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    ‘The Fabulous Four’ Review: Beaches (and Lots of Mojitos)

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    This raunchy comedy features Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally on a bachelorette weekend.“The Fabulous Four” stars Bette Midler, Susan Sarandon, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Megan Mullally as old pals who cut loose during a bachelorette weekend in Key West.Marilyn (Midler), a recent widow, is marrying a guy she just met at the D.M.V. But first, she’s itching to grind on an exotic male dancer. In the last year and a half, this kind of all-star girls trip flick has become its own genre (see also: “80 for Brady,” “Summer Camp” and “Book Club: The Next Chapter”). This one, directed by Jocelyn Moorhouse and written by Ann Marie Allison and Jenna Milly, is the raunchiest and loopiest so far. Slapdash but executed with gusto, “Fabulous Four” feels like it was made after guzzling three bottles of champagne — and honestly, that’s an apropos way to watch.The central conflict is that Marilyn is a self-absorbed TikTok influencer and Lou (Sarandon), a self-righteous stick in the mud who considers her estranged best friend’s wedding a personal affront. Lou blames Marilyn for turning her into a lonely cat lady — and, fittingly, gets tricked into the vacation by a phony claim that she’s won one of Ernest Hemingway’s polydactyl felines, descendants of his six-toed pet Snowball that continue to roam the grounds of the author’s former Florida home. (Sarandon’s saucer eyes light up endearingly as she clutches a pet carrier to her chest.)Rounding out the foursome are Kitty (Ralph), a cannabis farmer with a born-again daughter (Brandee Evans) who wants to stick her in a religious retirement home (“Heaven’s Gate?” Kitty groans, “More like hell on earth”) and Alice (Mullally), a lusty singer who roams the margins of the plot blurting as many gasp-inducing one-liners as she can.The jokes dance right on the edge of what you’re willing to giggle at in a matinee with your mother-in-law. Somehow when Lou meets a love interest (Bruce Greenwood) who happens to be clutching one of Key West’s famous wild chickens, the script restrains itself from a wisecrack about his rooster. There’s a little too much reliance on half-baked physical comedy. Midler kicks up her heels with such pizazz that her shoes literally go flying offscreen; later, she twerks, and she’s pretty good. More impressively, she and her fellow professionals do their utmost to add at least one layer to their caricatures. Midler allows her narcissist’s vulnerability to poke through, while Sarandon, tasked to look severe, wins us over every time she loosens up. (One scene has her blitzed on edibles and hallucinating a cat performing heart surgery.)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 Theater

      ‘Dicks: The Musical’ Review: Hitting High Notes, Going Lowbrow

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      Larry Charles’s musical comedy is so hellbent on being outrageous that it just ends up being tiresome.The funniest part of “Dicks: The Musical” sneaks in at the very end, when outtakes are interspersed with the credits. Nathan Lane, in particular, comes across as a living illustration of the words “game” and “trooper.” He and his co-star Megan Mullally, pros that they are, elegantly suggest hints of disbelief at just how they ended up in a movie in which his character spits pre-chewed cold cuts into the gaping maws of hideous puppet monsters and hers complains that her vagina has flown away (at one point it attaches itself to someone like the facehugger in “Alien”).On paper this sounds intriguing, in a Troma Entertainment kind of way, and maybe one day this musical comedy will turn into a cult film like that company’s “Surf Nazis Must Die” or some of the jetsam perpetually washing up at pop culture’s edges.For now this movie from the hip indie studio A24 simply exerts itself as it tries way too hard to join the hallowed ranks of exploitation favorites extolling schlock values.Directed by Larry Charles (“Borat”), the film was adapted by Aaron Jackson and Josh Sharp from a show they performed at Upright Citizens Brigade in the mid-2010s. The two writers also play the supposedly identical twins Trevor and Craig, who were raised separately after their parents (Lane and Mullally) split up. The siblings, whose straightness is too aggressive to not be conspicuous, coincidentally work at the same company, where they compete for the title of best salesman and the attention of