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      Shows About Abortion Surface a Stark Divide

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      Decidedly anti-sensationalistic, Alison Leiby’s shrewd and funny personal monologue plays downtown. Uptown, a staged reading focuses on a gruesome case.A few nights after the leak of the Supreme Court draft opinion that would overturn the right to abortion protected by Roe v. Wade, the comedian Alison Leiby walked onto the stage of the Cherry Lane Theater, in Manhattan’s West Village, to greet the audience before her monologue.“How are we doing?” she asked, taking the temperature of a friendly crowd that had more men in it than you might expect. Then, easily: “The show is exactly the same as it was before we lost all of our rights.”Low-key sardonic, politically charged humor it would be, apparently. We might have guessed as much from the title of the insightfully funny piece she was about to perform: “Oh God, a Show About Abortion.”It is probably true, in terms of Leiby’s script and Lila Neugebauer’s direction, that the monologue — constructed around an account of the abortion that Leiby had three years ago, at 35 — has not changed. But the atmosphere surrounding abortion rights has; it’s more charged, more urgent, more anxious. And the audience always brings the outside world into the room.So here is the first thing you need to know about Leiby’s abortion story: In a smart and entertaining show, full of observations about the sometimes painful messiness of female bodies — menstruation, childbirth, lactation — and the social pressure to put on a happy face about all of it, her trip to Planned Parenthood is the least dramatic, most calmly straightforward part.“Does this feel anticlimactic to you?” she asks, when she’s done retelling it.She knows it must, because back when it happened, she’d expected something more lurid, too.“I think that I thought I’d have some kind of Scarlet A that tells everyone I had an abortion,” she says, “which would have been devastating because it’s private, and also red clashes with my complexion.”A laugh line, sure, but that bit about the fear of the Scarlet A? It lands.“Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth” is a staged reading based on court records that features the cast members, from left, Roxanne Bonifield, Kaché Attyana, Benjamin Standford and Andrea Edgerson.Russ RowlandA couple of miles uptown, at the Chain Studio Theater on West 36th Street, is a show that announced its New York run as “Oh Gosnell: The Truth About Abortion” — a tabloid title with stalkerish overtones, especially given that its own news release mentions Leiby’s show.A publicist for “Oh Gosnell” said that the creation of the play was inspired by Leiby’s comic monologue. “They laugh about it — we tell the truth about it,” says the website of the play now going by the name “Oh Gosnell: A Show About the Truth.”It’s written by Phelim McAleer, who is credited on IMDB as being a producer of the yet-to-be-released film “My Son Hunter,” starring Laurence Fox as Hunter Biden, and as a writer and a producer of “Obamagate,” starring Dean Cain, which The New York Post described as a play that had its premiere on YouTube. His other plays include “Ferguson,” about the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown.Laughter and truth are not mutually exclusive, of course, even if McAleer, a right-wing provocateur whose program bio calls him “a veteran investigative journalist,” implies otherwise.As for conveying any general truth about abortion, rather than specific truths about the gruesome case of Kermit Gosnell — a Philadelphia physician convicted in 2013 of first-degree murder for killing three babies after botched late-term abortions — it doesn’t. Neither is it constructed to persuade.The script for the play, simply titled “Gosnell,” says that it was “compiled, verbatim, from grand jury and criminal trial transcripts” in the Gosnell case. In a spare, somewhat murky staged reading directed by David Atkinson, it has a cast of seven that includes a compelling young actor named Kaché Attyana, who I hope will soon get better work.“The first thing I want you to be assured of, ladies and gentlemen,” a prosecutor (Roxanne Bonifield) says, close to the top of the show, “is that this is not a case about abortion.”For emphasis, she repeats that assertion. Maybe McAleer, the co-author of a book about the Gosnell case, and a producer and co-screenwriter of the 2018 movie “Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer,” didn’t hear her?Then again, in a program note, McAleer writes of the Gosnell trial: “Perhaps the desire to suppress information was why no national media covered the story. There is a reluctance to shine a spotlight on abortion in the U.S. Few people are prepared to go behind the doors and tell the truth of what is really happening there.”Heidi Schreck in her play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which opened on Broadway in 2019.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThe problem with saying that no national media covered the story — well, his own show contradicts that right off the bat, when images of news clippings about the case include one from The New York Times. (Projections are by Meghan Chou.)As for going behind those doors, women do that every day, seeking abortion care. Leiby did it. I’ve done it. My mom did it, too, pre-Roe v. Wade, to save her life from an ectopic pregnancy before my brothers and I were born.Telling the truth about abortion, though — speaking of those experiences, that is, in a culture where abortion remains heavily stigmatized — well, that is rare.Which is maybe why Leiby expected to feel something more sensational than relief after her own abortion.“I thought I’d spend the next few days or months staring out the window like I’m in a depression medication commercial,” she says. “I thought I would carry sadness and emptiness with me everywhere I went.”Kidding, a little bit? Probably. But the notion of abortion as an automatic trauma is pretty deeply rooted in the culture, and it’s not often interrogated onstage. Which leaves the mystery intact.And, conversely, gives the shows that do discuss it an added potency — like Ruby Rae Spiegel’s “Dry Land,” which harnesses the ticking-time-bomb feeling of an unwanted pregnancy, and Lightning Rod Special’s “The Appointment,” which juxtaposes wild musical satire with the crisp quiet of an abortion clinic. And, of course, Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which put an abortion story on Broadway.In the Signature Theater revival of Suzan-Lori Parks’s play, Christine Lahti (right, with Joaquina Kalukango) portrayed an abortion provider. Richard Termine for The New York TimesWhen Leiby mentioned the Scarlet A, I thought of Suzan-Lori Parks’s take on “The Scarlet Letter” — the one of her Red Letter Plays whose title we can’t print here — with its heroine, Hester Smith, who is described in the list of characters as “the Abortionist.” Kia Corthron’s “Come Down Burning,” which also has a heroine who performs abortions, makes a clear connection between the option to safely end a pregnancy and women’s ability to control their own lives.Then there is Ciara Ni Chuirc’s “Made by God,” which had its premiere this winter at Irish Repertory Theater: a drama about a shame-filled Irish teenager who died alone with her newborn in the 1980s, and about the seismic shift in public opinion that led Ireland to legalize abortion in 2019. The play’s principal anti-abortion character is an American interloper.Leiby — who reports, incredulously, that she whispered the phrase “an abortion” to Planned Parenthood when she called to make an appointment for one — means her monologue to start people talking about theirs.Beyond that, though, her show makes a broader point: about the need for women to be able to decide what they want and don’t want, and shape their existences accordingly.“I’m a woman who did something she needed to do,” she says, “to protect the life she built for herself.”It’s not funny, but it’s true.Oh God, a Show About AbortionThrough June 4 at the Cherry Lane Theater, Manhattan; cherrylanetheatre.org. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes.Oh Gosnell: A Show About the TruthThrough May 15 at the Chain Studio Theater, Manhattan; ohgosnell.com. Running time: 1 hour. More

