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    Harris Yulin, Actor Who Perpetually Played the Bad Guy, Dies at 87

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    As an award-winning actor and director, he appeared in scores of stage plays, movies and TV shows over six decades, most often as unsavory characters.Harris Yulin, a chameleonic character actor who for more than six decades portrayed guys whom critics described as unsympathetic, soulful, menacing, corrupt and glowering, both onstage and onscreen, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. He was 87.His wife, Kristen Lowman, said the cause of death, in a hospital, was cardiac arrest.Inspired to pursue an acting career when he first took center stage at his bar mitzvah, Mr. Yulin never became a marquee name. But to many audiences he was instantly recognizable, even as a man of a hundred faces. He played at least as many parts, including J. Edgar Hoover, Hamlet and Senator Joseph McCarthy. Other roles ranged from crooked cops and politicians to a lecherous TV anchorman.“I’m not always the bad guy,” he told The New York Times in 2000. “It just seems to be what I’m known for.”Mr. Yulin, left, earned an Emmy nomination for his portrayal of a mobster in a 1996 episode of the sitcom “Frasier,” with David Hyde Pierce, center, and Kelsey Grammer. Gale M. Adler/NBCU Photo Bank, via Getty ImagesHe wasn’t just any bad guy. One reviewer characterized him as “an eloquent growler.” Another wrote that “his whiskeyed voice sounds just like that of John Huston.”Honors followed. Mr. Yulin was nominated in 1996 for a prime time Emmy Award for playing a crime boss in the TV comedy series “Frasier.” For his work in theater, he won the Lucille Lortel Award from the League of Off Broadway Theaters for his direction of Horton Foote’s “The Trip to Bountiful” in 2006. In the late 1990s he won Drama Desk nominations for acting on Broadway in “The Diary of Anne Frank” and Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”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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      Two Fresh Looks at Molière: ‘Imaginary Invalid’ and ‘Prosperous Fools’

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      Red Bull Theater’s smart “The Imaginary Invalid” and Taylor Mac’s dismaying “Prosperous Fools” attempt to engage with the French writer’s comedy.Based on. An adaptation of. After. Inspired by.When these words precede the title of a new production of a classic play or the name of a long-dead writer, chances are good you’ll be in for a ride. Now two shows drawing from Molière — Red Bull Theater’s revival of “The Imaginary Invalid” and the Taylor Mac play “Prosperous Fools,” both running through June 29 — illustrate, with widely diverging degrees of success, how far that ride can go.In “The Imaginary Invalid,” Jeffrey Hatcher compresses the plot of Molière’s three-act comedy, from 1673, into a 90-minute romp, and rewrites the jokes but preserves the essence of the story and characters.The production, now running at New World Stages, reunites Hatcher with the director Jesse Berger, with whom he had cooked up marvelously funny takes on Nikolai Gogol (“The Government Inspector”) and Ben Jonson (“The Alchemist”). Happily, lightning can strike thrice.Aside from nods to “Les Misérables” and Édith Piaf, the play’s structure is intact, and still revolves around the hypochondriac Argan (Mark Linn-Baker). The doctors administering the treatments he constantly requests (all played by Arnie Burton) appear to have graduated from Quack U. “All these things they do to you, it’s like you donated your body to science but they couldn’t wait,” Argan’s no-nonsense maid, Toinette (Sarah Stiles), tells him.He does not listen, of course — though Molière and Hatcher aim their arrows at Argan, they also skewer profit-driven snake-oil peddlers and greedy bad agents.Much of the plot involves efforts to fleece or deceive Argan, and much of the production is shamelessly focused on making the audience laugh. Which it does, thanks to a company of expert farceurs who look to be tremendously enjoying themselves — like “Oh, Mary!,” this show understands that perfect silliness requires perfect execution.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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      Broadway Shows Closing Soon: ‘Dorian Gray,’ ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and More

