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      The Key to Gerri on ‘Succession’? ‘Inside She’s a Nervous Wreck’

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      For decades the New York theater world paid homage to J. Smith-Cameron, a veteran stage actress who has often been compared to Carole Lombard for her precise timing and comic verve. When she wasn’t doing Molière or Shakespeare, she was impressing critics and her fellow actors with her performances in plays by Paul Rudnick, John Patrick Shanley and Beth Henley.Now her hard-won local fame has been eclipsed by her breakout role on “Succession,” the HBO drama about a venal Murdoch-like family locked in a “King Lear”-like power struggle. As Gerri Kellman, the long-suffering general counsel and consigliere to Logan Roy, the vicious, vacillating patriarch played by Brian Cox, Ms. Smith-Cameron has turned an ancillary player into a surprisingly complex character. It’s a grown-up role for a grown-up woman.Gerri’s cool gaze, raised eyebrows and clipped interjections, along with her shrewd analyses of corporate shenanigans, have made her an avatar of female power for women of all ages, especially young professionals who find that attaining success in their fields may require them to tiptoe around monstrous male egos. As a result, Ms. Smith-Cameron has gone from a darling of the stage to social media star, with memes galore and Twitter accounts dedicated to Gerri’s every eye roll.“Characters like hers are often written as these barracuda businesswomen or hard-boiled lady detectives, people who are impenetrable or invincible,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “What I like about Gerri is she’s very powerful, but inside she’s a nervous wreck. She’s not impervious to things. That’s why I think she strikes a note. There’s a vulnerability to her and a jittery, thinking-on-her-feet quality. She’s not just coming in and blasting people.”On a brisk March afternoon, Ms. Smith-Cameron, who goes by “J.,” settled in with a cup of coffee onto a squashy blue velvet sofa in her living room. Brownie, a grizzled and wary 12-year-old terrier mix, was napping, fitfully, among the pillows, occasionally rousing herself to bark at a guest.For the last eight years, Ms. Smith-Cameron and her husband, Kenneth Lonergan, the playwright, screenwriter and director, have rented this cozy, two-story apartment in a Federal-style townhouse in downtown Manhattan from the actor Matthew Broderick. Mr. Broderick and Mr. Lonergan have been pals since high school, and they and Ms. Smith-Cameron have worked together, on and off, for decades.Ms. Smith-Cameron with Mr. Broderick in a 1999 production of Emlyn Williams’s “Night Must Fall” at the Lyceum Theater in New York.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“It’s been thrilling to watch J. cross over from a fixture on the New York stage into the collective consciousness,” Mr. Broderick said in a phone interview. “She’s so smart and her humor is so slyly funny. She doesn’t miss a joke.”There are a few Broderick touches in the apartment, notably paintings by Mr. Broderick’s mother, Patricia. “This one is called something like, ‘No matter how old or sick they are, no one likes to look a wreck,’” Ms. Smith-Cameron said, pointing out a piece above the fireplace, an expressionist image of a stately woman in disarray. “Isn’t it great? It’s so thought through.”Gerri has been good to the Smith-Cameron-Lonergan household.“She’s been supporting us for the last six years,” said Mr. Lonergan, who is known for the films “Manchester by the Sea” and “You Can Count On Me.” “No qualms with her whatsoever. Whatever she needs to get done it’s fine with me.”He mused about what, if anything, the character has in common with his wife.“J. has pointed out that Gerri is very anxious,” he said. “J. is sometimes anxious but not in a maneuvering way — she just gets anxious and overwhelmed. Her wheels are always turning. When you hug her, she’s very nicely hugging you back, but you get the sense she’s thinking of other things.”“I’m sorry,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said.It was Ms. Smith-Cameron’s rapport with Kieran Culkin, who plays Roman, the youngest, sassiest Roy, that inspired a “Succession” subplot that completely unhinged the internet. Gerri and Roman were in a jousting and affectionate mentor-mentee relationship as she took him under her wing. But the show’s writers, noting the actors’ off-camera banter, pushed the relationship further. (Off the set, the prankish Mr. Culkin teases Ms. Smith-Cameron as relentlessly as Roman does Gerri. This summer, during a cast dinner, she said, she was so exasperated with him she threw a drink in his face.)Ms. Smith-Cameron, with Kieran Culkin, in a scene from Season 3 of “Succession.” She went off script to call his character a “little slime puppy” in one episode.HBOMidway through the second season, Roman’s Gerri-baiting and his off-color jokes, and Gerri’s snappy retorts, had morphed into a queasy dominatrix-submissive scenario. During a phone call with Roman, Gerri realizes, to her horror, that her tart insults are turning the conversation into phone sex, at least on his end. Ms. Smith-Cameron found herself improvising, which was how the phrase “little slime puppy,” a put-down she coined on the spot, entered the popular lexicon. Or at least the vernacular of “Succession” fanatics.By the end of Season 3, things had gone completely off the rails. Roman tried to text Gerri a close-up of his anatomy, only to misfire, sending the photo to his father. For the first time in her career, Gerri found herself in a vulnerable position. That precariousness, and her response to it, will define her path in the show’s fourth and final season, which has its first episode Sunday.“Gerri is in a restless, insecure place through the whole season, but also, I feel, getting wise to her heft,” Ms. Smith-Cameron said. “I always felt like there was something kind of on the boil with her. I can say that it’s the first time in her career that she’s not felt on solid ground — and she’s angry about it. She’s angry with both Roman and Logan. She’s of an age and has accrued money and could easily retire, but she’s not the type. She’s a workaholic and I think she feels like she’s in her prime. People are always asking me, ‘Why does she take it?’ I think it’s thrilling for her, it’s a high, like surfing in a dangerous sea.“I don’t know that I could be Gerri in real life, and yet acting is very insecure,” she continued. “You have to go out and kill for food every time.”Ms. Smith-Cameron started acting in plays in New York in the 1980s. “I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show,” she said.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMs. Smith-Cameron, 65, was born Jean Isabel Smith in Louisville, Ky., the youngest of three children, and grew up in Greenville, S.C. Her father was an architect and engineer; her mother worked at Head Start and as an assistant librarian. Ms. Smith-Cameron studied at the Florida State University School of Theater in Tallahassee but dropped out, because she was working so much in regional theater and small films.She changed her name in stages: First to J. Smith, because Jeannie, as she was known, seemed too flimsy for an actor. She then exchanged Smith for Cameron, a family name, for additional heft. The hyphenate Smith-Cameron came a bit later, and by accident, after a director printed her name on a film poster that way.In the early 80s, Ms. Smith-Cameron moved to Manhattan and has worked to growing acclaim ever since. In the 1997 Off Broadway production of Douglas Carter Beane’s “As Bees in Honey Drown,” she played an irresistible con artist, delivering a manic mash-up of Auntie Mame and Holly Golightly in a role that won her an Obie. Ben Brantley called her performance “deliriously pleasurable” in his review for The New York Times.“In my 60s, to have this attention, it’s just weird,” she said. “It’s not like I didn’t have notice before, but I always did these off-the-beaten track things. I wasn’t trying to be on a big hit show.”Ms. Smith-Cameron has long been a booster of independent film. You can see her right now in “The Year Between,” by Alex Heller, a comedic drama based on the filmmaker’s own experience with bipolar disorder, which caused her to drop out of college and move back home with her parents. Ms. Smith-Cameron plays the tart Midwestern mother, and Steve Buscemi is her kindly husband. It’s not the first time they have been married onscreen. “He’s so great,” she said of Mr. Buscemi. “We both love to champion independent movies because they’re not built on the premise of making money. They’re exhausting, you have to work really hard fast, but when it fits, it’s a joy.”The actress in an ensemble scene from the 2022 film “The Year Between.”Gravitas Ventures“J. lifts people up,” said Zoe Winters, another fine stage actor scooped up by the “Succession” team who plays Kerry, Logan Roy’s immaculate assistant. “I’ll get texts from her that say, ‘You’re quite something. You’re dazzling.’ She has an endless capacity for that. Ultimately, I think what she’s always trying to do is make people feel good and make really good art.”Ms. Smith-Cameron and Mr. Lonergan met cute, as she put it, while working on a series of one-act plays in the mid-90s. She said she found him appealingly grumpy and quietly hilarious.As she recalled, “I was like, ‘Why have I never met this actor? He’s of an age, he’s really good, he’s really smart! Is he gay? Is he married?’ I began to do a little research.”She learned he was a playwright, acting in another’s scene, who had also written what she thought was the best play of the program. When they collided one night on the stairs of the theater, she complimented his work, comparing it to a William Inge play. When he looked blank, she challenged him, saying, “Don’t you know who William Inge is?”“I had been married and divorced in my 20s,” she said, “and I was going through a chilly spell. I didn’t think I’d fall in love or get married or have kids. So I was a little bitter and a little saucy. But I had never been this brazen.”The couple married in 2000; their daughter, Nellie, is 21.Ms. Cameron-Smith and Mr. Lonergan at the Season 4 premiere of “Succession” at Lincoln Center this month.Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet for The New York Times“There’s something conspiratorial about J., as if she can’t wait to let the world in on the most delicious secret,” said Mr. Rudnick, who cast her in his 1994 Off Broadway comedy, “The Naked Truth.”“She was helplessly, magnetically funny,” Mr. Rudnick continued. “I kept making this one speech longer, just so I could watch J. perform it. She developed a brilliant set of almost balletic gestures, which she informed me were called ‘puppet hands.’ And over the course of an especially long rehearsal, we developed a system where if J. performed her monologue flawlessly, I’d give her a chocolate chip cookie. She of course ended up with an entire bag of Chips Ahoy!”Frank Rich, the former New York Times theater critic and an executive producer of “Succession,” said he had taken delight in Ms. Smith-Cameron’s stage work for years. Even though she has often been known for playing more flamboyant characters, he is not surprised by the nuanced quality she has brought to her character.“For Gerri, J. found this astringent comic tone that suggests she’s in on the joke of working for these entitled jerks who think they know what they’re doing but often have no idea,” he said. “She’s their corporate babysitter even as she has to be subordinate to them. There’s a tragicomedy to her situation, and J. is an actor who can deliver on that.”Ms. Smith-Cameron at home.Justin J Wee for The New York TimesMr. Lonergan, who had been puttering in the kitchen, wandered back into the living room, still mulling over the question of whether his wife has anything in common with the Waystar Royco general counsel.“The other thing I was going to say is, J. doesn’t take full command of things but they kind of go the way she wants them to go, sooner or later,” he said. “She’s very strong-willed. At first I would have said there wasn’t any similarity between J. and Gerri, but they both have their eyes on the main point. Both are extremely observant and notice shifts in what’s going on around them. They’re both interested in substance, and neither of them needs to be the center of attention in a room — and nobody is smarter than either of them in a room.”Ms. Smith-Cameron was beaming. “Thank you,” she said. More