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      in Movies

      The Strange Afterlife of George Carlin

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      In the closing monologue from a recent episode of his HBO talk show, Bill Maher cataloged a series of social conditions that he suggested were hampering stand-up comedy and imperiling free speech: cancel culture, a perceived increase of sensitivity on college campuses, and Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the Oscars.Near the end of his remarks, Maher invoked the comedian George Carlin, a personal hero whose iconoclastic spirit, he seemed to believe, could never thrive in such a thin-skinned and overly entitled era. “Oh, George,” he said, “it’s a good thing you’re dead.”Carlin, the cantankerous, longhaired sage who used his withering insight and gleefully profane vocabulary to take aim at American hypocrisy, died in 2008. But in the years since, it can feel like he never really left us.On an almost daily basis, parts of Carlin’s routines rise to the surface of our discourse, and he is embraced by people who span the political spectrum — they may rarely agree with each other, but they are certain that Carlin would agree with them.Carlin’s rueful 1996 routine about conservatives’ opposition to abortion (“they will do anything for the unborn, but once you’re born, you’re on your own”) became a newly viral phenomenon and was shown on a recent broadcast of the MSNBC program “11th Hour.” A video clip of a Carlin bit about how Americans are ravenous for war (“so we’re good at it, and it’s a good thing we are — we’re not very good at anything else anymore!”) has been tweeted by Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota. On the right-wing website Breitbart, Carlin has been cited as an expert on bipartisanship (“the word bipartisan usually means some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out”) and hailed as a rebel who didn’t acquiesce to authority.Carlin is a venerated figure in his chosen field who unites performers as disparate as Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan, but he’s also someone whose influence transcends comedy. He is a touchstone shared by the psychologist Steven Pinker, the rapper and actor Ice Cube and people on social media who equate the pandemic with George Orwell novels. Carlin’s indignant voice feels so impossible to duplicate that quotes he never said and entire essays he didn’t write are often wrongly attributed to him.George Carlin on “Saturday Night Live” in 1975. His fans include Joe Rogan and Jim Gaffigan.Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesThere’s a strange afterlife that Carlin enjoys, not just as a comic but also as a moral compass. Few of us care in quite the same way if our choices in life would meet the approval of Johnny Carson or Andy Kaufman.That Carlin’s work endures long after him is not only a testament to his talents; it’s a sign that his frustrations, which he expressed humorously but felt authentically, still resonate with audiences, and that the injustices he identified in American society persist to this day.“There’s something about his righteous aggravation — it’s a rare point of view, and it’s rare that it’s a natural point of view,” said Marc Maron, the comedian and podcaster. “It’s not something you can pretend to make happen. Aggravation is not always funny.”And Carlin’s routines, particularly from his splenetic, late-period specials, have hardly lost their punch. It’s still bracing to hear the bitter wordplay in his lament: “It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”When he spoke, “you always felt like you were hearing the truth, or his truth,” said the comedian Bill Burr. “He was giving you the truth of what he felt, which most of us don’t do. It’s refreshing to listen to another human being tell you exactly how they feel, even if it’s 180 degrees removed from what you agree with.”But the durability of Carlin’s material can be dangerous, too. Dislocated from the time and circumstances that inspired his work, the arguments he delivered can be made to serve purposes he didn’t intend.As those who were closest to him have learned, when he is unable to advocate for himself, he can be made to seem like he supported any opinion at all.“It is a daily battle for me,” said Kelly Carlin, the comedian’s daughter. “At first I was like, I’ll be the interpreter and tell them what I think he meant. And then it was like, this is not my job. It’s like trying to push back a tidal wave sometimes.”The continuing relevance of Carlin’s material is partly a result of how he learned to compose and refine it over a career that spanned nearly 50 years.As he explained in a 1997 interview on “The Chris Rock Show,” he essentially saw himself as a playful provocateur. “I like to bother people,” he said, adding that he tried to figure out “where the line is drawn, and then deliberately cross it and drag the audience with you. And have them happy that you did it.”Carlin with his daughter, Kelly, on the left and his first wife, Brenda. He’s the subject of a new documentary.George Carlin’s Estate, via HBOCarlin is well-known for pivoting from a strait-laced, suit-and-tie approach to standup in the late 1960s and early ’70s and for immersing himself in the counterculture that shaped his personal politics.But a new two-part HBO documentary, “George Carlin’s American Dream,” which will be shown May 20 and 21, illustrates how his professional trajectory consisted of numerous ups and downs — multiple efforts to rediscover his voice and refine his material when his personal radar detected he was out of step with the times.“He would do that every decade or so,” said Judd Apatow, the comedian and filmmaker who directed the documentary with Michael Bonfiglio. “At the moment when it seemed like he was out of gas, he would suddenly recharge and reinvent himself.”As he evolved from a fast-talking parodist of TV and radio to a rhetorical bomb-tosser, Carlin had a set of standards that remained consistent. “He had deep core values that were good,” Bonfiglio said: “Take care of other people. Take care of the planet. There was a sense of fairness and rooting for the underdog. Those would shine through, even in his darkest stuff.”But over the decades, as Carlin watched America’s retreat from Vietnam and its entrance into wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as corporate power grew more intractable and environmental catastrophe felt unavoidable, his feelings of bitter disappointment flooded into his routines.At times, Maron said, “his anger became more pronounced than his ability to speak funny within it.” But in every hourlong set he performed, Maron added, “there would be one bit that was worth the entire special.”Carlin’s personal politics were readily identifiable. Kelly Carlin said her father was “99 percent progressive” and that he raised her in a manner that today might be contemptuously dismissed as woke.“He taught me from Day 1 that the Black and brown people have always been oppressed, horribly and systematically, by the owners of wealth,” she said. “He had a pure disdain and loathing for white men in America.”That leftist bent was unmistakable in Carlin’s standup, too: He railed against police violence, championed prison reform and environmentalism and condemned organized religion.But he was also critical of Democrats and “guilty white liberals,” while he endorsed other ideas that conservatives supported. He despised euphemism and the policing of language, reviled what he called “the continued puss-ification of the American male” and rebuked his countrymen who would “trade away a little of their freedom for the feeling — the illusion — of security.”Using language that would later be echoed by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, Carlin observed in a 2005 routine that the interwoven systems of American economy and government were not designed to ensure the prosperity of the average citizen: “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it,” he said.“The table is tilted, folks,” Carlin added. “The game is rigged.”Carlin didn’t hesitate to criticize presidents by name — Bill Clinton and George W. Bush among them — but, more often, he spoke in broader terms and addressed institutional failings.“There were other court jesters before Carlin and alongside Carlin, but Carlin was more powerful and dangerous to the king,” said Journey Gunderson, the executive director of the National Comedy Center, which is home to more than 25,000 items from Carlin’s archives.What gave him his potency, Gunderson said, was that he turned his standup “into a call to action.” Carlin, she said, “taught everyone where to find the power that they have and encouraged them to use it.”Carlin at a benefit for the Bitter End in New York in 1992. He was “99 percent progressive,” said his daughter, but also took some positions that echoed those of conservatives today.Ed Bailey/Associated PressThat approach gave Carlin’s comedy a longevity that not even the work of his esteemed predecessor Lenny Bruce has attained.“It requires a scholarship to appreciate Lenny Bruce,” Maron said. “You’ve got to sort through a number of very dated impressions and news stories. Whereas George was always making things totally accessible.”(Even in her father’s later years, Kelly Carlin said, if he had an idea for a topical joke, rather than put it in his act, he would share them with people like the broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who was then the host of “Countdown” on MSNBC. Olbermann confirmed this, saying that Carlin sent him “a couple of one-liners about Bush” and a sports joke he keeps framed on his wall.)For the most part, Carlin left behind no protégés or appointed successors. When he died, no one else could say they spoke on his behalf. And while the generations of stand-ups that have followed may have a sincere reverence for him, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are fluent in the jokes he told.“A lot of us know that you’re supposed to say Carlin is an influence, but I don’t think a lot of us can back that up,” the comedian Nikki Glaser said.A lack of familiarity with Carlin’s words, his history and his values can lead to misapprehension when his arguments are stretched to fit present-day conditions he didn’t live to see.Several times during the pandemic, Carlin has drawn attention for a routine from his 1999 special, “You Are All Diseased,” in which he mischievously suggests that a childhood spent swimming in the polluted Hudson River was the reason he didn’t catch polio.(“In my neighborhood, no one ever got polio,” he fulminates. “No one, ever. You know why? ’Cause we swam in raw sewage. It strengthened our immune systems. The polio never had a prayer.”)As Kelly Carlin explained, some viewers concluded — wrongly — that her father would have opposed coronavirus vaccines.“Everyone’s like, see? George Carlin would have been anti-vaccination,” she said. “And I’m like, no. My dad was pro-science, pro-rational thinking, pro-evidence-based medicine. The man was a heart patient for 30 years. When he was a kid and the polio vaccine became available, he got the polio vaccine.”Though she generally tries to avoid intervening in these kinds of disputes, Kelly Carlin has used her social media to correct this reading. “I felt it was important that people not use him to undermine what we needed to do to get through this virus,” she said.On other modern-day topics in which George Carlin surely would have had an incendiary but clarifying take on — the Trump and Biden presidencies, social media, Elon Musk or the Marvel Cinematic Universe — no matter how much we might wish to know his thoughts, he remains frustratingly out of reach. Kelly Carlin said she could understand why audiences might long for her father’s particular brand of unvarnished honesty at this moment.“I think we are in a time of exponential uncertainty as a species,” she said. “He’s a man who looked forward and said, ‘This is not going to end well.’ He saw the chaos coming.”And Carlin remains almost universally admired as a free-speech pioneer: He was arrested in 1972 for a performance of “Seven Words You Can Never Say on Television,” and that same routine would later play a key role when the federal government asserted its power to regulate the broadcast of indecent content.Because of that status, Carlin is frequently summoned in contemporary debates over how comedians choose to use their platforms. When controversy engulfed Dave Chappelle’s 2021 special “The Closer,” which was criticized as transphobic and prompted walkouts at Netflix, Carlin’s name was invoked, even though no one could be certain what position he might have taken: Would he have criticized Chappelle as intolerant or defended his right to express himself?Carlin was arrested in Milwaukee in 1972 on obscenity and disorderly conduct charges. The case was later dismissed and the comedian was widely admired for his free-speech stance.Bettmann Archive/Getty ImagesIn efforts to divine his opinion, some Carlin fans pointed to a 1990 interview he gave to Larry King, when he expressed his misgivings about the crude standup of Andrew Dice Clay: “His targets are underdogs, and comedy has traditionally picked on power — people who abuse their power,” Carlin said at the time.Kelly Carlin said her father “always took the stand that more speech is better than less speech” and would have supported Chappelle’s right to perform the special. But, she added, “if you’re a comedian, you’ve got to be funny.”“If you’re going to take the audience over the line, you’ve got to construct things in a way that they’re willingly crossing it with you,” she said. “Did Dave Chappelle do that for everybody? Clearly not.”Even so, Kelly Carlin said, “is it dangerous when a culture wants to shut people down for speech? I think my dad would say that is dangerous.”Like his friend and forerunner Lenny Bruce, who was arrested and convicted on obscenity charges (and who later received a posthumous pardon), George Carlin was battling the state’s power to discourage and punish his expression.Maron contended that free-speech conflicts have shifted since Carlin’s era in such a way that it doesn’t make sense to drag Carlin back into them.“That fight was already won,” Maron said. “What’s going on now is not that fight.” Today, he said, we live “in a world where anybody can really say what they want, whether anyone believes that or not.”While Carlin would still probably be dissatisfied with the state of free speech today, Maron said, his barbs would have been aimed at “the corporate occupation” of discourse, with digital monoliths like Google, Facebook and Twitter “dictating how culture thrives and is consumed.”And if a comedian wants to claim freedom of speech while using words that others deem hateful, Maron said, “you can say them all you want — you’re probably just going to be hanging around people who enjoy that kind of stuff. If that’s the company you want to keep, do what you gotta do.”Without Carlin’s humanistic spirit to guide it, contemporary standup can sometimes feel like a ruthless place. “There’s this fearlessness in comedy now that is so fake,” Glaser said. “There’s so much sleight of hand and so many illusions happening onstage to trick an audience that you’re being brave.”“There was never a cruelty to Carlin,” she said. “He always seemed filled with empathy.”Gunderson, of the National Comedy Center, described Carlin as “a leader who didn’t want to hold all the power.” The ultimate lesson he had for us, she said, is that we have “the unlimited right to challenge everything, to never stop thinking critically about any source of power or any institution” — even Carlin himself.Kelly Carlin cautioned that we should not be too beholden to any of the messages in her father’s stand-up: Of course George Carlin believed in much of what he said onstage, but what mattered most to him was that audiences learned to think for themselves. He never wanted to be anyone’s role model and was never a comfortable joiner of causes.“The moment anyone gets in a group, gets together for meetings and puts on armbands, he instantly didn’t want that,” she said.If George Carlin were around now to respond to the questions we have for him, “he would have schooled us on both sides and come up with a third-way truth that would have blown our minds,” she said. “But not solved anything. He was never looking to solve the culture wars or solve America’s problems. He was always looking to show off what he’d been thinking about at home.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Which Way to the Stage’ Review: Theater Buddies, With Claws Out