their boss, Gloria (Megan Thee Stallion, who gets the movie’s single best number, “Out-Alpha the Alpha”).The new colleagues’ relationship is frosty at first: “You have long hair like a girl,” Craig tells Trevor; “you have short hair like a lesbian girl,” Trevor replies, expertly wielding the rapier wit of a peeved eight-year-old. But eventually, the pair team up to reunite their folks. One potential obstacle is that their father, Harris, is decidedly not heterosexual. Cue the song “Gay Old Life,” in which Harris details his fabulous queer existence and introduces the aforementioned creatures, his beloved Sewer Boys. (Jackson and Sharp wrote the passable songs with Karl Saint Lucy and Marius de Vries, and their staging is mostly anemic.)Once Lane and Mullally, who plays the lisping mom Evelyn like a 1930s movie’s idea of a Park Avenue eccentric, enter the story, they hijack it from Jackson and Sharp, which is not necessarily a bad thing but also destabilizes the movie.Despite brief instances when it spills into surreal madness, most notably in a scene set in a sewer, the film is rudderless — which is a polite way to say limp. Its only point is highly self-aware pseudo-gonzo provocation, peaking in a denouement that feels both surprising and inevitable, and looks as if it had been engineered to deliberately unsettle some viewers. Some keyboard warriors and craven politicians might take the bait, while the rest of us will be left wondering why Lane and Mullally didn’t get a song with Megan Thee Stallion.Dicks: The MusicalRated R for language, sexual single entendres, cartoonish taboo-breaking and offenses against musical theater. Running time: 1 hour 26 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Television

      ‘Party Down’ Is Back. Did You R.S.V.P.?

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      The invitations have been sent, the appetizers plated, the bottles opened. Rows of glasses gleam like baby stars. And somewhere, on the fringes of the celebration, a cater waiter is about to do something very wrong.This was the template of “Party Down,” a Starz comedy that ran for two 10-episode seasons, debuting in the spring of 2009. Canceled just as critics and niche audiences were beginning to catch on, the show followed the disaffected employees of a mid-tier catering company as they moved from party to party, one per episode, filching booze, seducing guests, snorting coke,  flirting with Nazism and accidentally poisoning George Takei.The original 20 episodes never included a surprise party. But get your streamers and party blowers ready. Because in a surprise to just about everyone — most likely including the folks at Nielsen, who once awarded the show’s finale a 0.0 rating among 18- to 49-year-olds — “Party Down” is back. A six-episode revival will premiere on Starz on Feb. 24, with new episodes arriving weekly.Martin Starr, a returning cast member, seemed to genuinely marvel at the development.“This was the only show I’ve worked on where people came to work when they weren’t working,” he said in a group video call. “It’s crazy that we get to come back and do it again.”“Truth be told,” his co-star Ken Marino said, “the reason I came back to set when I wasn’t working is I was between homes.”Starr: “I do remember you were finding places to go to the bathroom that maybe didn’t have your name.”Marino: “I still do. I’m going to the bathroom right now.”Is this the same “Party Down” that failed to dominate cable television over a dozen years ago? Mostly. The show’s original creators, John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, Rob Thomas and Paul Rudd, remain, as executive producers, and Enbom oversees a small staff of writers. The party-a-week structure also endures, as does the original cast — with the exception, based on the five episodes provided in advance, of Lizzy Caplan.In the revival, all of the original main characters (except for Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, not pictured) are either pulled back into cater waiting or never stopped. Starz“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” the show’s lead, Adam Scott (“Parks and Recreation,” “Severance”), said in a separate interview last month. “We all would have been there for free.”But the world has changed in the dozen or so years since the original run was canceled. So have the actors. Unknowns or barely knowns when the show debuted, most have since become household names. (The others? Depends on the household.) And they’ve all seen the current crop of disappointing reboots and reprises. “Party Down” could just be the rare