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      ‘Succession’ Recap Ahead of Season 4: Which Rat Could Win the Race?

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      Logan Roy, who compares his children to rodents, still needs a successor going into the final season. Who seemed most likely when we left off?From the start, the HBO series “Succession,” returning Sunday for its fourth and final season, has kept us dangling. The first ever episode teased a retirement announcement that never came, and ever since, the characters have fought over who should succeed the powerful media titan Logan Roy (Brian Cox) as head of the Waystar Royco empire. Should it be one of his spoiled adult children, who haven’t exactly instilled confidence, or a favored employee, whose motivations are often murky?For three seasons, the hierarchical possibilities continually shifted as the father and his heirs played out power dynamics worthy of Roman history, or Greek tragedy, or Shakespearean drama. Siblings fell in and out of favor as they tried to curry respect, or just fatherly attention. The final season should at least answer some crucial questions: Who, if anyone, will take Logan’s place? And will there even be a Waystar left to helm?Here’s a closer look at the candidates most likely to succeed Logan should he die, go to jail or otherwise abdicate his throne before a planned acquisition.ConnorOdds of succeeding: Not bloody likelyPoor, pathetic, peripheral Connor (Alan Ruck), the overlooked eldest, the witless wonder. While his younger half-siblings scheme and maneuver, his presence is never required. “Everybody thinks you’re a joke,” Logan tells him. “You’re irrelevant,” says Kendall. “Generally speaking,” Roman adds, “people don’t like you.”And yet, although he was never groomed to take over Waystar, Connor has his eye on an even bigger prize: the presidency of the United States. By the season premiere, he is barely polling at 1 percent, and even that seems tenuous. Logan could bankroll his campaign, or ATN could back him instead of Jeryd Mencken (Justin Kirk). But these things are unlikely to happen, especially given the pending company acquisition by new-media mogul Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard). It’s beginning to look as if Connor may just have to settle for being incredibly wealthy.The Rat Pack: Kendall, Siobhan and RomanOdds of succeeding: It’s an outside bet.Logan calls his other children “the rats.” We might call them nepo babies. These backbiting siblings usually work in opposition to one another — see the open letter from Shiv (Sarah Snook) about Kendall (Jeremy Strong), just for starters. For now, though, those two and their younger brother, Roman (Kieran Culkin), are presenting a united front.Might they succeed together? In the Season 3 finale, they form an alliance to prevent the sale of Waystar, but that effort fails. If they want to beat their father at his own game, there are only a few options. They could use their inherited wealth (and the billions they stand to make from the Waystar sale) to start their own media company. Or they could just buy a successful rival. But can they ever stop obsessing about their father? Dreaming of patricide — symbolically, for now — is the glue binding them together at present.Kendall (Jeremy Strong) has proved a little too volatile — and Oedipally inclined — to wind up with Waystar thus far.Claudette Barius/HBOKendallOdds of succeeding: Not the family favoriteOnce Logan’s likeliest successor, Kendall, a recovering drug addict, has proved to be too much of a Ken doll: too easily played with, manipulated and broken. He is a lost soul, still tormented by the accidental killing of a waiter at his sister’s wedding. (Word of that could still surface.)The only thing that seems to give Kendall a purpose — or pleasure — is making moves on Logan. He has made three tries so far, with the bear hug (Season 1 finale), the news conference (Season 2 finale) and the failed coup (Season 3 finale). Will a fourth do the trick? It takes a killer instinct — and success — to earn Logan’s respect.RomanOdds of succeeding: The best value on the boardRoman is the neediest of the Roy children, and his insecurity has led him to make some stupid moves. Lately, though, he has gotten smarter — or at least feels he has. (“I think I might be the best businessman in America,” he tells himself.) When he is actually working (and not engaging in self-destructive psychosexual dalliances), he has proved himself to be capable, although still morally weak. (Supporting Mencken might be good for ATN, but is it good for the country?)Roman’s strong ties to both Mencken and Matsson also put him in the best position to return to Waystar’s inner sanctum — he now has something his father needs, if he’s willing to put the sibling alliance aside. But he is still vulnerable, thanks to those inappropriate photos he meant to send to Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron). Don’t send nudes to your dad, especially if your dad is Logan Roy. It’s just ammunition.Shiv (Sarah Snook) may in many ways be the best suited to take over, but she also seems a little too willing to sell out her own principles.Claudette Barius/HBOSiobhanOdds of succeeding: Coin flipLogan once offered his daughter, Shiv, the top job, but he had second thoughts: “You’re a young woman with no experience.” She might not have run a global media company before, but she has proved herself capable — brokering deals and fending off a hostile takeover. The real problem was that Logan wanted a female face to represent the company only while it was facing allegations of sexual abuse. He doesn’t really recognize Shiv’s acumen. And doing his bidding, and suppressing her own liberal values, hasn’t earn her points, or respect. It only contributed to her getting stabbed in the back. If Shiv wants to prevail, she will have to start doing some shivving of her own.TomOdds of succeeding: A close front-runnerFaced with a difficult choice between his wife Shiv and his father-in-law, Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) chose Logan. It’s a decision that will likely destroy his marriage. Worse yet, a divorce could also affect his future standing with Logan. Right now, though, Tom is the head of the broadcast news division, he is Logan’s son-in-law, and he has put Logan in his debt by saving the merger deal (and by offering to serve prison time for the cruise line scandal).But Logan has a short memory for the favors he owes, and he doesn’t respect obsequious yes-men. So Tom will have to continue to prove himself.Cousin GregOdds of succeeding: LongTom’s accomplice and protégé, Cousin Greg (Nicholas Braun), is a bit of a dark horse, but he has come a long way from the days when he had to beg the doorman to cover his cab fare. Greg isn’t immediate family, but he somehow manages to be at all the important family events and becomes privy to much dangerous information. While he once seemed the most morally grounded member of this bunch, he was willing to sell his soul to Tom. What might he do if Logan asks?Granted, Logan would probably have to remember Greg’s name and existence before that happened, and even then, he would be more likely to grant control of a theme park than of Waystar. It’s still possible that Greg’s aged grandfather, Logan’s brother (James Cromwell), might change his mind again and bequeath his estate to Greg, which would give Greg a controlling stake in Waystar.Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron) has already been acting as chief executive. Her odds of taking over seem decent.Macall B. Polay/HBOLogan’s Lackeys: Gerri, Frank, Karl and HugoOdds of succeeding: Gerri alert!Logan doesn’t trust most of his C-suite colleagues — namely, Frank (Peter Friedman), Karl (David Rasche) and Hugo (Fisher Stevens) — enough to give them the keys to the kingdom. Gerri is the exception: He does recognize her business skills and wisdom. Gerri is cool and unflappable, and if she plays it smart, her current interim position as chief executive could become permanent, depending on how Matsson rates her. And whether she takes action against Roman for sexual harassment.The WivesOdds of succeeding: The juice is worth a squeeze.Each of Logan’s wives is a bit of a mystery. What do we know about the first one, other than that she was Connor’s mother? Does she have a stake in the company? Logan’s second wife, Caroline (Harriet Walter), did, but she gave up her claim — and her children’s supermajority of votes — in exchange for a London flat.And his estranged third wife (soon to be ex?), Marcia (Hiam Abbas), seemed to have a stake in the company — or at least Logan wanted her to — along with an extra vote on the board when he dies. It’s unclear exactly how that was resolved, but she did get a larger financial stake when he cheated on her. There’s also the matter of her son Amir (Darius Homayoun), who can implicate Kendall in the waiter’s drowning. So Marcia, as Logan would put it, has some juice.KerryOdds of succeeding: All bets are off.Logan’s friend, assistant, and adviser — and probably new lover — has managed to get very close to the tycoon in record time. And we know what sometimes happens with Logan’s mistresses — they are offered top positions. Remember Rhea Jarrell (Holly Hunter)? Kerry (Zoë Winters) may have growing ambitions, so she is one to watch, and not just for a baby bump. If she continues to smirk at and mock various members of the Roy family, it could be because she knows something we don’t. More

