really does happen. Sometimes the fairy tale comes true,” Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote in 1976. “It happened on Wednesday night at the Broadway Theater to a young unknown, Ken Page.”His many other Broadway credits included the original Broadway productions of “Cats,” in which he played the dignified Old Deuteronomy, and “Ain’t Misbehavin’,” the musical revue built around songs written or recorded by Fats Waller. Offstage, he was probably best known for voicing Oogie Boogie, the infamous boogeyman in Henry Selick and Tim Burton’s 1993 stop-motion classic, “The Nightmare Before Christmas.” It was a role that Mr. Page would revisit often, in video games and at Halloween celebrations.According to a statement released by his agent, Mr. Page was preparing for upcoming appearances as Oogie Boogie when he died.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More