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      In her new comedy, Ana Nogueira spins zippy fun out of a fairly conventional story about a friendship strained by resentment.If you have ever fantasized about casting your favorite musical or ranked the actresses who have played Mrs. Lovett, chances are you will be familiar with Jeff and Judy. You might even be them.We first meet the two besties by the stage door of the Richard Rodgers Theater. They are waiting, Playbills at the ready, for Idina Menzel — this is 2015, when Menzel was still headlining “If/Then” and stars occasionally met with fans after a performance (an activity now curtailed by the Covid-19 pandemic).Judy (Sas Goldberg) and Jeff (Max Jenkins) are arguing over the respective merits of Bernadette Peters and Patti LuPone in “Gypsy,” and Ana Nogueira’s “Which Way to the Stage,” at MCC Theater, is off, its needle already close to the red zone. At least Jeff and Judy agree on one thing: either of those two stars is better than the one they refer to simply as “Imelda” (Staunton, unless Marcos also appeared in “Gypsy”). “Like a caricature of a caricature of a performance by my mother in the Temple Beth Israel talent show,” Judy says.You might have sussed out by now that Judy is straight and Jeff is gay, and both have a way with quips.Admittedly this is a fairly conventional setup, but Nogueira spins zippy fun out of it, the theater references are on point, and the director, Mike Donahue, imparts a nice screwball-comedy pace. Then come the variations on the theme.Michelle Veintimilla, from far left, Evan Todd and Sas Goldberg at a drag performance by Max Jenkins’s character, Jeff.Richard Termine for The New York TimesThe first is that, somewhat predictably, Judy and Jeff are actors themselves — though she makes a living as a real estate agent while he is a Crunch instructor with a drag gig on the side.We also gradually realize that their friendship is heavy with barely contained resentment. Jeff lectures Judy when she uses a slur for gay men, only to casually drop demeaning words for women. After she takes off during his drag tribute to Menzel, a wounded Jeff demands to know what she thought of his act. It is obvious the last thing he wants is an honest opinion, but he pressures Judy anyway.“Which Way to the Stage” is about the performances people put on for themselves, their friends, family and potential loved ones, as well as the identities they hide behind. (Nogueira has experience both as a writer and an actor, with acting credits on such shows as “The Vampire Diaries” and the Starz series “Hightown.”)This tension between who we are, who we think we are and the personas we project is especially fraught for actors, and it weighs heavily on Jeff and Judy. (Goldberg, a standout in “Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow Moscow” and “Significant Other,” excels at suggesting hurt underneath sarcasm.) The veiled animosity between the two is brought to a head when they meet the handsome Mark (Evan Todd), who has the easygoing, insouciant charm of a born star — or at least someone who can live off his acting.Under its avalanche of knowing jokes, “Which Way to the Stage” has serious matters on its mind, including the undercurrent of homophobia and misogyny that can suffuse the relationship between straight women and gay men. Nogueira’s writing is at its best when she lets anger bubble to the surface, but like Jeff and Judy with theater, it seems as if she can’t quite decide whether her play is, at heart, about love or cynicism.“Which Way to the Stage” builds up to a conflagration that is the equivalent of an 11 o’clock number. But like many musicals, the show doesn’t know what to do with itself afterward, so it ends big with a move that feels like a Hail Mary pass. The attempt is fun to watch, but it also comes up short.Which Way to the StageThrough May 22 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 50 minutes. More