show to get it right, mixing the perfect cocktail of star power, nostalgia, growth and gags.Then again, the characters never put a lot of muscle into bartending. So here’s a Zen koan for a deeply un-Zen show: Can you throw the same party twice?Are we having fun yet?The first run of “Party Down” was both structural marvel and joke spectacular. Each episode was simultaneously a workplace comedy, a hangout comedy and a procedural — a sitcom that never sat down. The celebrations it featured — birthdays, after parties — typically bordered the entertainment industry and nearly all of the cater waiters harbored industry dreams of their own.Those dreams eluded them, which fueled the philosophical inquiry at the show’s center.“What we were asking was: How long do you chase the dream?” Thomas, one of the creators, said. “When do you grow up? When do you quit banging your head against the wall?”The “Party Down” staff are all trying to make it, as actors, screenwriters and comedians. (Marino’s Ron, the manager, has a different dream: a Soup ’R Crackers franchise.) Only Henry (Scott), who has traded beer-commercial celebrity for free-floating despair, has opted out. The actors were trying back then to make it, too. None of the original cast — Caplan, Ryan Hansen, Jane Lynch, Marino, Scott, Starr — were anything like famous when the show began. Acting in a comedy about the entertainment industry’s has-beens, also-rans and never-wills resonated with the cast, sometimes uncomfortably.“It felt so close to home, this show, because I felt like I could be a caterer the next day easily,” Hansen said.Scott, who at the time had yet to play a lead, then shared that sense of career tenuousness. The cast felt deeply connected to the show in those first seasons, he said, and protective of it. “We just wanted to do it forever, because it made us feel better,” he said. “It really did.”“All of us, for the entire 13 years since we stopped shooting the show, all we wanted to do is make more ‘Party Down,’” Scott, fourth from left, said.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesThe salaries, though small, kept a few of the actors on the sunny side of financial precarity. The camaraderie helped, too. (That camaraderie remains; I had four of the actors together on a video call, and I have never heard grown men exchange so many “Love yous.”) Several actors separately compared the original shoot to summer camp.That genuine affection altered the show’s tone. Some first season episodes included “edgy” humor — gay jokes, post-racial jokes. (“It’s cringey, yeah,” Starr said.) But the creators quickly realized they didn’t need that edge. The show was sadder than that. Funnier, too. The characters are screw-ups, sure, but the show suggests that everyone is a screw-up, especially after an hour at an open bar. So maybe the best thing is to find common cause as you pass the hors d’oeuvres.“It’s about people who think that they’re going to find happiness in something out there,” Lynch said. “But what they have right in front of them is really quite sweet.”Lynch shot the first eight episodes. Then she had to leave for the Fox show “Glee.” Marino hired a stripper for her wrap party. The stripper, Lynch recalled, smelled of French fries. The show went on, with Jennifer Coolidge replacing Lynch for two episodes and Megan Mullally, the only actor who was already well-known, coming in for the final 10.The creators believed that it would keep going, even though, according to Nielsen, the Season 2 finale attracted only 74,000 viewers. Starz had other plans. Those plans didn’t involve letting the creators take the show elsewhere. “Party Down” languished.One decade, zero dinnersIf the original run argued that it’s healthier to let some dreams die, the creators and the cast could never quite manage that. There were talks, every year or so, of getting the crew back together — for a special, for a movie, for a move to another network. Friends and fans often asked Marino about it.