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      Catch two Tony-winning performances, Sarah Snook in the Oscar Wilde classic and Nicole Scherzinger as Norma Desmond, before these productions and others wrap up.Floyd CollinsBased on true events, this musical drama by Tina Landau (“Redwood”) and Adam Guettel (“Days of Wine and Roses”) stars Jeremy Jordan in the title role of a cave owner and explorer in 1925 Kentucky who creates a national media sensation when he is trapped deep underground. Taylor Trensch plays Skeets Miller, the diminutive cub reporter who descends into the cave to conduct a series of interviews with Floyd and help get him out. Landau directs. (Through June 22 at Lincoln Center Theater’s Vivian Beaumont Theater.) Read the review.The Last Five YearsJason Robert Brown’s two-character musical of doomed romance, which arrived Off Broadway in 2002 and later became a movie starring Anna Kendrick and Jeremy Jordan, comes to Broadway for the first time. Adrienne Warren, a Tony winner for “Tina,” stars as Cathy opposite Nick Jonas as Jamie, New Yorkers whose marriage can’t bear the tension between his swift success as a novelist and her lack of it as an actress. Whitney White (“Jaja’s African Hair Braiding”) directs. (Through June 22 at the Hudson Theater.) Read the review.SmashThe TV series about the making of a Broadway musical has itself become a Broadway musical: a backstage comedy leading up to the opening of “Bombshell,” a musical about Marilyn Monroe. Directed by the five-time Tony winner Susan Stroman, it has a score by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (“Hairspray”), whose dozens of songs for the series include “Let Me Be Your Star,” and choreography by Joshua Bergasse. The book is by Rick Elice and Bob Martin; Brooks Ashmanskas, Krysta Rodriguez and Kristine Nielsen are among the cast. (Through June 22 at the Imperial Theater.) Read the review.Glengarry Glen RossDavid Mamet’s luxuriantly crude, bare-knuckled real estate drama, which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize, gets its third Broadway revival. Kieran Culkin, last on Broadway a decade ago in “This Is Our Youth,” stars as Richard Roma — the Al Pacino role in the movie adaptation — opposite Bob Odenkirk (as Shelley Levene, the Jack Lemmon role), Bill Burr, Michael McKean, Donald Webber Jr., Howard W. Overshown and John Pirruccello. Patrick Marber, a 2023 Tony winner for his production of “Leopoldstadt,” directs. How’s that for a lead? (Through June 28 at the Palace Theater.) Read the review.The Picture of Dorian GrayWe 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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      Review: ‘The Counterfeit Opera’ on Little Island Falls Short

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      At Little Island, “The Counterfeit Opera” falls short of its wildly successful historical models.After weeks of rain that interrupted rehearsals, conditions seemed perfect at the start of “The Counterfeit Opera” Wednesday on Little Island, with balmy temperatures and zero chance of precipitation. As members of the cast swarmed the stage shouting questions into the steeply raked rows of the amphitheater, conditions also seemed ripe for some political rabble-rousing.After all, this show with a libretto by Kate Tarker and music by Dan Schlosberg was billed as a new take on John Gay’s “Beggar’s Opera,” which punctured the cultural pretensions of 18th-century London and inspired Brecht’s darker indictment of social inequality in “The Threepenny Opera” (1928).“Can you afford your rent?”“No!” the audience shouted back.“Can you afford health insurance?”“No!”“Can you afford to support a lawless, self-serving government of con men?”This time, the “no” came out as a roar.At that point, it almost seemed possible that a revolution might start up right here on this artificial island developed by the billionaire Barry Diller. But as the sun set, the heat drained out of the day and with it the performance. With toothless satire, goofy humor and an absence of memorable tunes, “The Counterfeit Opera” falls short of its wildly successful historical models.The closing chorus — “Class wars repeat. Con men don’t sleep. Fight to break the dark spell of a world made of deceit!” — was met with mild-mannered applause and a version of a standing ovation that masks competition for the exits. The meteorological chance of political action breaking out was back to zero.More unforgivably, perhaps, the piece fails to infuse the material with a distinct New York flavor. Aside from a few quips at the expense of Boston and New Jersey, this self-declared “Beggar’s Opera for a Grifter’s City” feels like it could unfold anywhere.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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      Review: Jean Smart, Gritty and Poetic in ‘Call Me Izzy’