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      in Movies

      In Comedy, Timing Is Everything, Especially at Netflix’s Festival

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      Planned long before the streamer hit a rough patch, the expansive event had the feel of the end of an era. Still, there were plenty of stellar shows.LOS ANGELES — Over the past two weeks, in a shock-and-awe display of cultural power that suddenly seems from a bygone era, Netflix put on a behemoth festival that summoned all corners of the comedy world. Take Saturday evening, for instance. Amy Poehler and Tina Fey cracked jokes at the YouTube Theater while Billy Eichner hosted an evening of LGBTQ+ stand-ups at the Greek Theater that included, among others, Wanda Sykes and Tig Notaro. Tim Heidecker chatted with comics at the Elysian Theater, a savvy new alternative space, while Mitra Jouhari from Adult Swim’s “Three Busy Debras” prepared to go onstage. Two miles away, Gabriel Iglesias was getting ready to be the first stand-up to ever perform at Dodger Stadium.The inaugural Netflix Is a Joke Fest which was cooked up before the pandemic and then postponed, rivaled if not eclipsed Just for Laughs, the mammoth industry event in Montreal. Producing 298 shows in dozens of spaces throughout Los Angeles, this ambitious effort took place in an awkwardly humbling moment for the streaming giant, after a quarter when it reported losing subscribers for the first time in a decade and its valuation dropped more than a third. There were layoffs, talk of price increases and the once unthinkable, adding digital ads.The physical kind blanketed the city, including a seven-story sign overlooking Hollywood Boulevard that commanded: “Please Laugh Responsibly.” This is the sort of corporate humor that uses jokey irony to disguise a commercial purpose, but there was something especially incongruous about the swagger of these promotions. To trumpet, in another sign, “the biggest comedy event in history” (with an asterisk and the joke “probably”) while employees anxiously whispered about the company’s future gave the festival a certain “last days of the Roman Empire” vibe.Ads for the festival blanketed Los Angeles. Allison Zaucha for The New York TimesMy week at the festival, seeing two shows a night, was a reminder that comics thrive in such environments. “Anyone hear an earthquake or a tremor?” David Letterman quipped at his live talk show, held at the festival with only stand-ups as guests. (They performed short sets and also sat down to chat.) With his old pinpoint timing, he waited a beat before quipping: “Must have been the Netflix stock crashing.”Anthony Jeselnik told the crowd at his show he loved that Netflix started the festivities by “laying off half their marketing team, losing a billion dollars and then trying to kill Dave Chappelle” — a reference to an audience member’s attack on Chappelle earlier in the festival. Known for taut jokes, Jeselnik leaned more into storytelling while sticking to his commitment to navigating hot button subjects in sharp-edged punch lines, starting with material on the trans community that aims to be both transgressive and progressive. The rap against Jeselnik is that his use of misdirection can be formulaic, like a math problem, but this show was advanced calculus, an implicit rebuke to comedians relying on lazy jokes about marginalized groups. He said he had writer’s block over the pandemic so he set himself goals to escape it. “I wanted to not aim too high,” he said at a leisurely pace: “Set something easy: try to handle this better than John Mulaney.”Those expecting Mulaney, who performed at the Forum, to dig deep into the relationship drama that has made him a tabloid staple would be disappointed. He is touring with an hour of material that is the most anticipated of the year, and it lives up to the hype. (No news on when it will become a special.) When I first saw him do the same material at City Winery one year ago, his discussion of addiction and rehab was raw and messy and bleak. It has tightened into a polished showbiz machine, with his broadest act-outs, impressions and even an extended song and dance. (The suggestion of a suicidal tendency is gone.) His show is less a baring of the soul than a joke-dense and pointed scuffing up of his image. Its key line: “Likability is a jail.”If so, Meg Stalter might be its current warden, since her videos during the pandemic turned her into an unlikely star with a devoted community of fans who delighted in her collection of flamboyantly overwrought characters. How this success will translate to her live comedy is an open question. In a hectic, digressive performance to a sold-out audience, she left her characters behind and stuck to one self-dramatizing, often flailing star whose biggest laughs were less the product of bits than interactions with the crowd.While there were several star-driven shows, the festival was anchored by many showcases of short sets, often hosted by big names like Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda. They introduced a stellar lineup of mostly women comics, including Cristela Alonzo and Michelle Buteau (who both told quarantine jokes). In between acts, Fonda and Tomlin bantered, comparing notes on who had been arrested more. When Margaret Cho came onstage, a few days after the leak of the Supreme Court abortion opinion, she told the hosts, “I look forward to getting arrested with you after the repeal of Roe v. Wade.”Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda were hosts of one show featuring mainly women comics.Elizabeth Morris/Netflix The biggest show by far was Iglesias’s at Dodger Stadium, a stand-up set that seemed to double as a celebration of its own feat, even though seeing comedy in a ballpark is not ideal. When Martin Moreno asked the crowd to not look at screens before introducing him, most of the audience, myself included, was watching him on a giant screen.But many of the funniest, most satisfying performances took place in small rooms, none more so than the one by Liza Treyger, whose act has become a Richard-Lewis-level opera of neurotic self-deprecation. What she called her “monologue of bad habits” is a rapid-fire series of beyond-jaded jokes at her own expense that often take the form of exasperated questions: “Do you ever watch a video on Instagram and tell your friends you watched a documentary?” she said. “Do you run late on purpose just to feel something?”For comedy nerds, it was also a pleasure to see Marsha Warfield, a former star of the sitcom “Night Court” and a figure from the 1970s Comedy Store scene whose legendary reputation rarely translates into high-profile shows. In a confidently moseying delivery, she talked about falling out of the public eye and coming out of the closet on Facebook, then defensively insisted that’s just where old people are. “Facebook is the 21st-century version of sitting in an open window and yelling at people,” she said.Of course such intimate live shows are not what created the most news. That would be Pete Davidson returning to stand-up (“In the last couple years, I’ve been onstage less than the babies inside of Ali Wong,” he said, a solid inside baseball quip) and cracking jokes about Kanye West. There was also the attack on Chappelle which added an element of tension to the entire festival. Beefy security guys were quick to clamp down on hecklers. I saw two people wrestled to the ground and dragged out of a theater before a Snoop Dogg-hosted show; another person was forcibly ejected after heckling Letterman. Many comics seemed jittery and ready to battle. When Mike Epps, dressed in a black leather suit, walked onstage shadow boxing, everyone got the joke. This was funny, but that this celebration of jokes sat alongside the new alertness to security added yet another irony to this festival.Pete Davidson made headlines for his return to stand-up (and for jokes about Kanye West).Ser Baffo/Netflix Comics were sympathetic to Chappelle, but the backlash toward his jokes about the trans community started make its way into sets. After saying that people have been asking her about the assault, Robin Tran, a trans comic who was headlining a show, quipped: “I just want to say, for the record, I only told him to scare Chappelle.” At a different show, another trans comic, Nori Reed, did a very funny, experimental set that postponed telling a conventional punchline for a few minutes, then calling it inspired by Chappelle: “No jokes, all vibes.”One of the strengths and perhaps vulnerabilities of Netflix, the festival and service, is its range. The streamer’s comedy taste has always been difficult to pin down. Its brand is big. I interviewed the heads of Netflix comedy in 2018, around the height of their power, though competition from rival services like Apple TV+ and Disney+ loomed. Asked if they could continue to draw the most famous names with big money, Lisa Nishimura, the vice president of independent and documentary film content, said: “If we continue to grow the audience, we’re OK.”Now that the audience has shrunk, what does that mean? Will the number of Netflix comedy specials dwindle? Will competitors fill the space? HBO has been putting out quality shows and found a discourse-dominating hit with Jerrod Carmichael’s “Rothaniel.” (That special was directed by Bo Burnham, whose “Inside” is one of the most impressive success stories for Netflix of the past few years.)In a Sunset Boulevard coffee shop, just a few blocks from the hotel where club owners and comics stayed and you could see unnerving sights like late-night Comedy Cellar staple Dave Attell bathed in Hollywood daylight, I met with Robbie Praw, the director of original standup at Netflix. He looked weary managing this behemoth. Asked if financial troubles will change Netflix’s commitment to comedy, he said no but conceded that when it came to the number of specials, there would be “a little more curation.”It was a cautious, careful answer, one that reflected the moment more than any joke, billboard or festival did that week. More