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      in Theater

      In ‘Up Here,’ the Song Stuck in Your Head Might Be Your Mean Ex-Crush

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      Developed by a team of Broadway and Hollywood all-stars, the new Hulu series sets a chorus of inner critics to song.The rats were not on the call sheet. They turned up anyway.For the members of the brain trust behind the new Hulu musical series “Up Here,” this balmy September night last year was to be a precious occasion: After more than two years of cross-country video calls, the writer and executive producer Danielle Sanchez-Witzel had flown in from Los Angeles during the last full week of production, finally giving her a chance to hang out on set with her collaborators — a gang of Broadway powerhouses that included the highly decorated songwriting couple behind “Frozen,” Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez.“She was one of our best friends in the pandemic,” Anderson-Lopez said at the time, at an outdoor shoot in the Manhattan neighborhood of Hudson Heights. “We spent six to eight hours together a day during 2021. And we just hugged in person for the first time 10 minutes ago.”And then Sanchez-Witzel got a dose of New York City realness. As they gathered around the monitors, with the cameras rolling just a few yards away, a few enterprising rodents decided to join the fun. Snacks were stashed. Sanchez-Witzel nervously pulled up her feet. Someone joked about creating a viral video to promote the show.It was just the latest twist in the bigger challenge faced by the illustrious team behind “Up Here,” which dropped all eight episodes of its first season on Friday: how to merge that most classically New York of art forms, the stage musical, with a much younger Hollywood one — the bingeable half-hour streaming sitcom.Stage musicals have been adapted into movies for decades; live television adaptations have made a comeback in recent years, too. But turning one into serialized television is new. This alone would make “Up Here,” developed from an original musical by the Lopezes, stand out.The developers of “Up Here” on a location shoot in Manhattan, from left: Danielle Sanchez-Witzel, Robert Lopez, Steven Levenson, Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Thomas Kail.Sarah Shatz/HuluThe Lopezes created “Up Here” as a stage musical that debuted in San Diego in 2015, but soon shelved it. They made significant changes for the TV adaptation. Sarah Shatz/HuluAdd to that the Tony-winning creative powers of the writer Steven Levenson (“Dear Evan Hansen”) and the director Thomas Kail (“Hamilton”), and the series also comes courtesy of Broadway’s equivalent to a Marvel superteam.“I think they wanted to make sure someone hadn’t won a Tony in this group,” Sanchez-Witzel said. (She, Levenson and the Lopezes are all credited as developers.) She joked that over the years she had spent “thousands of dollars on StubHub” to watch her new collaborators’ shows.Given the surrealistic premise of “Up Here,” it was perhaps always well suited for the screen — think “Herman’s Head” with music, or “Inside Out” with nagging parents, mean ex-crushes and former friends instead of lovable little gremlins. Set at the turn of the millennium, it centers on Lindsay and Miguel (played in the series by Mae Whitman and Carlos Valdes), a young couple who meet outside a bar bathroom where Lindsay’s roommate is having sex with a stranger.If a show about the lurid dating lives of 20-something New Yorkers feels a little familiar, the twist is that the characters’ thoughts, as personified by people from their lives, constantly speak up — or, rather, sing up — to interfere.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes about trying out for his role. He had ample show-tune experience.Patrick Harbron/HuluThe original musical premiered in San Diego in 2015, then was shelved while the Lopezes worked on other things. It didn’t stay on the shelf for long. Early in 2020, Kail, who since directing “Hamilton” had begun to develop a solid reputation in television (he was an executive producer and director of the acclaimed FX series “Fosse/Verdon”), was looking for a new project he could sink his teeth into. He knew the Lopezes from the theater world — in addition to their songs for the “Frozen” movies and “Coco,” Lopez had co-written “Avenue Q” and “The Book of Mormon” — and he asked if they had anything lying around.They were keen to take another crack at “Up Here.” Kail saw potential. He soon pulled in Levenson, his fellow developer of “Fosse/Verdon.” All agreed that “Up Here” would work best as a comedy series. There was just one problem.“We quickly decided none of us had any experience in half-hour television,” Levenson said. So Kail contacted Sanchez-Witzel, whose credits included “The Carmichael Show” and “New Girl.” She signed on but continued to work from Los Angeles. (Kail, the Lopezes and Levenson are also executive producers.)The team’s central task was figuring out how to translate the stage version to episodic television. The idea, as Levenson explained it, was to create a musical that spanned eight episodes but where each was also its own mini-musical. And the tunes had to be more than an accessory.“The show needed to function like a musical, where the songs actually were necessary to the storytelling, so that if you removed them, the show wouldn’t work,” Levenson said.The learning curve was steep for both sides.“Danielle told us about certain structures of a 30-minute comedy,” Anderson-Lopez said. “And we talked a lot about how when we’re looking for songs in theater or animated musicals, we’re always looking for a moment when a character is having a feeling so big, they can’t speak anymore. It was really fun figuring out those spaces in a half-hour comedy.”Eventually, the set list from the San Diego production was almost entirely put aside. The male lead’s name was also changed from Dan to Miguel.Valdes as Miguel in a scene from the series. The male lead was called Dan in the stage version. Sarah Shatz/Hulu“I felt strongly that this time around he should be not white,” said Lopez, the youngest person ever to win an EGOT — an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony — and also the only person to have won each award more than once. He and Sanchez-Witzel share “a similar experience being nonwhite and feeling disconnected from both the white mainstream and from our immigrant histories,” he added. (Lopez is of Philippine descent; Sanchez-Witzel is Mexican American.) “We thought that’d be interesting to put into this character.”To find their lead actors, the New York-based creators followed a procedure they were all familiar with. This was an advantage for Valdes.“I got there, and with the accompanist and the music, I was like, ‘Oh, this is like a theater audition,’” said Valdes, who is best known for playing Cisco/Vibe on the CW’s “The Flash” but has extensive show-tune experience, including appearing in the Broadway hit “Once” a decade ago.“It had been a long time since I’d been in that kind of musical theater space, but it felt so familiar,” he said, “like a homecoming.”Landing the part was more fraught for Whitman, whose extensive television résumé (“Parenthood,” “Arrested Development”) had not prepared her for an old-school tryout. “I had to fly to New York and stand in front of a table full of people next to a piano player and have to sing,” Whitman said in a joint video call with Valdes. “It was terrifying. I can sing, but I’d never done anything like that.”As for the actors handling Lindsay and Miguel’s inner voices, they tend to straddle both worlds. Portraying Lindsay’s parents are the writer, humorist and actor John Hodgman and the Broadway and “Brockmire” veteran Katie Finneran. Team Miguel includes Scott Porter, an original cast member of the Off Broadway hit musical “Altar Boyz” who went on to star in “Friday Night Lights.” That evening in Hudson Heights, he was rocking a goatee and suspenders that made him look like a cocky late-90s corporate bro, which is exactly what he plays.Lindsay leaves her partner (George Hampe, far right) for New York City in the pilot. The voices in her head (played by, center left, Sophia Hammons; Katie Finneran; and John Hodgman) follow her.Craig Blankenhorn/HuluFrom his experience in theater and on “Fosse/Verdon,” Kail had learned that things went smoother if you had everyone in the same building; aside from the portions shot on location, the entire production was concentrated at a compound in Long Island City, Queens, from the writing to the choreography to the costume making.“The thing with theater is, there is a moment when you move into the theater and everybody’s under the same tent,” he said. “We wanted to try to do that here and bring everybody in.”Except, of course, for Sanchez-Witzel, who until the final full week had to make do from Los Angeles. It was great that technology had allowed her to observe the set from 3,000 miles away, she said, but she couldn’t deny the thrill of finally watching it all in person: the strips of ratty off-white carpet evoking dirty Manhattan snow, the whispers between takes, the in-person chemistry between Whitman and Valdes.Then there was the massive boulder in the middle of a block in Hudson Heights, where Lindsay and Miguel share an important kiss.“To see the rock in person — it’s probably hard for you to imagine how exciting it is,” Sanchez-Witzel said, laughing. “But to me, it’s extremely exciting!” More

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      Al Franken Talks Potential TikTok Ban on ‘The Daily Show’

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      “That’s right, we don’t need a Chinese company stealing our data and spying on us. That’s a job for American companies,” Franken said.Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.TikTok the SpyLawmakers interviewed the chief executive of TikTok on Thursday, looking for connections to China and the possibility that Beijing could use the app to spy on Americans.“That’s right, we don’t need a Chinese company stealing our data and spying on us. That’s a job for American companies,” Al Franken said, leading the audience in a chant of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!”“Of course, a ban will affect me personally because, as many of you know, I have a huge following on TikTok thanks to my unboxing videos, my makeup tutorials, and, of course, my dance moves.” — AL FRANKEN“The president of China watches every second of this. He’s just watching and one day, he’s going to use it against us. That’s TikTok for you.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“The parent company is a company called ByteDance. The fear is that the Chinese government could order ByteDance to turn over all the information it has on us at any time, and if China figures out how to make spaghetti on a countertop, they’ll be unstoppable.” — JIMMY KIMMELThe Punchiest Punchlines (TikTok Edition)“Everyone is nervous about TikTok because they think all of our information is being delivered to China. In response, TikTok said, ‘Well, it’s not delivery — it’s D’Amelio.’” — JIMMY FALLON“That’s right, the C.E.O. of TikTok testified. Then, of course, the head of Instagram Reels showed up and said all the exact same stuff, just not as cool.” — JIMMY FALLON“The hearing was actually fun, because every time TikTok’s C.E.O. took a sip of water, somebody slapped him with a tortilla.” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe reunited pop-punk band Fall Out Boy played its new track “Hold Me Like a Grudge” on Thursday’s “Tonight Show.”Also, Check This OutKeanu Reeves, foreground, as the laconic assassin John Wick in the franchise’s fourth installment.Murray Close/LionsgateKeanu Reeves visits Paris and paints the town red as the titular assassin in “John Wick: Chapter 4.” More