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      The “Hacks” star returns to Broadway after 25 years in a triumph for her, if not for the old-fashioned, flowery play about spouse abuse.Two things can happen when a big star appears in a small play. She can crush it, or she can crush it.The first is almost literal: She leaves the story in smithereens beneath her glamorous feet. The second is colloquial: She’s a triumph, lifting the story to her level.Returning to Broadway after 25 years in “Call Me Izzy,” which opened Thursday at Studio 54, Jean Smart crushes it in the good way.Naturally, Smart plays the title character, a poor Louisiana housewife who writes poems on the sly. In the manner of such vehicles, she also plays everyone else, including Ferd (her abusive husband), Rosalie (a nosy neighbor), Professor Heckerling (a community college instructor) and the Levitsbergs (a couple who have endowed a poetry fellowship).You could probably write the play from that information alone, but I’m not sure you’d achieve the level of old-fashioned floweriness and deep-dish pathos that the actual author, Jamie Wax, has achieved.For this is quite self-consciously a weepie, one that with its allusions to Melville’s lyrical prose (“Moby-Dick” begins with the phrase “Call me Ishmael”) aspires to poetry itself. The play’s first words are an incantation: six synonyms for “blue” as Izzy drops toilet cleaner tablets in the tank. (“Swirlin’ cerulean” is one.) Shakespeare comes next, after a visit to a local library she didn’t know existed. Ears opened, she is soon devising sonnets of her own.This she does in secret, lest Ferd, who sees her hobby as a betrayal, should discover the evidence and beat her up. (He has been doing that with some regularity since their infant son died years earlier.) In a detail that’s a few orders of magnitude too cute, Izzy’s sanctum is the bathroom, where she scratches out her lines in eyebrow pencil, on reams of toilet paper.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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      ‘Angry Alan’ Review: John Krasinski Explores the Manosphere

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      In an Off Broadway play, the former Jim Halpert of Dunder Mifflin dives into a darker world of male grievance.Roger is jazzed. He’s spent money he doesn’t have, including the child-support payment he owes, on a gold ticket to a men’s rights conference. Nor does the gathering disappoint. The Detroit hotel where it takes place is brimming with guys taking back their power. But guess what’s best? Angry Alan, the internet personality who opened Roger’s eyes to the evils of the gynocracy, is scheduled to speak. This is going to be great!For Roger, anyway. Not so much for us.It is perhaps a clue to the over-thick ironies of Penelope Skinner’s “Angry Alan,” which opened Tuesday at the new Studio Seaview, that the horde of inspired men at the conference is represented by, count ’em, two dummies and some faceless paintings on a backdrop. Offered in Sam Gold’s staging as a joke, like the rest of their gender, they are mere markers in a loaded argument. Even Roger, though played exceedingly well by John Krasinski, is a place holder: a straw man incarnate.Krasinski works hard to disguise that. As he proved during nine seasons as the gemütlich Jim Halpert on “The Office,” he performs charm, titrated with a satire of charm, very well. Here, in a role that runs to more than 10,000 words, some of them Roger’s and some of them his unflattering imitations of the women around him, that good-guy appeal has a lot of work to do.Because Roger is not a good guy. Though he believes himself to be supportive and reliable, the play keeps dropping heavy hints to the contrary. His first wife got uncontested custody of their son. The son doesn’t speak to him. He lost his BMW-level job at AT&T under unexplained circumstances, and is now the dairy manager at Kroger. Perhaps worst, he is paranoid about his girlfriend, Courtney, who has enrolled in a nude life-drawing class at a community college. Her classmates wear T-shirts that say things like Mind Your Own Uterus.Courtney’s recent behavior and new friends are the immediate cause of Roger’s descent into the manosphere. There, Angry Alan teaches him that women, far from being victims of a male-dominated society, run the world and have done so for decades. Men must fight back to restore the proper balance.Perhaps these loathsome ideas seemed like news in 2018, when “Angry Alan” premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Don Mackay, credited with creating the play with Skinner, played Roger there and, later, in London.) The title character might have introduced audiences to recently emerged manopshere figures like the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who advocates a return to traditional gender roles, and the British influencer Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist with millions of followers.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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      ‘Angry Alan’ Review: John Krasinski Explores the Manosphere

