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      in Theater

      A Reluctant Satirist Takes On the Bomb

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      About two years ago, when Armando Iannucci began adapting “Dr. Strangelove” for the West End, he didn’t think the 1964 movie had many direct parallels to today.The full title of Stanley Kubrick’s film is “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb,” and it tells the story of a U.S. Air Force general who goes rogue and orders a nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. In the Pentagon’s war room, an ineffectual president (Peter Sellers) dithers, blusters and flails, as he tries to avert World War III.In the 1960s, the movie became a much-debated hit — a “nightmare comedy,” as Kubrick called it — at a moment when nuclear annihilation was a common fear. Yet for Iannucci, who created the TV series “Veep,” the movie’s contemporary relevance was, at first, more metaphorical: The failure to stop atomic catastrophe was akin to society’s handling of climate change.Then, the news took over.Steve Coogan, left, plays four roles in “Dr. Strangelove,” including the president of the United States in this scene.Manuel HarlanAs Iannucci and the director Sean Foley worked on the adaptation, which opens at London’s Noël Coward Theater on Oct. 29 and runs through Jan. 25, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia floated the idea of nuclear conflict with the West over its support of Ukraine. China has boosted its nuclear arsenal. And violence in the Middle East has renewed fears around both Iran accelerating its nuclear program and Israel pre-emptively striking Iran’s nuclear facilities.Suddenly, Iannucci recalled in a recent interview in a grand back room of the Noël Coward Theater, his “Dr. Strangelove” felt like “a kind of literal reminder of a real doomsday.”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

    • 150 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Randy Newman Is at His Best When America Is at Its Worst

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      His movie songs are filled with memorable melodies; his own albums with unsavory characters. One of the most astute cultural observers is the subject of a new book.Around the summer of 1966, a song on the radio recorded by the Italian American pop crooner Julius La Rosa caught Bob Dylan’s ear: a forlorn, impressionistic ballad called “I Think It’s Going to Rain Today,” penned by a 22-year-old publishing company staff writer from Los Angeles named Randy Newman.“Randy’s song was so mysterious,” Dylan recalled. “I never heard a song like that before; it was so cynical.” Newman’s own rendition later stood out to him for “the sadness in Randy’s voice. Sadness and cynicism, it’s a strange combination but Randy always manages to pull it off.”Dylan’s testimonial is one of many in “A Few Words in Defense of Our Country: The Biography of Randy Newman,” by the former Los Angeles Times pop critic Robert Hilburn (out Oct. 22).“It’s an honor to have Dylan say something nice about me,” Newman said during a recent phone interview. Though he’s received plenty of accolades — including six Grammys, three Emmys and two Oscars, as well as induction into the Rock & Roll and Songwriters Hall of Fame — Newman, now 80, admitted, “what I really wanted was to have the respect from fellow workers in the field. That Bob or Paul Simon, Jackson Browne, Don Henley, Linda Ronstadt, that those people liked what I did mattered to me — maybe an inordinate amount.”While Newman has never enjoyed the broad commercial success of his peers, his work has on occasion clicked with the culture. His somewhat controversial 1977 satire “Short People” was a bona fide hit that gave him his only gold album, “Little Criminals”; “I Love L.A.,” a wry celebration of his hometown from 1983, became an unlikely anthem for the city’s sports teams; the earnest “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” from Pixar’s 1995 movie “Toy Story,” soundtracked millions of childhoods.In truth, far more people have heard the 20-plus film scores Newman has composed since the early ’80s than any of his singer-songwriter records. “It’s sort of a funny hand to be dealt,” he said.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      A Guide to “Saturday Night” and the Real Players at the Start of ‘S.N.L.’

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      With so many players involved in Jason Reitman’s new movie about “S.N.L.,” here’s a guide to the real-life personalities.It’s easy to get lost watching “Saturday Night”: Jason Reitman’s new film drops us backstage at a moment of maximum confusion — 90 minutes before the 1975 debut of a new NBC show called “Saturday Night.” At the center of all the hubbub is creator-producer Lorne Michaels (played by Gabriel LaBelle), who’s been the one constant at “S.N.L.” over most of the show’s 50 seasons. But what about all the other characters rushing about, wringing their hands over whether this show will actually make it to air? Here’s a guide:The Original CastCHEVY CHASE AND GARRETT MORRIS These members of the original cast, known as the Not Ready for Prime Time Players, were hired as writers, not actors. Chase (played by Cory Michael Smith) had written for Alan King and the Smothers Brothers. As the anchor for “Weekend Update,” Chase, a master of mugging and pratfalls, became the show’s first breakout star and left in 1976 to embark on a film career. (He would return to guest host in 1978, when he reportedly got into fisticuffs with Bill Murray, the cast member who replaced him.)Morris (Lamorne Morris, no relation) was a Broadway performer and a playwright with no improv or sketch comedy background. He was underused but became known for his impersonations of Sammy Davis Jr. and Tina Turner, as well as for yelling on “Weekend Update” (as the News for the Hard of Hearing interpreter). After the show, he stuck with TV comedy, appearing on sitcoms like “Martin,” “The Jamie Foxx Show” and “2 Broke Girls.”Garrett Morris (played by Lamorne Morris, no relation, right) didn’t have a sketch comedy background when he started on “Saturday Night Live.”GILDA RADNER, JANE CURTAIN AND LARAINE NEWMAN The movie doesn’t try very hard to differentiate among the show’s female cast members — Gilda Radner, who died in 1989, Jane Curtin and Laraine Newman. But the three women had very distinct styles. Radner (Ella Hunt), a former member of Second City in Toronto, was the first performer Michaels signed and soon became a star beloved for her fragile, goofy style and characters like Roseanne Roseannadanna. It was her advocacy for fellow Second City veteran and ex-boyfriend Dan Aykroyd that persuaded Michaels to hire him.Newman (Emily Fairn), a founding member of the Los Angeles improv troupe the Groundlings, knew Michaels from working together on a Lily Tomlin special. Her character Sherry the Valley Girl helped kick off a national fad mocking Southern California mall-speak. Newman’s expertise with accents and dialects paved the way for a post-“S.N.L.” career as a voice artist.Curtin (Kim Matula), a member of the Boston improv group the Proposition, was one of the last cast members hired. She was often presented as the foil to more outrageous characters and helped ground many a sketch. As the first female anchor of “Weekend Update,” she was called upon to weather Aykroyd’s contemptuous catchphrase, “Jane, you ignorant slut.” After “S.N.L.,” Curtin became a sitcom star (“Kate & Allie,” “3rd Rock From the Sun”).We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Why ‘Saturday Night’ Omits the Influence of Carol Burnett