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      Ric Parnell, Real Drummer in a Famous Fake Band, Dies at 70

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      The central characters in the mockumentary “This Is Spinal Tap” were comic actors, but Mr. Parnell was an actual professional musician.Ric Parnell, a real drummer best known for playing in a fake band, the one chronicled in Rob Reiner’s fabled 1984 mockumentary, “This Is Spinal Tap,” died on May 1 in Missoula, Mont., where he had lived for some two decades. He was 70.His partner, McKenzie Sweeney, confirmed the death. She said a blood clot in his lungs led to organ failure.Mr. Parnell had been in several bands, including the British prog-rock outfit Atomic Rooster, when he auditioned for “This Is Spinal Tap,” a deadpan sendup of rock clichés, and got the role of the drummer, Mick Shrimpton. The central band members, though, weren’t primarily musicians, though they had musical ability; they were comic actors — Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Shearer. Mr. Reiner played the role of Marty DiBergi, a documentarian recording what turns out to be a disastrous tour by Spinal Tap, a heavy metal band that is past its prime and poorly managed.Mr. McKean said Mr. Parnell fit in seamlessly.“He looked perfect, all hair and cheekbones, but he also got the joke and knew to play the reality without comment,” he said by email. “And he was a great drummer in the tradition of his hero, John Bonham” — the drummer for Led Zeppelin.“Onstage,” Mr. McKean added, “he was the best kind of monster; offstage, a very nice, very funny guy.”Mr. Parnell had only a few lines in the movie, but he was pivotal to one of its funniest gags: Drummers for the band had a habit of dying in bizarre and unpleasant ways. In one scene, he lounges in a bathtub while Marty DiBergi asks him if he’s bothered by that history.“It did kind of freak me out a bit, but it can’t always happen,” Mick says, and Marty agrees, telling him, “The law of averages says you will survive.”The law of averages, alas, was wrong — near the end of the film, Mick spontaneously combusts onstage. When the film developed such a cult following that the fake band went on tour in the early 1990s, playing actual shows, that necessitated a tweaking of Mr. Parnell’s persona — he was now Rick Shrimpton, the twin brother of the deceased Mick.Life almost imitated art in mid-1992, when Mr. Parnell fell down some stairs while hurrying to a sound check as the band was rehearsing in Los Angeles. He injured an ankle.“Despite the odds of meeting with death by remaining with Spinal Tap,” a publicist for the band said at the time, “he’s looking forward to continuing the tour.”That “Return of Spinal Tap” tour eventually took the group to the Royal Albert Hall in London, a pinch-me moment for the British-born Mr. Parnell as he waited to go on alongside Mr. Shearer.“I remember during ‘The Return of Spinal Tap’ standing backstage with Harry and hearing the Albert Hall crowd just chanting, ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!’ ‘Tap!,’” Mr. Parnell told The Missoula Independent in 2006. “I turned to Harry and I said, ‘Come on, now. We’re a joke! Don’t they know that?’ It was just amazing how quite massive it all became.”The members of Spinal Tap, from left: Christopher Guest, Mr. Parnell, David Kaff, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean.Aaron Rapoport/Corbis/Getty ImagesAbout two decades ago, Mr. Parnell settled into a much quieter sort of life in Missoula, where for a time he had a radio show called “Spontaneous Combustion” on KDTR-FM, on which he told stories and indulged his eclectic musical tastes. For one show he played only artists who were alumni of Antelope Valley High School in California, among them Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart.“I get to play what I want, do whatever I want — all as long as I don’t swear,” he told The Independent. “That’s the only hard part.”Richard John Parnell was born on Aug. 13, 1951, in London to Jack and Monique (Bonneau) Parnell. His father was a composer, conductor and drummer, and he said that drumming came naturally from a young age.“I got it from my dad,” he told The Missoulian in 2007. “I could sit down at the drum kit and play a beat straight away.”Lessons, he said, were not his thing; he learned by playing in groups.“Over the years, I’ve built up a technique,” he told the newspaper. “I get drummers saying, ‘How did you do that?’ I say, ‘I have no idea. I’m just hitting.’ I wouldn’t know a paradiddle from a flam-doodlehead.”His father, who worked as musical director or in other capacities on numerous television shows, sometimes added to his education by taking him to the set. He recalled sitting at the feet of Jimi Hendrix when he performed on the singer Dusty Springfield’s British TV series in 1968.Mr. Parnell’s own career was starting about the same time. He recalled touring with Engelbert Humperdinck as a teenager. He joined Atomic Rooster in 1970, and then came a stint with an Italian group, Ibis. In 1977 he moved to the United States with a band called Nova, which settled in Boulder, Colo.He played numerous studio sessions over the years and can be heard on records by Beck, Toni Basil and others. For a time he toured with the R&B saxophonist Joe Houston. They would stop every year for a few shows in Missoula before heading into Canada to tour there. But, as Mr. Parnell often told the story, one year the group didn’t have the right paperwork to cross the border and had to extend its stay in Missoula.“I basically got stuck here and then didn’t want to leave,” he told The Independent. “I’d always liked this place — it’s like Boulder in the 1970s, when I first came to the states. I became a Missoulian instantly.”Mr. Parnell was married and divorced four times. In addition to Ms. Sweeney, he is survived by two brothers, Will and Marc, and two stepsisters, Emma Parnell and Sarah Currie.Over the last two decades he could often be found playing with one group or another at local spots in Missoula. In 2004, a writer for The Missoulian asked if he, as an accomplished musician, ever got tired of being recognized only for his joke band.“No, not really,” he said. “Really it’s quite nice to be a part of such a legendary thing.” More

