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    Theater to Stream Now: ‘Beckett Briefs’ and One of Gavin Creel’s Last Shows

    Also available for streaming: A masterful F. Murray Abraham in “Beckett Briefs,” and Christopher Walken and Susan Sarandon in a take on “Streetcar.”‘Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice’Stream it on YouTube.When Gavin Creel died of a rare form of cancer last fall, at the age of 48, he left behind an artistic and emotional hole — he was a beloved presence onstage, especially in musical theater, with an easy wit, a sure flair for physical comedy and an old-fashioned elegance. One of his last large-scale endeavors was the musical “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” for which he wrote the book and score, and which he performed in a run at MCC Theater in 2023. The show, which The New York Times’s Michael Paulson described as “a passion project” in his obituary for Creel, allowed the actor to venture into soul-searching as he explored his (very new) relationship with the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Fortunately, that institution, which had commissioned the project, keeps a capture of an October 2021 performance on YouTube.‘[Untitled Miniature]’Stream it at HERE.As a theater maker, Joshua William Gelb fully came into his own with his Theater in Quarantine productions, which he performed and streamed live from a closet in his home, often displaying uncommon technical mastery. From Tuesday through March 25, he continues to explore the live-digital hybrid with a new project that sounds closer to the experiments of such artists as Marina Abramovic than to traditional theater, and in which he will push the boundaries of his own endurance. In “[Untitled Miniature],” Gelb will spend 24 nonconsecutive hours (in 45-minute segments spread over eight days) naked inside a box that’s about 3 feet wide by less than 2 feet tall. Despite (or perhaps because of) the limited space, his movement will be choreographed. Audience members can buy tickets for either the physical performances, to be held at HERE, or for a live feed.‘Beckett Briefs’F. Murray Abraham in “Krapp’s Last Tape,” which is being presented as part of Irish Repertory Theater’s “Beckett Briefs.”Carol RoseggStream it from the League of Live Stream Theater.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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    5 Takeaways From Meghan Markle’s Netflix Show ‘With Love, Meghan’

    The new streaming series from the Duchess of Sussex has arrived. It shows her cooking, creating and harvesting, and feels like a billboard for things to come.Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, has returned to the small screen with a new cooking and lifestyle show that was released on Netflix on Tuesday.Filmed at a property near her home in sunny Montecito, Calif., the eight-episode series positions Meghan, 43, as a modern domestic goddess embracing the do-it-yourself delights of cooking, crafting and entertaining.“Love is in the details, gang,” she says on an episode of the show, while preparing her own lavender towels.The series, which Netflix has pitched as “inspiring,” saying it “reimagines the genre of lifestyle programming,” is directed by Michael Steed, who worked on “Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown.” It is executive produced by Meghan and is loosely organized around a series of creative projects — teaching a friend to make bread, throwing a game night for friends and planning a brunch — and offering tips along the way.“We’re not in the pursuit of perfection,” Meghan explains in the show as she makes crepes. “We’re in the pursuit of joy.”It has been about five years since Meghan, and her husband, Prince Harry, officially stepped back from their royal duties in Britain. The family is now firmly planted in Southern California. Prince Archie is 5 and Princess Lilibet is 3.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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    Test Yourself on These Screen Adaptations of Popular Books

    Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on books with a sharp comic edge that were adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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    After Netflix Success, ‘Suits’ Opens Another Firm

    The creator of the legal drama didn’t expect to make any more spinoffs. But after “Suits” became a rerun hit on Netflix, “Suits LA” was born.On a January morning, attractive people in tailored attire stood in a sun-skimmed California courtroom, arguing a motion in the murder trial.“Bring the venom!” the director, Anton Cropper, said encouragingly.This was on the set of “Suits LA,” a sibling of “Suits,” the legal procedural that ran on USA for nine seasons, from 2011 to 2019. (It is also a cousin of “Pearson,” a short-lived “Suits” spinoff.) Back in the courtroom, a clash over evidentiary rules turned vicious as one lawyer hissed at another, “You immoral piece of filth!” Time, it seemed, had not mellowed the mildly glamorous, majorly cutthroat world of “Suits.”The original “Suits” had done well on USA during its run — well enough to be renewed and renewed. But its hold on the cultural imagination was never especially strong and its reviews were, like the Season 1 suits themselves, muted. “Though the series begins amusingly enough, it quickly descends into cloying buddy escapade,” The New York Times wrote in 2011.It wasn’t much lamented when it ended, and as late as a year and a half ago, Aaron Korsh, the show’s creator, claimed another “Suits” spinoff was unlikely. Case closed.But when “Suits” moved to Netflix in mid 2023, it set a record for the most total weeks and the most consecutive weeks at the top of the Nielsen streaming ratings. Pacey, witty, cast with good-looking actors (Meghan Markle among them) and smart — but not so smart that you couldn’t follow along while also answering a few emails — “Suits” was the nice lawyer show an exhausted America needed.From left, Gabriel Macht, Patrick J. Adams and Rick Hoffman in “Suits.”Ian Watson/USA NetworkWe 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 Kendrick Lamar’s Performances Led Him to the Super Bowl Halftime Show