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      A new film about the show doesn’t mention her. But in many ways her hit sketch series helped define the early vision of Lorne Michaels.What makes Lorne Michaels laugh?That’s no small question. Half a century of aspiring stars have thought hard on it. The answer has launched and stymied many careers while going a long way to defining modern comedy. The hagiographic new movie “Saturday Night” focuses on Michaels as he puts together the 1975 premiere episode of “Saturday Night Live,” but the comedic vision of the man who has gone on to oversee the show for decades remains maddeningly, pointedly remote.Played with a determined calm by Gabriel Labelle, the young Lorne Michaels comes off as a blandly generic maverick, struggling repeatedly to explain his idea for the show. In an early scene, he compares himself to Thomas Edison, and while one can detect some mocking of the hubris of that statement, there’s not enough. To the extent that his sensibility is illuminated in the screenplay by Jason Reitman and Gil Kenan, it’s through opposition. In scene after scene, Michaels is the counterculture hero confronted by a procession of squares, suits and old-school naysayers. They’re not just skeptical executives or scolding censors, either. Actors playing Jim Henson, Johnny Carson and Milton Berle make appearances, in roles designed, thematically at least, to show us everything this hip new show is not.What stands out about this parade of aesthetic antagonists is that perhaps the most important one to the formation of the identity of “Saturday Night Live” goes unmentioned: Carol Burnett.Despite the sense you get from this cinematic love letter, “Saturday Night Live” did not invent must-see television sketch comedy. It wasn’t even the first important live one on Saturday nights on NBC. (That would be “Your Show of Shows” in the 1950s, with a writers room that included Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner and Neil Simon.) The dominant sketch comedy when “S.N.L.” got started was “The Carol Burnett Show,” a CBS staple since the late 1960s that also featured topical satire, flamboyant performances and star cameos.Lorne Michaels in 1976. What he finds funny remains an enigma even as his influence has grown.NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesIn books about the creation of “Saturday Night Live,” the ones the new film’s screenwriters certainly leaned on, Burnett represented a lodestar of sorts for the artists on the show.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

    • 50 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      Tim Heidecker, Glendale Dad

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      From the moment he showed up at Tim Heidecker’s house, the Chihuahua in the dragon costume seemed a little freaked out.Mr. Heidecker — an actor, comedian and singer-songwriter — lives on a low-key, tree-shaded street in Glendale, Calif. On a recent morning, he was in his converted garage, getting ready for another episode of his talk show, “Office Hours Live With Tim Heidecker.”As crew members hurried around the room, Mr. Heidecker, 48, installed himself at an old white piano and started banging out the opening chords of the Rolling Stones’ “Let’s Spend the Night Together.” A few feet away, the “Office Hours” co-hosts Vic Berger and Doug Lussenhop started blasting random pop-culture sound bites over the speakers, including Jim Carrey yelling “Alllll right-y then!” on repeat.The noise was too much for Mr. Piffles 2.0, who is billed as “the world’s only magic-performing Chihuahua.” Dressed head to tail in a green get-up, he trembled in the arms of his handler, the Las Vegas entertainer known as Piff the Magic Dragon.Mr. Heidecker headed to a standing desk in the middle of the garage. It was time to start planning the episode.“We’re getting close here, guys,” he said. “Do we need Piff at the top of the show? Are we going to talk first?”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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator

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      In his wide-ranging career, he also helped write Elvis Presley’s comeback special and appeared on an early version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.His wife, Rita Blye, confirmed the death. She said he had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Blye was a writer and singer on variety shows in Canada when he received a surprise call in 1967 from Tom Smothers asking him to join the writing staff of the series that he and his and his brother, Dick, would be hosting on CBS.“I couldn’t believe it was Tom Smothers,” Mr. Blye said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2019. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers.”Tom, left, and Dick Smothers on the set of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967. Mr. Blye helped establish the show’s outspoken tone. CBS, via Getty Images“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was unlike any other variety show. The brothers were renowned as a comical folk-singing duo: Tom played the naïve, guitar-playing buffoon, and Dick, who played the double bass, was the wise straight man. They had creative control of the series, which emboldened them and their writers to be more outspoken as they addressed politics, the Vietnam War, religion and civil rights — and their forthrightness during a divisive era increasingly angered some viewers, CBS censors, some of the network’s affiliates and conservative groups.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

    • 88 Shares99 Views

      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