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      in Music

      Fun Things to Do in N.Y.C. This May 2022

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      Looking for something to do in New York? Go see the Asian Comedy Fest at Stand Up NY and Caveat or the British singer Nilüfer Yanya at Webster Hall. Take the kids to Our First Art Fair, as part of NADA New York. Or you can still catch “Hangmen” on Broadway and the Jacques-Louis David blockbuster at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Comedy | Music | Kids | Film | Dance | Theater | ArtComedyJes Tom, above at Union Hall in Brooklyn in February, will be among the performers in this weekend’s Asian Comedy Fest.JT AndersonAsian Comedy FestFriday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Stand Up NY, 236 West 78th Street, Manhattan; standupny.com. Saturday at 6, 8 and 10 p.m. at Caveat, 21A Clinton Street, Manhattan; caveat.nycFor the third straight year, Ed Pokropski, a writer and producer at NBCUniversal, and the producer and comedian Kate Moran have assembled dozens of performers for this festival, and like last year, they’re right on time to celebrate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. The six shows will feature Julia Shiplett, Michael Cruz Kayne, Usama Siddiquee, Karen Chee with the puppeteer Kathleen Kim, the podcasters from “Feeling Asian,” and Yuhua Hamasaki from “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” Friday’s 8 p.m. lineup includes perhaps the festival’s buzziest performer: Jes Tom, a nonbinary trans comedian who co-stars in the new Hulu rom-com “Crush.” (Tom will also headline their own show on May 14 at the Bell House.) Tickets start at $25 per show ($65 for an all-night pass) and are available at asiancomedyfest.com. SEAN L. McCARTHYMusicDarius Jones, above at the Winter Jazzfest in 2018, has programmed this year’s MATA Festival, which concludes at National Sawdust this weekend.Jacob Blickenstaff for The New York TimesClassical MusicMATA FestivalFriday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. at National Sawdust, 80 North Sixth Street, Brooklyn; live.nationalsawdust.org.This year’s iteration of the annual contemporary music blowout known as the MATA Festival has been programmed by the composer and alto saxophonist Darius Jones. For the festival’s final two nights, Jones has put together a set of works by younger artists on Friday and one of his own on Saturday. Friday’s concert will feature notable artists like Travis Laplante, who is scheduled to play his solo tenor saxophone opus “The Obvious Place.” And Saturday’s performance will offer the world premiere of Jones’s piece “Colored School No. 3,” which references a Brooklyn building once used as a segregated school for Black children into the early 20th century. Tickets for each night are $25. SETH COLTER WALLSNilüfer Yanya will headline at Webster Hall on Saturday.Adama Jalloh for The New York TimesPop & RockNilüfer YanyaSaturday at 7:30 p.m. at Webster Hall, 25 East 11th Street, Manhattan; websterhall.com.Though as a teenager she was tapped to be in a girl group assembled by Louis Tomlinson of One Direction, Nilüfer Yanya chose a self-determined path over the prospect of pop stardom. The British singer’s debut album, from 2019, contained notes of jazz and indie pop but leaned predominantly into alt-rock, showcasing the guitar chops she had honed since picking up the instrument at age 12. Yanya’s sophomore effort, released in March, follows suit but pares her sound down to essential components: wafty melodies, crisp beats, circuitous guitar work reminiscent of Radiohead. Ironically titled “Painless,” the album is spiked with thorns, its lyrics tackling the complicated, damaging side effects of desire. On Saturday, Yanya heads a bill that also features two other singer-guitarists: Ada Lea and Tasha. Tickets start at $25 and are available at axs.com. OLIVIA HORNKidsOur First Art Fair at Pier 36, sponsored by the New Art Dealers Alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts, will feature works by children 12 and under. Above, a display from an after-school class at the museum in 2019.Children’s Museum of the ArtsOur First Art FairThursday from 4 to 8 p.m.; Friday and Saturday from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m.; Sunday from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. at NADA New York, Pier 36, 299 South Street, Manhattan; newartdealers.org.Learn More About the Metropolitan Museum of Art$125 Million Donation: The largest capital gift in the Met’s history will help reinvigorate a long-delayed rebuild of the Modern wing.Recent Exhibits: Our critics reviewed exhibits featuring the drawings of the French Revolution’s chief propagandist and new work by the sculptor Charles Ray.Behind the Scenes: A documentary goes inside the Met to chronicle one of the most challenging years of its history.A Guide to the Met: From the must-see galleries to the lesser-known treasures, here’s how to make the most of your visit.While the New Art Dealers Alliance has always catered to the business’s youngest members, it would be hard to find exhibitors younger than some appearing at this year’s NADA New York exposition. They’re the entrepreneurs 12 and under participating in Our First Art Fair, presented by the alliance and the Children’s Museum of the Arts. Here, youngsters display and price their creations, receiving all proceeds. Little artists who missed the April submission deadline can still contribute by completing a required form and delivering it, along their work, to the fair. On Saturday from 2 to 4 p.m., museum educators will also attend, providing art supplies and helping with last-minute entries. What doesn’t sell goes to the museum’s permanent collection — no small distinction. NADA passes start at $40; they’re free for children. LAUREL GRAEBERFilmThuy An Luu and Frédéric Andrei in Jean-Jacques Beineix’s “Diva,” which is screening at Film Forum starting on Friday.Rialto Pictures‘Diva’Ongoing at Film Forum, 209 West Houston Street, Manhattan; filmforum.org.You’ve seen Brian De Palma’s “Blow Out”? “Diva” is the other major film of 1981 (released in the United States in 1982) that involves a protagonist with a hot-potato audio recording, or technically two: Jules (Frédéric Andrei), a postman and opera fan, secretly records a star vocalist, Cynthia Hawkins (the real-life soprano Wilhelmenia Wiggins Fernandez), who makes a point of only singing live, at a performance in Paris. Soon after, he unwittingly comes into possession of another tape that could expose an international drug-and-sex-trafficking operation.But the crazy convolutions of the plot are hardly the point. “Diva,” directed by Jean-Jacques Beineix, who died in January, is perhaps the film most identified with a trend in France that became known as the cinéma du look, movies for which visual style and attitude left the prevailing impressions. In a print showing at Film Forum, the shades of blue are dazzling, and an elaborate chase through the Paris Metro is pretty exciting, too. BEN KENIGSBERGDanceValerie Levine of Ice Theater of New York performing “Arctic Memory” by Jody Sperling on Governors Island in February.Josef PinlacIce Theater of New YorkFriday and Saturday at 7 p.m.; Monday at 6:30 p.m. at Sky Rink, 61 Chelsea Piers, Manhattan; chelseapiers.com.After pivoting to pavement during the pandemic, Ice Theater of New York returns to its true milieu, which is also a fitting place to reflect on climate change. As part of its home season, the company will present the premiere of the choreographer Jody Sperling’s “Of Water and Ice,” which draws on her research in the Arctic and is set to music by D.J. Spooky. It will be joined on the program by 10 other works, many of them also new, with soundtracks ranging from Philip Glass to Rachmaninoff to Madonna. Don’t expect a string of Nathan Chen-like acrobatic feats, though; the company, founded in 1984, is rooted in the art of ice dancing, which combines the ethos of concert dance with the speed, momentum and strength of ice skating. Two of the form’s best-known practitioners, the British champions Jayne Torvill and Christopher Dean, will be honored at Monday’s gala performance. Tickets start at $25 and are available at icetheatre.org. BRIAN SCHAEFERTheaterDavid Threlfall, center, with, from left, Richard Hollis, Ryan Pope, John Horton and Alfie Allen in Martin McDonagh’s dark comedy “Hangmen” at the Golden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesCritic’s Pick‘Hangmen’Through June 18 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan; hangmenbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.In Martin McDonagh’s Olivier Award winner, set in the 1960s, a menacing mod from London (Alfie Allen of “Game of Thrones”) walks into a grim northern English pub run by a former hangman (David Threlfall). Pitch-black comedy ensues. Directed by Matthew Dunster, this production was a prepandemic hit downtown. Read the review.‘Plaza Suite’Through June 26 at the Hudson Theater, Manhattan; plazasuitebroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes.Matthew Broderick and Sarah Jessica Parker revel in physical comedy as they play two married couples and a pair of long-ago sweethearts in the first Broadway revival of Neil Simon’s trio of one-act farces, a smash at its premiere in 1968. John Benjamin Hickey directs. (Onstage at the Hudson Theater. Limited run ends July 1.) Read the review.Critic’s Pick‘American Buffalo’Through July 10 at Circle in the Square, Manhattan; americanbuffalonyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.Laurence Fishburne, Sam Rockwell and Darren Criss team up for David Mamet’s verbally explosive tragicomedy, set in a Chicago junk shop where an inept pair of small-time criminals and their hapless young flunky plot the theft of a rare nickel. Neil Pepe directs. Read the review.Hugh Jackman as Harold Hill in the Broadway revival of “The Music Man” at the Winter Garden Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘The Music Man’At the Winter Garden Theater, Manhattan; musicmanonbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.Hugh Jackman, a.k.a. Wolverine, returns to the stage as the charlatan Harold Hill opposite Sutton Foster as Marian the librarian in Jerry Zaks’s widely anticipated revival of Meredith Willson’s classic musical comedy. It’s a hot ticket, and one of Broadway’s more stratospherically priced shows. (Onstage at the Winter Garden Theater.)Read the review.Art & Museums“The Oath of the Tennis Court” (1791), a presentation drawing in “Jacques-Louis David: Radical Draftsman” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, depicts a foundational event of the French Revolution.RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NYCritic’s PickJacques-Louis David: Radical DraftsmanThrough May 15 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-535-7710, metmuseum.org.“Radical Draftsman,” a momentous and deadly serious exhibition, assembles more than 80 works on paper by this prime mover of French Neo-Classicism, from his youthful Roman studies to his uncompromising Jacobin years, into jail and then Napoleon’s cabinet, and through to his final exile in Brussels. It’s a scholarly feat, with loans from two dozen institutions, and never-before-seen discoveries from private collections. It will enthrall specialists who want to map how David built his robust canvases out of preparatory sketches and drapery studies. But for the public, this show has a more direct importance. This show forces us — and right on time — to think hard about the real power of pictures (and picture makers), and the price of political and cultural certainty. What is beautiful, and what is virtuous? And when virtue embraces terror, what is beauty really for? Read the review.Critic’s PickJonas Mekas: The Camera Was Always RunningThrough June 5 at the Jewish Museum, 1109 Fifth Avenue, Manhattan; 212-423-3200, thejewishmuseum.org.A Lithuanian refugee who landed in New York City in 1949, Jonas Mekas became a founder of the Film-Makers’ Cooperative, Film Culture magazine and Anthology Film Archives. He also made scores of collagelike “diary” films. “The Camera Was Always Running” is Mekas’s first U.S. museum survey, and its curator, Kelly Taxter, approached the daunting task by mounting a high-speed retrospective projected on a dozen free-standing screens.Most of the films in the exhibition are broken up into simultaneously projected pieces, so that the full program of 11 takes just three hours. Many are diary films — abstract kaleidoscopic records of Mekas, his brother Adolfas, also a filmmaker, and the SoHo bohemians and Lithuanian transplants of their circle. Since the point of all this, even more than documenting the variety of Mekas’s life in particular, is to capture the magical incongruity of life in general, Taxter’s inspired staging may even make the works more effective. Read the review.Painted fabric hangings behind the sculpture “The Wake and Resurrection of the Bicentennial Negro,” 1976. This entire installation originated as part of a performance piece.Faith Ringgold/ARS, NY, DACS, London and ACA Galleries; Simbarashe Cha for The New York TimesCritic’s PickFaith Ringgold: American PeopleThrough June 5 at the New Museum, 235 Bowery, Manhattan; 212-219-1222, newmuseum.org.Ringgold’s first local retrospective in almost 40 years features the Harlem-born artist’s figures, craft techniques and storytelling in inventive combinations. And it makes clear that what consigned Ringgold to an outlier track half a century ago puts her front and center now. The show begins with a group of brooding, broadly stroked figure paintings from the 1960s called “American People Series.” All the pictures are about hierarchies of power; women are barely even present. Ringgold referred to this early, wary work as “super realist.”In the ’80s, an elaboration on the painted quilt form, called “story quilts,” brought Ringgold attention both inside and outside the art world. It is the vehicle for Ringgold’s most formally complex and buoyant painting project, “The French Connection.” Overall, it feels, in tone, like a far cry from the “American People” pictures, but there’s politics at work in the French paintings, too. Read the review. More