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      Toheeb Jimoh on ‘Ted Lasso’ and His Pretty Good Few Years

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      In the Season 2 finale of “Ted Lasso,” Toheeb Jimoh’s character, Sam Obisanya, stands in front of the vacant storefront he has just bought. “What’s it going to be?” asks the woman who has handed the soccer player his keys. “A Nigerian restaurant,” he says, a broad smile on his face. This moment is a turning point of sorts for Sam, a mark of his ambition and growth from the young man viewers met in the “Ted Lasso” pilot who had recently arrived in Britain.So it’s fitting that Jimoh, 25, chose Enish, a West African restaurant in Brixton, in South London, a stone’s throw from the actor’s childhood home, for an interview. Dressed in a black sweater and matching cargo pants and tucking into rice and ayamase, a spicy meat stew, Jimoh said that Sam has had a “beautiful arc” over the past two seasons.“If you had told me at the start of Season 1 that Sam would be a business owner, one of the stars of the team, and dating the boss, I wouldn’t have believed you,” he said. Sam has also gone from a minor character to one of the show’s leads, with his positive attitude and strong work ethic making him a favorite among fans.The past couple of years have been pretty good to Jimoh, too, who graduated from drama school in 2018. Last year he was nominated for an Emmy for his portrayal of Sam, and this month he can be seen onscreen in two major TV shows: the third season of “Ted Lasso,” which started airing on Apple TV+ on March 15, and “The Power,” adapted from the British writer Naomi Alderman’s dystopian novel of the same name, which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on March 31.In the upcoming Amazon Prime Video show “The Power,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian journalist.Amazon Prime Video“The Power” is a science fiction drama that considers what would happen if women became more physically dominant than men. Jimoh plays Tunde, a young journalist documenting the revolutions that come as women gain new strength, and his character embodies the vulnerability of men in the face of this female power.Tim Bricknell, an executive producer on “The Power,” said in a recent interview that there were two sides of Jimoh “that made him perfect for this particular role.” The first, he said, is the actor’s “natural charm,” which is integral to Tunde’s character. But the second is Jimoh’s curiosity. “He wants to know what everybody on the crew is doing and is always asking questions,” Bricknell said. “That is quite rare in successful young actors, which makes him perfect for playing a journalist.”In preparing for the role, Jimoh spoke to his female friends “about routine things that they do to make sure that they’re safe when they go out,” he said. “I was a bit sheepish because I hadn’t realized that.” He sees the book and the TV adaptation as containing “many really interesting questions about the relationships between men and women, society’s relationship with power and how power corrupts people.”In both “The Power” and “Ted Lasso,” Jimoh plays a Nigerian. The actor — whose parents are Nigerian and who spent some time in the country when he was growing up — is attracted to roles like these that allow him to “speak about my family and culture,” he said. But he also likes to choose roles that explore wider societal topics. His first major acting role came in 2020, when he starred in “Anthony,” a 90-minute BBC drama about  Anthony Walker, a teenager who was killed in a racist attack in England in 2005.“You can tell from the roles I’ve ended up doing in my career that I was also a kid who would have done politics if I wasn’t an actor,” Jimoh said.To become an actor, “I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said.Erik Carter for The New York TimesHe studied politics in his final years of high school, along with law and history, with acting as his “easy subject on the side,” he said. He didn’t consider it as a career option until a teacher pulled him aside to suggest he could be an actor.“I thought you had to live in L.A. and have been doing it from 4 years old, or have parents who did it,” Jimoh said. He didn’t know anyone in the acting world, and his parents both worked in hospitals — his father as a caterer and his mother as a health care assistant. “All the grown ups that I knew had very, very normal jobs, and that was the blueprint,” he said.Soon he was performing in youth productions and had a gig as an usher at the Young Vic theater. One day, sitting across from his friend at school during a lunch break, Jimoh threw his history homework in the trash and decided to pursue acting seriously. “I refused to have a Plan B,” he said, adding that he “harassed my teachers into watching my audition speeches.”In a school newsletter at the time, one of Jimoh’s teachers wrote that, “In all the years that I have been teaching, never have I come across someone who has such raw talent at such an early age” as Jimoh.He went on to get an undergraduate degree in drama from Guildhall School of Music and Drama, which has an abundance of high-profile alumni, including Orlando Bloom and Michaela Coel.Sam (Jimoh) and Roy (Brett Goldstein) in “Ted Lasso.” Goldstein said Jimoh had “integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Apple TV+The actor and comedian Brett Goldstein, who plays the former soccer player Roy Kent on “Ted Lasso” and is now a close friend of Jimoh’s, said he believed that the younger actor’s success was partly because of his selective approach to work. “He turns down as much as he takes,” Goldstein, 42, said in a recent interview. “He has integrity and wants to make good stuff.”Between bites of ayamase, Jimoh said he hoped future opportunities would allow him to show different sides of himself. “I’m just interested in what the story is for that young man, and why it is interesting to tell,” he said of how he chooses his gigs. “There’s a plethora of work out there, and I just want to dip my toe in everything.”From June, he will be starring in a production of “Romeo and Juliet” at London’s Almeida Theater. He sees the play’s meaning as rooted in “believing young people and their feelings,” noting that he had a friend who died by suicide when he was 15.“When you’re young, you feel things so deeply,” he said, “and older people might look at that and think it’s a bit naïve, but it leads to stuff like this.”At the moment, Jimoh said he often finds himself having to perform like Sam when he meets people who recognize him from the show.“But there is more to me than the squeaky clean ‘Ted Lasso,’” he said, “and I’m excited to show that part of me as well.” More

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      ‘Star Trek: Picard’ Season 3, Episode 6 Recap: Night at the Museum