“I was like, ‘They’re working on it,’” he said. “‘It’s going to happen! Right around the corner!’” It took him eight or nine years to accept that maybe that corner wasn’t coming.Then in 2019, Starz appointed Jeffrey Hirsch as its new president and chief executive. Thomas reached out to Hirsch and began pitching the show again. Hard. This time, Starz said yes.That was only the first hurdle. The actors had conflicts and prior commitments now. The revival was approved in the summer of 2021, with production scheduled for early 2022. Lynch was to begin rehearsing a Broadway musical. Scott was making the Apple TV+ show “Severance.” Mullally had booked a movie being shot in Idaho.Somehow a six-week window was found, even though that window involved flying Mullally to Los Angeles every weekend and back to Sun Valley by Monday.When “Party Down” debuted in 2009, none of the main cast were anything like famous.StarzIn the new season, the main cast has become more diverse, with the inclusion of two new regulars: Zoë Chao, second from left, and Tyrel Jackson Williams, far right.Starz“We could never get together for dinner for a decade,” Etheridge, a creator, said. “But when we came to shoot the show, everybody was there.”Everybody except for Caplan, who had signed onto the FX series “Fleishman Is in Trouble.” (Asked whether Caplan might make a surprise appearance in Episode 6, Starz declined to comment.) Enbom had originally structured this new season around the on-again-off-again relationship between Henry and Caplan’s Casey. He had to restructure it, adding a new character, a studio executive played by Jennifer Garner. The revival’s first episode takes time out to heckle Caplan: Casey, now a successful comedian, can’t make a crew reunion.“She’s shooting in New York,” Starr’s Roman, still an aspiring “hard sci-fi” writer, says. “Too big time for the likes of us.”There were fewer jokes in real life. Hansen tried to make light of the situation. “Listen, we get it,” he said. “She had a job, whatever. I mean, I personally turned down a Marvel movie to do ‘Party Down.’”“Tell that to everybody,” he added.But just about everyone described themselves as heartbroken, including Caplan. “If I think about it for too long, I start to cry,” she wrote in an email. She sent cupcakes to the shoot.The bow tie abidesHollywood has transformed in the years since “Party Down” first concluded, and in some ways the show has, too. Gratuitous boobs are gone now. And the catering crew, once blindingly white, has become more diverse with the inclusion of two new regulars: Sackson, a YouTube-style content creator played by Tyrel Jackson Williams, and Lucy, a chef played by Zoë Chao who styles herself as a “food artist.”Yet, the sweet-sour, slightly funky flavor of “Party Down” — like a margarita made with off-brand liquor — is mostly unaltered. This seems to be the rare revival that understands what made the original work, yet can still move (or move just enough to include the occasional TikTok dance challenge) with the times.“We kept doing what we’d always been doing, just with new details,” Enbom said. “Because society certainly has not changed into a more wholesome place.”Have the returning characters changed? That depends on how much you and your therapist believe that change is possible. “They’re still the same lovable knuckleheads,” Mullally said. “Most of these people haven’t really moved on, or they haven’t really become any happier, or more fulfilled in their lives.”Friends and fans often asked Marino, top left, whether the series would be revived. “I was like, They’re working on it!,” he said. “Right around the corner!” It took nearly 13 years.Chantal Anderson for The New York TimesSlinging hors d’oeuvres hits different and more darkly in midlife. Still, the creators and the cast didn’t want the revival to feel like a bummer.“It’s going to be fun watching the characters try to claw their way toward something other than their current circumstances,” Scott promised.And if not exactly “fun,” then certainly relatable. “Really who gets what they want in this life?” Lynch said.She probably meant that rhetorically. But the “Party Down” die-hards, Lynch included, did get what they wanted, a third season. And they seem to have delighted in making it, though Marino joked that he’d had to slim down before he could fit into his signature pink bow tie.“Had to work off that neck fat,” he said. “Got my neck nice and lean.”Slipping on that outfit was a little more stressful for Chao, a newcomer. She had watched the show, years after its debut, while working a food-service survival job herself. “Party Down” had made her feel less alone. She didn’t want to ruin it. “I whispered to myself every day, going onto set, ‘Be the least funny, but by as little as possible,’” she said.Williams expressed similar gratitude and anxiety. “Everyone was so sweet and welcoming from the very beginning,” he said. “It never felt like an intimidating environment.” And yet, he added, “there was still like this insane fear.”The returning cast faced related, if less acute, worries. They have been in the business long enough to understand how revivals can go wrong. (A few of them had even appeared in revivals that flopped.) But