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      in Television

      In ‘I Love That for You,’ Vanessa Bayer Sells Out

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      The “Saturday Night Live” veteran’s new sitcom draws on her experience of childhood cancer and her obsession with home shopping TV.Listen to This ArticleTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android.According to Vanessa Bayer, being diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia as a 15-year-old wasn’t all bad.It got her out of gym class. The attendance lady at her high school never marked her as tardy. She told a boy she didn’t like that she couldn’t be his date for the homecoming dance because she had chemo that weekend. (She didn’t). Her father talked his way out of a speeding ticket by using her illness as an excuse, a tactic he referred to as “dropping the L-bomb.”Bayer survived the L-bomb. The experience didn’t change her, she said, but it did intensify characteristics that were already inherent — determination, resilience, a borderline delusional sense of optimism. Who receives a diagnosis of cancer and accentuates the positive? Bayer does.“I was always a person who loved attention,” Bayer said chirpily. “This allowed me to get so much attention.”Bayer is getting attention now. On Sunday, Showtime will premiere the first episode of “I Love That for You” (the Showtime app will have it on Friday), a sitcom that draws on Bayer’s pediatric cancer and her longtime obsession with home shopping shows. She stars as Joanna Gold, a sheltered young woman and leukemia survivor who auditions to become the newest host on the Special Value Network. Nearly fired after her disastrous first hour on camera, she saves her job by telling her colleagues that her cancer has returned. (It hasn’t.)Bayer’s character pretends to have cancer in order to keep her job at a home shopping network.Tony Rivetti Jr./ShowtimePlaying Joanna isn’t cathartic for Bayer — she doesn’t seem to need catharsis — but it does offer her a chance to work through her past, this time with even more jokes. “It’s really nice to be able to have some distance from that time and to be able to laugh at it even more,” she said.Bayer grew up in a Reform Jewish family in the suburbs of Cleveland. A star student and a cross-country runner, she decided that she wouldn’t let her illness mess with her G.P.A., even when teachers told her she could coast.“It lit this fire under me,” she said. “It was important to me that everybody saw me as someone who wasn’t weak.”Diagnosed in the spring of her freshman year, she spent time in the hospital, then in outpatient treatment, completing chemotherapy just before her senior year. She graduated on time. As prom queen.She first performed comedy as a member of Bloomers, an all-female troupe at the University of Pennsylvania. After graduation, she moved to Chicago and studied and performed at various improv theaters, which eventually led to a spot on “Saturday Night Live” in 2010. There she created characters such as Jacob the Bar Mitzvah Boy and Dawn Lazarus, an anxious meteorologist. But long before she got paid for it, Bayer had relied on jokes as a coping mechanism.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” she said, speaking of her time in treatment. Here comes that optimism again: “I also think it made me funnier.”She was speaking, from a bench on the fringes of Central Park, on a recent Friday afternoon. The temperature had climbed to nearly 70 degrees, but Bayer, who had just flown in on a red-eye from Los Angeles, was bundled against the spring in a belted coat, a knit beanie and Rag & Bone fleece sneakers. She had a green juice in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other. A medical-grade mask had left a red mark high on each cheek.Even sleep-deprived and apparently very cold, Bayer radiated positivity. She smiled approvingly at the gamboling dogs, the sweating men, the woman who had arrived for a constitutional in high heels and full makeup. “Nothing like New York birds!” she said, when a flock of pigeons flew over, Hitchcock close. In high school she was voted Most Likely to Succeed. Most Likely to Bake a Mean Casserole would have tracked, too — even sitting in the middle of Manhattan, she emanated Midwestern normalcy and niceness.Over seven years on “Saturday Night Live,” Bayer (with Michael Che) was a dependable utility player with many memorable appearances on Weekend Update.Dana Edelson/NBC“She almost doesn’t seem like an actress,” said Molly Shannon, an “S.N.L.” veteran who now co-stars opposite Bayer as SVN’s superstar host. “She’s very steady and calm and grounded.”The comedian Aidy Bryant, who worked with Bayer in Chicago before they both found their way to “S.N.L.,” noted that Bayer has a way of turning that mildness into a strike force. When it comes to comedy, Bryant said, “She is a quiet, smiling assassin.”“Vanessa has a real reserved, polite, wonderfully Midwestern energy,” she added. “Then she hits with a punchline or a funny reaction or her truly incredible smile, which she can weaponize as a force of pain.”On “S.N.L.,” Bayer became a dependable utility player, often infusing characters (football widow, early career Jennifer Aniston) with a manic intensity — eyes overbright, speech a tick too fast. Taran Killam, another “S.N.L.” co-star, noted how calm the offscreen Bayer seemed, a composure he attributed to her history.“It must have given her incredible perspective,” he said. “‘S.N.L.’ is a very passionate job, a dream job. It feels like it matters more than anything in the world. She would always be the first one to say: ‘Who cares? No big deal. So they didn’t like the sketch? Move on.’”“S.N.L.” has a famously punishing schedule. But Jeremy Beiler, a former “S.N.L.” writer who joined around the same time Bayer did, noted how she met the stresses of the job with buoyancy.“She only looks in one direction,” he said. “It’s only forward.”In 2017, after seven seasons on “S.N.L.,” Bayer moved on. Another comedian might have worried about what would come next. Unsurprisingly, Bayer stayed positive. “My attitude is just that stuff kind of works out,” she said. And it did work out, more or less, with guest spots, voice work, supporting roles in a few movies.“I had to use humor to make everyone, including myself, feel OK,” Bayer said, speaking of her time in cancer treatment as a teen. “I also think it made me funnier.”Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesAs she was leaving “S.N.L.,” her management team asked her about dream projects, and her mind somehow flashed on home shopping TV. She had watched the channels often as a child: The peek into adult life fascinated her, and she loved the elegance of the hosts and the ways in which they would spin seemingly extemporaneous stories in their attempts to entice buyers.She described the hosts’ particular rhythms and vocabulary as “the first foreign language I ever learned,” and the network most likely provided her first taste of improv, too. (In college, when it came time to write her first sketch, she wrote one set in the world of home shopping, in which the host was selling cardboard with a hole in it. It killed.)A few months later, over brunch, Beiler mentioned that he had, by coincidence, begun a series pilot set in the world of home shopping. They began to collaborate, even arranging a field trip to QVC’s headquarters in West Chester, Pa., where they met with two hosts, Jane Treacy and Mary Beth Roe, whom Bayer had idolized as a child, and also managed to score some free soft pretzels. (Everyone I spoke to mentioned Bayer’s enthusiasm for snacks, and most of them mentioned her gift for scamming her way into free ones.) In the gift shop, they bought matching QVC mugs.Back at work, with Jessi Klein as showrunner, they began to build out a back story for Bayer’s character, Joanna, that would give her stakes and drive. They decided to borrow from Bayer’s own story, particularly her diagnosis and treatment and the way that those years of chemo and radiation stunted her emotional growth for a while.“I didn’t understand dating at all,” she said. “It was just playing catch up. Even out of college and into my 20s, I always was trying to fake being an adult.” In an hour’s conversation, this was the closest she ever came to acknowledging that pediatric cancer hadn’t been entirely a walk in the park.Bayer didn’t mind lending Joanna her medical chart — she has never been shy about her diagnosis. As a teen she used it to win her family a trip to Hawaii courtesy of the Make-A-Wish Foundation. (She had thought about asking to meet Jared Leto, but she eventually decided she would prefer to meet him as a peer. Years later, she did.) Colleagues at “S.N.L.” have heard her introduce leukemia into the conversation just to get free ice cream, which jibes with advice she offered during our interview: If you are sick, use it to get whatever you can.Bryant said, “She always takes the things that are hard and makes them something that she can use to empower herself or use to her advantage.”Gradually, Joanna took shape, a woman more guarded than Bayer and more stunted, with her same love of snacks and her same gift for antic improvisation but none of her obvious success. A woman who lies about having cancer shouldn’t be a woman you root for, but Bayer has a way of communicating a kind of desperate brightness that makes terrible things seem less terrible, just because she does them with such enthusiasm.What the camera recognizes is what Shannon, who also survived a major childhood trauma (her mother, youngest sister and a cousin were killed in a car accident), identified as a shared joy and determination to wring the utmost out of life.“We don’t take it for granted,” Shannon said. “We feel so lucky that we’re alive. For real.”There are many stories about illness. (Admittedly, there are fewer of them set in the world of home shopping.) But this is one — with its snacks and its sunniness and its heroine’s determination to exploit her fake diagnosis for all she can — that seemingly only Bayer can tell.“I always wanted to do something about when I was sick,” she said contentedly, as the gentle chaos of Central Park swirled around her. “Specifically, the fun I had.”Audio produced by More