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      In an Off Broadway play, the former Jim Halpert of Dunder Mifflin dives into a darker world of male grievance.Roger is jazzed. He’s spent money he doesn’t have, including the child-support payment he owes, on a gold ticket to a men’s rights conference. Nor does the gathering disappoint. The Detroit hotel where it takes place is brimming with guys taking back their power. But guess what’s best? Angry Alan, the internet personality who opened Roger’s eyes to the evils of the gynocracy, is scheduled to speak. This is going to be great!For Roger, anyway. Not so much for us.It is perhaps a clue to the over-thick ironies of Penelope Skinner’s “Angry Alan,” which opened Tuesday at the new Studio Seaview, that the horde of inspired men at the conference is represented by, count ’em, two dummies and some faceless paintings on a backdrop. Offered in Sam Gold’s staging as a joke, like the rest of their gender, they are mere markers in a loaded argument. Even Roger, though played exceedingly well by John Krasinski, is a place holder: a straw man incarnate.Krasinski works hard to disguise that. As he proved during nine seasons as the gemütlich Jim Halpert on “The Office,” he performs charm, titrated with a satire of charm, very well. Here, in a role that runs to more than 10,000 words, some of them Roger’s and some of them his unflattering imitations of the women around him, that good-guy appeal has a lot of work to do.Because Roger is not a good guy. Though he believes himself to be supportive and reliable, the play keeps dropping heavy hints to the contrary. His first wife got uncontested custody of their son. The son doesn’t speak to him. He lost his BMW-level job at AT&T under unexplained circumstances, and is now the dairy manager at Kroger. Perhaps worst, he is paranoid about his girlfriend, Courtney, who has enrolled in a nude life-drawing class at a community college. Her classmates wear T-shirts that say things like Mind Your Own Uterus.Courtney’s recent behavior and new friends are the immediate cause of Roger’s descent into the manosphere. There, Angry Alan teaches him that women, far from being victims of a male-dominated society, run the world and have done so for decades. Men must fight back to restore the proper balance.Perhaps these loathsome ideas seemed like news in 2018, when “Angry Alan” premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. (Don Mackay, credited with creating the play with Skinner, played Roger there and, later, in London.) The title character might have introduced audiences to recently emerged manopshere figures like the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson, who advocates a return to traditional gender roles, and the British influencer Andrew Tate, a self-proclaimed misogynist with millions of followers.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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      Broadway Dreams Were Dashed, Then Rob Madge Knocked on Some Doors

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      The British performer is bringing “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” to City Center this week, after an earlier run was canceled.“Everybody needs a good setback in their life and gosh, 2024 did that for me.”That was Rob Madge, speaking on video last month from their London home. A theater maker who identifies as nonbinary, Madge smiled wide into the camera and, wearing a crisp white guayabera-style shirt that was mostly buttoned, looked as if they were on their way to a “White Lotus” resort happy hour.But Madge wasn’t talking about cocktails and island intrigue. They were recalling dashed Broadway dreams.In February 2024, the Broadway run of Madge’s autobiographical show “My Son’s a Queer (but What Can You Do?)” was postponed just weeks before it was to begin preview performances at the Lyceum Theater. There was talk of opening on Broadway the following season, but that never materialized.In a statement last month, the show’s producers, Tom Smedes and Heather Shields, said “the heartbreaking decision” to call off a Broadway run was because “the risks of launching and sustaining the production were simply too great” for the show’s “long-term health.”The actor in the production, which incorporates projected scenes from the “living room shows” that Madge performed as a kid.Mark SeniorMadge, 28, said having Broadway fall through prompted them to consider difficult and dueling questions, the likes of which plague any theater artist putting work into the world.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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      How Jon Bernthal Became Hollywood’s Most Dependable Bruiser