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      Geordi La Forge gets to right some wrongs, but first he has to make up with his daughter in an episode that doubles as a Callback Museum.Season 3, Episode 6: ‘The Bounty’Geordi La Forge, through much of “Next Generation,” on some level needed rehabilitation. He was brilliantly portrayed by LeVar Burton, but he was also sometimes treated like a stereotype: a nerdy engineer who couldn’t get the girl and wasn’t given much else to do. In fact, his main love interest was Dr. Leah Brahms (Susan Gibney), whom he initially met as a hologram.So the non-holographic Brahms was quite creeped out after she found out about her digital counterpart’s tryst with this engineer she didn’t know. This was always a weird story line, which even Burton acknowledged in my recent interview with the cast.“Geordi was a stalker,” Burton said, laughing. “You know, he stalked that woman. And that’s not OK.”“He created a holodeck version of that woman,” He added. “And that’s wrong! It’s just wrong. And the opportunity to right that wrong was central to my enthusiasm to come back and do this again.”In this week’s episode, we finally get to see what Geordi is up to. He is now Commodore La Forge, running the fleet museum and a father to two daughters, Sidney (the pilot of the Titan) and Alandra. There’s a complexity for Geordi that didn’t previously exist, torn between his duty as a friend and as a parent.“Leave it to you, Jean-Luc, to turn fatherhood into an intergalactic incident,” Geordi tells Jean-Luc. This is an apt line, especially when you remember that the reason Beverly never told Jean-Luc about Jack was because Jean-Luc attracts trouble.When Jean-Luc mentions that their precarious situation is “life or death,” Geordi tartly replies: “It’s always life or death, Jean-Luc. When has it not been? Which was fine back in the day when I chose to put my life under your command. But you’ve just knowingly put my daughter in grave danger.”Geordi’s arc is like that of many people who become parents. When they are younger and childless, they feel free to be reckless. But as a parent, when you’re responsible for someone who didn’t ask to be born, the calculations change. Geordi has done his part to save the galaxy. Now, he just wants to keep his kids and himself safe.“I can’t help you and protect them,” Geordi tells Jean-Luc. This is a stinging rejoinder to Jean-Luc’s call for help. And so another close friend of Jean-Luc’s has told him that he poses a risk to their children.The implication from Sidney in her confrontation with her father is that Geordi was hard on her because she chose to be a pilot instead of an engineer — as if that decision had been a specific rejection of him. But Geordi’s own past comes back to haunt him: Sidney considers the Titan crew to be her family, just as Geordi did with the Enterprise’s. That’s the example Geordi set. It’s hard to take that back now. Later in the episode, Geordi says he is disappointed in himself for not having jumped at the chance to help his friends the way the younger Geordi would have.It’s clear that the creative team behind “Picard” put a lot of thought into how to put these characters properly into new spaces, rather than simply rely on the versions we have come to know and love.That even applies to Data, or whatever version of him the team rescues in this episode. Altan Soong, who appeared in earlier seasons of “Picard,” is shown to have died, but not before he created an android that combines Lal, B-4, Lore and Data.Of course, it probably wasn’t realistic to do a proper “Next Generation” reunion without having Brent Spiner resurrect Data. But the way “Picard” does it is quite novel, without discounting his two previous deaths. It gives us the most human version of Data yet, one that has aged and battles multiple personalities. This android has Lore inside him, as well as the childlike Lal and B-4. In a way, that’s all of us. We all struggle with our inner Lore — the ambitious, mischievous and morally dubious inclinations. We also have needs from when we were children that never go away — say, approval and love.And we have our inner Data — clinical versions of ourselves that try to weigh life’s decisions dispassionately. How we balance all of that is what makes us human — and that’s what this new, modern version of Data appears to have to battle with.And I must salute Spiner here — he plays all of these different versions of the android within seconds of one another. It’s a tremendous — and difficult — performance that Spiner nails.Odds and EndsJust a ton of fan service in this episode, particularly at Daystrom Station, which itself is named after Richard Daystrom, a legendary scientist from the original series. Daystrom appears to be a toy store for Section 31 while doubling as a museum for callbacks. Riker, Worf and Raffi walk by the Genesis Device, Tribbles and a skeleton of James Kirk (intrigued at the possibilities here). The holographic crow that shows up is a likely reference to Data’s dreams in the “Next Generation” episode “Birthright,” where Data experiences dreams of his creator. Bringing Professor Moriarty back as part of the artificial intelligence to guard the station was a brilliant touch. And I loved the detail of giving Riker perfect pitch to discern Moriarty’s purpose.Then, of course, there were the actual Fleet Museum ships: The Defiant. The Enterprise-A. Voyager. The Klingon Bird of Prey from “Star Trek: The Voyage Home.”There is a nice moment where Jack acknowledges to Seven the need for connection, after suggesting to Jean-Luc in Episode 4 that he didn’t need anyone. Jack lets his guard down momentarily.The reunion scenes involving Worf, Geordi, Beverly, Jean-Luc and Riker are wonderful. Decades of onscreen chemistry shine through here, even though the characters are in different places than they were the last time they were together. Parental concerns are a theme of this season, and it’s notable that Worf immediately makes the mission about protecting both Starfleet and Jack, his old captain’s son, while Geordi initially declines to take part so he can protect his own children. (Of course, he eventually comes around.)Worf references a “Deep Space Nine” story line, in which Starfleet nearly wiped out the changelings by engineering a virus to infect them during the Dominion War. Although Starfleet eventually came up with a cure — thanks Dr. Bashir! — it radicalized some changelings along the way. More

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      Late Night Awaits Donald Trump’s Perp Walk

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      Jimmy Kimmel joked that a grand jury “decided to push the hearing to tomorrow to give Trump supporters time to iron their Confederate flags.”Welcome to Best of Late Night, a rundown of the previous night’s highlights that lets you sleep — and lets us get paid to watch comedy. Here are the 50 best movies on Netflix right now.Still WaitingDespite his preparation, former President Donald Trump was not indicted on Wednesday.Jimmy Kimmel joked that the grand jury “decided to push the hearing to tomorrow to give Trump supporters time to iron their Confederate flags.”“He’s been telling people he’s excited about the idea of getting paraded in front of cameras, like it’s a red carpet at some kind of Guilty People’s Choice Awards or something.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“He’s also saying he specifically wants to get handcuffed behind his back, which, weirdly, is the same request he had for Stormy Daniels when he got into this mess.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Why he would make a spectacle out of being arrested, I don’t know. He’s been even asking friends if he should smile when he gets arrested. He’s been asking friends if he should smile — Melania’s been debating whether she should play ‘Party in the U.S.A.,’ or ‘Celebration’ by Kool & the Gang.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Yep, Trump’s loving the attention from possibly being arrested. What a difference a day makes. It went from ‘lock her up’ to ‘lock me up.’” — JIMMY FALLON“Trump’s even putting thought into his perp walk. He is planning this out like it is a reality show or something.” — JIMMY KIMMEL“Wasn’t this meant to happen yesterday? Like, seriously, they’re — they’re stretching this out like it’s the, you know, the end of — the final of ‘American Idol’: ‘It’s time to find out whether or not Trump is getting arrested. Trump is — going to find out after this break. Don’t go anywhere!’” — JAMES CORDENThe Punchiest Punchlines (Spoiler Alert Edition)“The D.C. Court of Appeals today upheld the ruling of a federal judge who found that there is compelling evidence to suggest Trump deliberately misled his own attorneys about whether he had classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. Of course he misled his attorneys. He’s the lied piper. He’s Ms. Led Zeppelin. This is what he does!” — JIMMY KIMMEL“So just to be clear: Trump was already in trouble for stealing classified documents from the White House, and now he may have broken the law again by tricking his own lawyers into lying to the government. So Trump’s original crimes are now having their own little baby crimes. You know, they grow up and implicate you so fast, don’t they?” — AL FRANKEN“Can you imagine being a lawyer for Donald Trump and finding out he set you up? That would make you question whether it was even worth buying a degree from Barbados in the first place.” — AL FRANKEN“So look, I know there are a lot of different cases going on, and this all seems very complicated, but there is a simple explanation: Trump is a, um, a criminal. I hope that clears that up.” — AL FRANKEN“Yeah, everyone’s still waiting to see if and when former President Trump will be indicted for hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. After all of the hype and buildup about Trump, Stormy Daniels was like, ‘Spoiler alert: Get ready to be disappointed.’” — JIMMY FALLONThe Bits Worth WatchingThe actor Kerry Washington shared the story of meeting the director Spike Lee while she was a teenager on Wednesday’s “Late Late Show.”What We’re Excited About on Thursday NightThe drag queen BenDeLaCreme will talk about the anti-trans legislation and bans on drag shows being proposed around the country on Thursday’s “Daily Show.”Also, Check This OutMegan Hilty soaring as Ivy Lynn in the television series “Smash,” which is being developed into a Broadway musical years after it was canceled.Will Hart/NBCThe producers behind the long-awaited stage adaptation of “Smash” announced it will premiere on Broadway during the 2024-25 season. More