they were reassured by the scripts, written by Enbom and a small staff, which suggested a continuity of character and tone and food-poisoning-induced body horror. There was also the pleasure of being together again — a little older, a little grayer, but still able to drop a tray on cue.Will the ratings for this coming season be better? Comfortingly, they can’t get much worse. But the cast and creative team are counting on the show’s turning enough heads that Starz will greenlight a fourth season. (“You better believe I’m not missing that one,” Caplan wrote.)Though Starr is inclined to cynicism, he sounded only mildly sardonic in discussing this ambition. “I really do hope we’re allowed to come back and do it again and keep up this little charade we’ve got going,” he said.Hansen put it a bit more pragmatically. “In 12 years, people are going to love Season 3.” More

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      in Music

      What Megan Mullally Likes: Soft T-Shirts and Sad Songs

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyWhat Megan Mullally Likes: Soft T-Shirts and Sad SongsA star of the animated Fox comedy “The Great North” swears by Instagram street dance videos, vintages Ts and “Promising Young Woman.”Credit…Frazer Harrison/Getty ImagesFeb. 9, 2021, 1:38 p.m. ETWhen the actress Megan Mullally began recording her podcast, In Bed With Nick and Megan, she and her husband, the actor Nick Offerman, invited guests into their actual bed. In the spring, the bed went virtual. But she and Offerman kept recording, turning a guest room into a studio where they could tape episodes of their new animated show, “The Great North,” which premieres Sunday on Fox. She plays Alyson Lefebvrere, a sultry small-business owner with a crush on Offerman’s single dad, Beef.“She’s a groovy lady,” Mullally said, speaking from her home in Los Angeles.Nimble, ferocious, with a barrel-aged voice that she pitches higher for certain roles, Mullally, 62, has spent the last two decades caroming from one TV comedy role to the next, with a couple of Broadway shows in between. Pandemic willing, she will travel to London in the spring for a West End production of “Anything Goes.” “I’m supposed to take tap classes for that,” she said. “But I haven’t started yet.”When not avoiding her shuffles, scuffles and stomps, her lockdown schedule involves cooking, reading, drawing, Zooming and searching out new songs for her all-covers rock band, Nancy and Beth. With the occasional pause to tend to her dogs, she detailed her current cultural top 10. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. Street dance videos on Instagram I just happened to see a video of Lil Buck. I don’t even know why he came up in my search. His style is called Memphis jookin. He has a very poignant lyrical sensibility. He’s a very good storyteller and he can be quite heartbreaking. I got to know him and his best friend, Jon Boogz, over Instagram and then they were friends with Sheopatra and Yorelis Apolinario and this other dancer that I love, JaJa Vankova. She’s crazy amazing. Their freestyles are insane. They’re out there almost every day, shooting videos. I find that so incredibly cool. Just the work ethic alone. It’s coming from this true passion for dance.2. “Discomfort of Evening” by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld She’s a first-time novelist. I thought the whole thing was just so staggering. It’s about a family. The eldest son dies in an accident at the very beginning of the book and the family unravels. Basically, none of the kids or the parents can accept that the son died and they can’t make sense of his death. It’s very dark and complex. It’s also about how religion can warp people and be twisted into something to be used as a weapon. I was like, “Gosh, do I really like this? Or do I hate it? I’m definitely going to keep reading!”3. “Promising Young Woman” Nick and I watched that last week. I was pretty blown away. It’s the best movie I’ve seen in a long time. And it’s so important. I didn’t really understand feminism until later in life. I’m a rape survivor and every other possible form of sexual harassment and abuse you could think of. And yet, because I’m 62, I’m from this generation where a lot of that, you were supposed to just think, that’s normal. Especially being an actress and having absolutely no power whatsoever, because back in the day, you’d better just get there and learn your lines and shut up. This movie, written and directed by a woman, it’s a black comedy until it’s not.4. Vintage T-shirts I’ve been into vintage T-shirts for