    Kendrick Lamar performs like someone parceling out a secret. On the 2015 single “King Kunta,” he stage-whispers, “I swore I wouldn’t tell,” and then proceeds to flaunt industry gossip without naming names. Though the Grammy-hoarding, Pulitzer Prize-winning rapper has mastered literary opacity in his music — he’s a generous user of perspective shifts and allusion — in videos and in live performances, Lamar’s expressive stagings strike like visual poetry.Lamar has scaled up those performances, becoming more elaborate as his platforms have grown in the 14 years since his recording debut. Dave Free, his primary creative partner and a collaborator on his visual presentations, has in the past attributed the rapper’s mutability to what he called the roller coaster effect: “You give people some type of variation, they can’t get used to you. They can’t put their finger on you. The more you keep people on their toes, the more interested they stay in you, for a longer period of time.” The zigzagging ride Free described is not unlike the sensory swerve of verse, especially Lamar’s quirky couplets. Ahead of his performance at the Super Bowl halftime show on Sunday, and a planned stadium tour this spring, it’s worth tracing how Lamar has visually explored intimate themes as his ambitions and career have expanded.‘Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe’ video (2013)Layering Comedy and Tragedy“Bitch, Don’t Kill My Vibe,” the last single from Lamar’s debut album, “good kid, m.A.A.d. city”(2012), is his most straightforward exploration of a visual lament. “I know you had to die in a pitiful vain, tell me a watch and a chain / Is way more believable, give me a feasible gain,” he chants in one verse. The song’s video, directed by Lamar and Free, is set at a funeral, with the rapper joining a procession of mourners wearing white in a hike up a picturesque hill. Their destination? A party with a preacher played by the comic Mike Epps.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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    What’s Next for MrBeast? Class Consciousness.

    On YouTube, he’s long prompted people to do extreme tasks for money. But on his new reality show and in social media posts, MrBeast is showing a new motivation.In the eighth episode of the reality competition show “Beast Games,” released last week, the YouTube superstar MrBeast — the show’s host, co-executive producer and mischief-maker-in-chief — asked the 10 remaining contestants to choose their share of a $1 million split.By this stage of “Beast Games,” which streams on Amazon Prime Video, there was a surprising amount of good will and trust among the players, who are all competing to be the lone winner of a $5 million prize in next week’s finale, the largest amount ever given away on television.The money was presented in a preposterous stack of bills, an almost cartoonlike array. The first contestant took one-tenth. The second took a little more. The third contestant to stake a claim was J.C., a man with a sob-story background who had previously appeared to be beyond ethical reproach. But the combination of quite reasonable greed and quite tragic desperation led him to take $650,000 for himself, leaving barely anything for the remaining players, to their collective repugnance.The subsequent shots of J.C., alone in his bunk, weeping and surrounded by duffel bags of cash, was the first truly affecting note of this season. He was a villain, but a completely reasonable one. Resources are scarce, competition is everywhere — all you can do is grab what’s in front of you.J.C. anguished after taking the bulk of a $1 million pot split among nine other contestants.Amazon Prime StudiosTypically, the YouTube videos for which MrBeast, born Jimmy Donaldson, is known steer clear of such psychic weight. He is 26, and has been the dominant star on YouTube for several years now, with 357 million subscribers. His stunt videos, in which people are prompted to do extreme tasks for money, are often viewed hundreds of millions of times.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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    Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

    Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.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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    36 Things That Stuck With Us in 2024

    The movie scenes, TV episodes, song lyrics and other moments that reporters, critics, editors and visual journalists in Culture couldn’t stop thinking about this year.The Last Scene in a Film‘Challengers’Mike Faist in “Challengers.”MGMReal tennis, like real dancing, happens when the body is rapt and alive, where visceral sensation takes over and the only thing left is the crystallization of every nerve and muscle, both aligned and on edge. That last match was a dance.— More