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      Aaron Sorkin Battled a Stroke as He Reimagined ‘Camelot’

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      “Camelot” opened on Broadway 63 years ago, an eagerly anticipated new musical from the makers of “My Fair Lady.” But happily-ever-aftering took a while.Out-of-town, while trying to trim the overlong production, one writer was hospitalized with an ulcer, and the director collapsed of a heart attack. In New York, despite starring Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, “Camelot” took months to find its footing, and only did so following a televised segment on “The Ed Sullivan Show.”Today the musical, written by Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, is remembered as one of the last of Broadway’s Golden Age shows, but its traditional narrative — Arthurian legend with all of its romance, politics, swordplay and sorcery — has never quite clicked.“Unfortunately, ‘Camelot’ is weighed down by the burden of its book,” the New York Times critic Howard Taubman wrote of the opening. That assessment has persisted. “It has one of the great scores of all time,” said Theodore S. Chapin, the former president of the Rodgers & Hammerstein Organization, “but the plot starts to go haywire.”On April 13, a new version of “Camelot” is scheduled to open on Broadway, with its book rewritten by Aaron Sorkin. The Hollywood screenwriter is familiar to many as the creator of the television series “The West Wing,” and he won an Oscar for writing the movie “The Social Network.” He is also an accomplished playwright, whose first Broadway drama, “A Few Good Men,” became a hit film, and whose most recent Broadway outing, an adaptation of “To Kill a Mockingbird,” was a critical and commercial success.Clockwise from top left: Aaron Sorkin, Phillipa Soo, Jordan Donica and Andrew Burnap.Photographs by Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesBut musicals have not been part of his repertoire, until now. He earned a B.F.A. in musical theater from Syracuse University, but this, in his slightly overstated words, is “the first time I’m putting it to use.” (He tried writing a musical once before, partnering with Stephen Schwartz on a show about Houdini. It didn’t work out.)This rewritten “Camelot,” starring Phillipa Soo of “Hamilton” fame as Guenevere, alongside Andrew Burnap (“The Inheritance”) as Arthur and Jordan Donica (“My Fair Lady”) as Lancelot, is now in previews at Lincoln Center Theater. By contemporary standards, it’s a large production, with a 27-person cast and a 30-piece orchestra.Sorkin is not the first to revise the musical — even Lerner and Loewe reworked it post-opening, and others have tried, too — but his deft hand with witty, fast-paced dialogue and audience nostalgia for “Camelot,” which is adapted from T.H. White’s fantasy novel, “The Once and Future King,” has made the production one of the most anticipated on Broadway this year, with theater mavens eager to see how Sorkin puts his stamp on it.“People think the show is about a love triangle, which of course it is,” said Alan Paul, the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company and director of his own production of “Camelot” a few years back, “but I really think it’s about the birth of democracy, and when you look back at ‘The West Wing,’ which is one of my favorite shows, that is a TV show that believes government can work for the people.”‘You’re supposed to be dead.’Just getting to this point is an unexpected relief for Sorkin.In November, two months before rehearsals were set to begin, he woke in the middle of the night and noticed that, while walking to the kitchen, he was crashing into walls and corners. He thought nothing of it until the next morning, when the orange juice he was carrying to his home office kept spilling.Sorkin called his doctor, who told him to come in immediately; his blood pressure was so high, Sorkin said, “You’re supposed to be dead.” The diagnosis: Sorkin, 61, had had a stroke.For about a month afterward, he was slurring words. He had trouble typing; he was discouraged from flying for a few weeks; and until recently, he couldn’t sign his name (he has just discovered, thanks to “Camelot” autograph seekers, that that’s improving). Those issues are now behind him, and the main lingering effect is that he still can’t really taste food.“Mostly it was a loud wake-up call,” he said during one of several interviews for this article. “I thought I was one of those people who could eat whatever he wanted, smoke as much as he wanted, and it’s not going to affect me. Boy, was I wrong.”Sorkin had been a heavy smoker since high school — two packs a day of Merits — and the habit had long been inextricable from his writing process. “It was just part of it, the way a pen was part of it,” he said. “I don’t want to talk about it too much, because I’ll start to salivate.”After the stroke, he quit cold turkey, cleaned up his diet and started working out twice a day. And, he said, “I take a lot of medicine. You can hear the pills rattling around in me.”“If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault,” Sorkin said.Jingyu Lin for The New York TimesSorkin told me about the stroke almost in passing, when we were having a get-acquainted cup of tea in a hotel lobby (he loves writing in hotels) earlier this year. Trying to understand his creative process, I asked whether he prefers to write longhand or on a device. That’s when he said writing by hand had become difficult.At first he told me about his stroke only off the record; we agreed we’d revisit the subject the next time we met, so he could think through the implications of going public. By then, he had decided he was ready to describe what he had been through, in the hopes that his experience might be a cautionary tale. “If it’ll get one person to stop smoking,” he said, “then it’ll be helpful.”He is aware how lucky he is to have recovered, and to be able to continue to do the work he loves. “There was a minute when I was concerned that I was never going to be able to write again,” he said, “and I was concerned in the short-term that I wasn’t going to be able to continue writing ‘Camelot.’”Now he’s commuting between Los Angeles, where he lives, and New York, where he’s trimming the script, offering pointers to actors, refining word choices that don’t strike him quite right. “Let me make this very, very clear,” he said. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t want anyone to think I can’t work. I’m fine.”‘Now with no magic!’For many people, “Camelot” is more familiar as a metaphor than as a musical — it depicts a noble effort to create a just society, often associated with the Kennedy administration, because Jacqueline Kennedy, in an interview shortly after President John F. Kennedy’s assassination, mentioned her husband’s fondness for the show, and quoted a final lyric: “Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot.”Four years ago, Lincoln Center Theater, which is a nonprofit, staged a fund-raising concert performance of the show, starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Arthur. It went so well that the creative team began talking about a full-scale production.“The music is so good, and it’s incredibly fun, and I don’t know of any other pieces set in the Middle Ages with knights,” said Bartlett Sher, a veteran of Golden Age revivals (“South Pacific,” “The King and I,” “My Fair Lady”) who directed the concert and is now directing this revival. “I realized how extraordinary the score was,” he said, “and how complicated the experience of the book was.”Julie Andrews and Richard Burton, center, starred in the 1960 production of “Camelot.”Pictorial Press Ltd./AlamySher was debriefing with Miranda when Sorkin’s name came up. “I knew Sorkin was a fan of ‘Camelot,’ because he quotes it in ‘The West Wing’,” said Miranda, who grew up hearing songs from the musical, a favorite of his mother’s, and memorized them while a passenger in her car.Sher and Sorkin already knew each other because they had collaborated on “Mockingbird,” and they were eager to work together again.