forever. I will not reveal the website I buy shirts from under pain of death. I don’t have any room left, but I keep buying them. During quarantine I’ve bought probably 20. I like soft ones. And I like them sort of cute, but not too cute. Not girly. My style is “moderately successful male rancher from New Mexico.” I also buy them for Nick. I recently just got some for him that he was like freaking out over. One, it’s goldenrod-colored, it’s a production of “Pippin” from somebody’s high school. It’s freaking genius. Another one is this really great blue, but with some bears and wildlife. Today, I was like, “It’s as if you were born in that T-shirt.”5. POOG with Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak Now everybody has a podcast. It’s not fun anymore. But POOG, I immediately got obsessed with. Ostensibly the premise of the thing is beauty and wellness. But it’s just them talking about whatever. I love what it says about our consumer culture and about being a woman in this world, which is so [expletive] hard and never fair and never right and never adds up. I love that Kate just wanted to do it so she could get free stuff, because she’s cheap, and that Jacqueline is incredibly obsessed with skin care. I’m fascinated. I don’t think I even washed my face until I was like 40. No joke.6. TwinsthenewTrend pop music reaction videos on YouTube It’s these 22-year-old twins in Gary, Ind., who post YouTubes of themselves listening to songs that they’ve never heard before. In the last two weeks, there have been days where I’ve spent up to an hour or two just watching their videos. They’re both really funny, but they’re sweet. When they watch the videos, I feel like it would be so easy for them to take it in another direction and be more meanspirited. Them watching it makes you hear the song again, like for the first time. The one that got me the most is Whitney Houston singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” at the Super Bowl. I literally burst into crazy sobs at the end of that. She’s in a state of joy when she sings it. And they’re like, “Look, she’s just smiling.”7. Food52 I’ve never cooked in my whole life. But I had a craving for chocolate chip cookie dough. I was regressing. So I found a recipe and I ate a lot of cookie dough. Then I cooked this chicken thing, a Martha Stewart thing. And it was so good! Nick was freaking out, because we’ve been married for 20 years and I swear to God, I’ve never cooked anything more than oatmeal. I was like, “Wow, I’ll do this more to freak Nick out.” I got completely consumed with which pots and pans to buy. I would go on these sites and read reviews for hours, even just to buy a spatula. Food52, I’ve gone super deep on their recipes. Milk bread, this spinach and cilantro soup with tahini and lemon, there’s a cake called simple pistachio almond cake that’s one of my favorites. Here’s the best one: White lasagna with Swiss chard, leeks and Gruyère.8. “The Vow” documentary mini-series We just watched “The Vow” like a week ago. I’ve had some dealings with people who have personality disorders. And that’s what Keith Raniere is, a psychopath or a sociopath. The more people that watch “The Vow,” the better. If you stand warned, then you have a better chance of avoiding the total control and manipulation, the gaslighting, the charm offensives, the cycle of abuse, the building up to tear you down to build you up to tear you down.9. Vielmetter Los Angeles I’ve known [Susanne] Vielmetter since 1999. I met her when I first started collecting. Susanne started in a little storefront on Wilshire Boulevard and she has built this incredible gallery. She’s brought in a ton of cool artists and over half of them are women. She also has a lot of people of color. She has run that place with integrity. And she’s got great taste. There’s this artist I really like, Raffi Kalenderian. He’s a portrait painter, but a very modern version of that. Very cool. I saw a new painting of his and I emailed her. I was like, “Oh my God, I love this.” I ended up buying it even though we’re completely out of space.10. Covers by Rickie Lee Jones I love a sad song. I mostly listen to music when I’m finding songs for Nancy and Beth because we do all covers. In the late ’80s, Rickie Lee Jones had a couple of records that were all covers. One was called “Girl at Her Volcano,” which is unbelievable. She does “My Funny Valentine.” She does “Lush Life.” I love her covers. It’s an amazing voice, but not necessarily a beautiful voice. It’s just coming straight from the heart.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More