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      When Jon Bernthal was cast as a petty drug dealer in “The Wolf of Wall Street,” Martin Scorsese’s 2013 white-collar crime epic, the actor wasn’t even supposed to have many lines. But Bernthal went into that film intending to take his shot. So he came in for a wordless B-roll scene in which the script had him lifting weights in a backyard, asked the second-unit director to mic him and riffed for 45 minutes. Scorsese wasn’t there that day, but here’s what he saw in the footage: a shirtless Bernthal curling dumbbells, tormenting some teenage boys with a baseball bat and peacocking his virility. “Bring some of them chicks around here sometime,” he says. Then Bernthal makes a brilliant little decision about his tough guy’s whereabouts. “Hey, Ma, we got chicken or what?” he yells toward the house. “Ma!” There was no “Ma” in the script. No one even said he lived with his mother.The role introduced Bernthal as an excellent character actor. Since then, he has become the guy who shows up onscreen unexpectedly, delivers the most memorable performance in a scene or two and then vanishes. This is perhaps why he’s so often playing dead men in flashbacks. He’s the dramatic center of gravity in FX’s “The Bear,” appearing just once or twice per season as the deceased family patriarch, and the tragic romantic in the 2017 Taylor Sheridan film “Wind River.” Bernthal was so good in “The Accountant,” an improbable 2016 Ben Affleck-led movie about an autistic accountant turned gunslinger, that the filmmakers made this year’s sequel a two-hander.Bernthal has had leading roles too, most notably in “We Own This City,” the HBO miniseries about Baltimore police corruption in which the actor’s performance was criminally overlooked. But for the most part, he has carved out a career of supporting roles. So it made perfect sense when he told me that one of his favorite movies is “True Romance,” Tony Scott’s 1993 adaptation of Quentin Tarantino’s first script. Christian Slater may have been the lead, but it was the supporting characters played by Gary Oldman, Brad Pitt and Dennis Hopper who stole the film. “There are so many people who are in it for a scene or two,” Bernthal said, “but you could have made a movie about any one of those characters.”We were having breakfast in Ojai, Calif., where Bernthal lives. The previous day, he returned from New York where he was promoting “The Accountant 2.” Before that he was in Greece and Morocco, filming a role in “The Odyssey” with Christopher Nolan, which is perhaps the greatest honor that can be bestowed on a dramatic actor these days. In front of him was a pile of egg whites, spinach, fruit and gluten-free toast. “I’m like a gorilla,” he said. “I eat a lot.”Most actors, once they get lead roles, are advised to turn down anything smaller. But Bernthal is allergic to strategizing about how to become a leading man or listening to agents and managers who want to find him a “star vehicle.” The only real mistake he made in his career, he told me, happened because he let that sort of thinking get in his head. But he has switched agents since then. He knows he has become the guy who everyone calls for a favor, but then again “The Bear” was a favor. And that turned into one of the most rewarding experiences of Bernthal’s career. The intensity he brought to the role won him an Emmy, and now he has even co-written an episode in the upcoming season. “I can’t imagine deciding what you’re going to do in this super-tenuous field while being so dependent on some businessman’s strategy,” he said.Jon Bernthal, right, with Jeremy Allen White and Abby Elliott in the 2023 episode of “The Bear” that earned him an Emmy.Chuck Hodes/FX, via Everett CollectionWe 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