“You would think we would have sat and talked for hours about the problems we had with the existing book, or what we were hoping for, but we didn’t,” Sorkin said. “I just got to work.”He made one key early decision that has guided his approach to the show: no supernatural elements. That means Merlyn, who in the original is a magician who can remember the future and can turn Arthur into a hawk, is now a wise tutor; Morgan Le Fey, who in the original can build invisible walls, is now a scientist; and the nymph Nimue is gone. Even Arthur’s sword-in-the-stone origin story is questioned.“It wasn’t that I don’t like magic — I do,” Sorkin said. “Nor were there commercial reasons — no producer wants to put on a marquee, ‘Now With No Magic!’ It was because I feel that this story, in particular, had a chance of landing more powerfully, more emotionally, if people felt real. If a problem can be solved by waving a magic wand, it doesn’t feel like much of a problem.”‘Musicals can get tangled with.’“Camelot,” like many older musicals, has its complications for a modern audience. “From a contemporary perspective, it’s very problematic,” said Stacy Wolf, director of the music theater program at Princeton University. “The musical is about heterosexual adultery ruining a visionary government, and the woman is ultimately blamed for it.”Nonetheless, Wolf is eager to see the revival. “The music that Lerner and Loewe wrote is just incredible,” she said, “and in the same way that Shakespeare gets tangled with, and operas get tangled with, musicals can get tangled with.”Sorkin quickly realized that two songs, in particular, posed problems: the sexist-sounding “How to Handle a Woman” and the classist-sounding “What Do the Simple Folk Do?”“When I first started writing it, I thought, there’s an easy way to solve this: Don’t sing the songs,” Sorkin said.But Sher asked Sorkin to reconsider, given fan fondness for the score. “There’s a reason we see ‘Camelot’,” Sorkin acknowledged, “and the reason isn’t me.”So he came up with an alternative solution: humor. The songs are back, preceded by dialogue in which Guenevere preemptively defuses their sting with Sorkin-esque wit.“When I joined, ‘How to a Handle a Woman’ wasn’t there in the script, but then one day it was,” Soo said. “But there was also a beautifully written scene — and this is another reason why Aaron Sorkin is brilliant at what he does — that explores the song in a new way.”The revival has been extensively nurtured — there were four developmental workshops along the way, and Sorkin estimates that he has written about 10 drafts of the script. Lancelot “went from being a buffoon, like Gaston in ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ to a three-dimensional person.” Arthur struggles to define his feelings for Guenevere, whom he marries as part of a peace treaty. And Guenevere is now a strategic helpmate, periodically outthinking her husband.“The ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country,” said Donica, left foreground, who plays Lancelot.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times“There have been rewrites at each stage of workshop, and there are even more rewrites still going on,” said the actor Dakin Matthews, who is playing Merlyn and another character.A case study: Morgan Le Fey, who in the original is a sorceress with a sweet tooth, and a threat to Arthur’s reign. At first, Sorkin simply cut the character — as Lerner had done for some post-Broadway productions — but, Sorkin said, “she found her way in, and she got better.”In an early workshop, the actress Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in “Rent”), read the role, when Le Fey was little more than a spurned ex-girlfriend. “She, in a very nice but direct way, said I could do better,” Sorkin said. “She was right.”He made Le Fey a scientist, an unmarried mother, and, for a time, an opium addict. (Sorkin has been clean for 23 years after battling his own addictions.) Now she makes and sells brandy. “People coming in and auditioning — they were just leaning into being high on opium, and it wasn’t working,” Sorkin said.Marilee Talkington, who plays Le Fey, has embraced the character’s evolution.“The old version of ‘Camelot’ felt distant, but also fun and entertaining,” she said. “This version is inviting the audience to ask themselves who they are, what they want, and where there’s hope.”How much “West Wing” is there in “Camelot”? Sorkin said the screenwriting device for which he is most famous — the so-called walk and talk, in which characters converse while in motion, is a.) “probably exaggerated” and b.) a screen technique that “has no implications for the stage.” Having said that: Arthur has his best ideas while pacing.One trick Sorkin did transfer from filmdom: He intercut three scenes together, as in a movie, held together with scoring, and challenged Sher to figure out the staging. “Give Bart something like that,” Sorkin said, “and he’s a happy guy.”And there are lines that can clearly be heard as allusions to our contemporary challenges.“All of his films are about game-changers, and ‘Camelot’ is no different, because Arthur is a game-changer,” said Donica, the actor playing Lancelot. “And the ideas of democracy that are discussed in this show are the ones that are discussed in this country.”‘I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it.’I sat down with Sorkin the morning after the first preview performance, and he was obviously pleased. It struck me that this was the first time he had seemed happy with his work. “That’s not an illusion,” he said. “It’s the most positive I’ve been during the process. I feel ashamed I didn’t have more confidence in everybody.”There was still work to be done over the five-week preview period — the show was running too long (“I’m sure I’ll be called upon to make some cuts, and I’m not looking forward to that”), and Sorkin was still wrestling with various bits of language (Would it be exciting or distracting if he changed an “or” to a “like,” with the effect of implying that Guenevere might be agnostic?).But until that first performance before an audience, Sorkin had repeatedly fretted about what might go wrong, remembering that at one point he told a group of young librettists, “If you write the book to a musical with a score written by Lerner and Loewe, and they have this cast, and Bart Sher is directing it, and it doesn’t work, it was definitely your fault.”I found it hard to understand how someone as successful as Aaron Sorkin could be so worried, so I asked him about it.“I have had some success, and I’ve also had plenty of experience feeling anxiety about what I’m doing,” he said. “Am I going to have an idea? Am I going to be able to write this?”One startling example: “I wrote 86 episodes of ‘The West Wing,’ and every single time I finished one, I’d be happy for five minutes before it just meant that I haven’t started the next one yet, and I never thought I would be able to write the next one. Ever.”Is that kind of worrying a liability, or a strength, for an artist like Sorkin? “I hope it wasn’t a waste,” he said. “And I do think to myself, as I try to relax myself a little bit, I worry that if I stop worrying then I won’t do it. That it’s the worrying that’s driving me to do it.”Sorkin, who has already begun having meetings about possible next musicals, even while dreaming up a Jan. 6 movie he is contemplating writing and directing, said he has come to see “Camelot” as a narrative about narrative.“Ultimately, the show is a valentine to storytelling,” he said.“I like that Arthur thinks if we can just keep telling these stories, then people will be inspired and they’ll believe that we do have greatness in our grasp, and that you have to keep trying,” he added. “The greatest delivery system for an idea ever invented is a story.” More