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      James Corden Says He’ll Leave His CBS Show Next Year

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      The British-born host, who was a successful actor and comedian before joining the network’s late-night lineup, has been signaling for some time that he was considering leaving.James Corden, the British theater actor and comedian turned late-night TV host in the United States, said on Thursday that he would leave his 12:30 a.m. nightly show on CBS next year. Mr. Corden made the announcement during a taping of his talk show in Los Angeles.Mr. Corden, the host of “The Late Late Show” since 2015, has been signaling for some time that he was strongly considering leaving the show.Five months ago, Mr. Corden told Variety that he never saw his late-night perch as “a final destination.” In a previous interview with The Sun, Mr. Corden said he and his family were “homesick.”Mr. Corden’s contract was set to expire in August, but he signed an extension that will keep him on CBS through next spring.“We wish he could stay longer, but we are very proud he made CBS his American home and that this partnership will extend one more season on ‘The Late Late Show,’” George Cheeks, the president of CBS, said in a statement.James Corden’s Run on ‘The Late Late Show’The British actor and comedian turned late-night TV host, announced he would leave his CBS show in 2023.His Debut: James Corden was “amiable and cheerfully self-assured, but not particularly special,” our critic wrote of the comedian’s first night as host in 2015.A Bit of Controversy: In a recurring gag on the show, Corden portrayed foods from cultures around the world as disgusting. The segment drew the ires of some viewers. On Stage: Corden started out as an aspiring stage performer. Here is what he said about his long love affair with theater.Mr. Corden’s impending departure is one of the most significant changes for the late-night comedy lineup since 2014 and 2015, when veteran hosts like David Letterman, Jay Leno and Jon Stewart left their shows, and a new generation of stars, including Mr. Corden, Comedy Central’s Trevor Noah and HBO’s John Oliver, went on the air.There is a feeling of uncertainty in late night beyond Mr. Corden’s departure. Jimmy Kimmel, the longtime ABC host, has a contract that will end soon and has said publicly that he was unsure if he would renew. Stephen Colbert, whose show precedes Mr. Corden’s on CBS, also has a contract that expires next year. Chris Licht, the longtime executive producer of “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert,” left last month to become the chairman of CNN. And Jimmy Fallon’s “Tonight Show” recently went through yet another showrunner change, the fourth in four years.There are questions throughout the entertainment industry over the longtime viability of the late-night talk show genre. Over the last few years, as viewing habits have rapidly changed, ratings for the shows have nose-dived. Five years ago, roughly 2.8 million people were tuning into Mr. Corden’s show as well as NBC’s 12:30 a.m. show, “Late Night With Seth Meyers.” By 2022, that figure had dropped to about 1.9 million, according to Nielsen’s delayed viewing data.Talk shows — which depend on topical relevance and audiences who make it a daily habit to tune in — have also not fared well on streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.Mr. Corden entered the late-night fray in a big way when his show debuted in 2015. Mr. Corden, who had a successful theater career but was still relatively unknown in the United States, became an overnight star. “Carpool Karaoke,” a signature of his show, featured him singing along with stars like Lady Gaga, Michelle Obama and Adele, and clips routinely went viral.“Seven years ago, James Corden came to the U.S. and took television by storm, with huge creative and comedic swings that resonated in a big way with viewers on-air and online,” Mr. Cheeks said.But Mr. Corden’s brand of comedy — focused on games and musical sketches — soon found itself out of step with the zeitgeist.The landscape changed considerably after Donald J. Trump entered the White House. Late-night audiences began devouring biting political humor. Within weeks of Mr. Trump’s inauguration, Mr. Fallon’s fun-and-games approach at “The Tonight Show” fell steeply in the ratings, and Mr. Colbert became the No. 1 late-night host, thanks to his more topical approach. He has held that lead for more than five years. Like Mr. Fallon, Mr. Corden favored a lighter show.Mr. Corden parlayed his late-night perch into other high-profile ventures, including hosting the Tony Awards and Grammy Awards. He has also appeared in several movies, including the critically gnawed-on “Cinderella” and “Cats.”Seated behind his “Late Late Show” desk, Mr. Corden called his decision to leave the hardest “he ever had to make.”“I never want this show to overstay its welcome in any way,” he said. “I always want to love making it. And I really think in a year from now that will be a good time to move on and see what else might be out there.” More