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    HBO Max Gains Traction in a Crowded Field

    AT&T, HBO’s parent company, reported that HBO and the new streamer added 2.7 million subscribers in the first quarter.AT&T added 2.7 million new customers to HBO and HBO Max in the first quarter, a boost for the company’s new streaming effort in an increasingly crowded field.The company’s WarnerMedia division, which includes HBO, recorded $8.5 billion in revenue for the period, a 9.8 percent jump over last year, when theater sales and advertising revenue plummeted during the pandemic. Led by the chief executive Jason Kilar, WarnerMedia also includes the cable networks CNN and Turner and the Warner Bros. film studios.HBO is the cornerstone of AT&T’s media strategy, and the company sees HBO Max as a way to keep its mobile customers from fleeing, offering the streaming platform at a discount to its phone subscribers.In its report on the year’s first quarter, AT&T stopped disclosing the number of active HBO Max users, obscuring how many people are actually tuned into the new streaming service.Over all, AT&T counted 44.1 million subscribers to HBO and HBO Max in the United States at the end of March, a gain of 2.7 million from the previous quarter. Before it stopped breaking out the HBO Max subscriptions, in December, it said it had 41.5 million subscribers: 17.1 million for the streaming service, 20 million for HBO on cable and the rest from hotels or other deals.HBO Max most likely drove the gain in the quarter, which is notable given how competitive the streaming universe has become. HBO Max is also the most expensive of the major streaming platforms, at $15 a month. Netflix, which reported earnings on Tuesday, remains the leader, with 67 million customers in the United States and nearly 208 million in total.Netflix’s dominance has started to wane, in part because of newer entrants like HBO Max and Disney+. Netflix added four million new subscribers in the quarter, with a little more than 400,000 in the United States. Netflix chalked up the comparatively sluggish growth to the production slowdown when Hollywood studios largely stopped making shows and films during the pandemic. The company said it expected a more successful second half of the year, when returning favorites and highly anticipated films become available.HBO Max most likely got a boost from an unorthodox strategy championed by Mr. Kilar: The sibling company Warner Bros. plans to release its entire lineup of 2021 films on HBO Max on the same day they’re scheduled to appear in theaters. The announcement rumbled throughout Hollywood, angering agents and filmmakers who stood to lose out on crucial bonuses and commissions by short-circuiting the old theatrical release schedule.Mr. Kilar has said the company was likely to go back to a more traditional distribution plan next year. For the rest of 2021, he is counting on the film slate — which included the recent releases of “Zack Snyder’s Justice League” and “Godzilla vs. Kong,” as well as the Friday premiere of “Mortal Kombat” — to help drive people to HBO Max.The company also plans a global expansion of HBO Max starting in June, along with a lower-cost version of the service that will include commercials. The company has about 19.7 million HBO customers overseas who it hopes to convert into HBO Max subscribers. More

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    How a Multimedia Whiz Became the Go-To for Virtual Productions

    The projection designer Jared Mezzocchi has become a go-to guy for ambitious virtual productions. Next up: Starring in his own haunted house play.In March 2020, live venues closed, and the theater industry was shocked into numbness. But for the multimedia designer and director Jared Mezzocchi, the moment felt like a ringing alarm.Mezzocchi warmed up in early May by co-directing a livestreamed student production of the Qui Nguyen play “She Kills Monsters” at the University of Maryland, where he is associate professor of dance and theater design and production. The show made imaginative use of filters in Zoom. Who knew that you could generate creature features in an app conceived for office meetings?Numerous projects of diverse sizes and genres followed, playing to strengths Mezzocchi had developed as a projection designer, the person making new images or fashioning existing footage to be shown onstage. He is comfortable in the digital realm, can create a visual environment to tell a story, and has the technical know-how to handle virtual live performances — he is a whiz with Isadora, a software that allows users to mix and edit Zoom on the spot.Highlights have included Sarah Gancher’s acclaimed “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi directed with Elizabeth Williamson; video and web design for “The Manic Monologues”; and multimedia design and direction on Mélisande Short-Colomb’s recent “Here I Am.”Next, Mezzocchi is starring in his own interactive virtual play, “Someone Else’s House,” which starts previews Friday at the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles.To be sure, Mezzocchi, 35, didn’t wait for March 2020 to get busy. In 2017, for example, he won Obie and Lucille Lortel Awards for his projection design on the Manhattan Theater Club production of Nguyen’s “Vietgone.”But his workload and influence have exploded over the past 13 months. Last September, he further extended his reach by creating the Virtual Design Collective (ViDCo), a think tank, networking hub and problem-solving resource (watch it in action during the live event “Word. Sound. Power. 2021” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music on Friday).“He’s unafraid to ask bigger questions and push what’s really possible theatrically,” May Adrales, the “Vietgone” director, said over video.“Someone Else’s House,” produced in association with ViDCo, is yet another experiment for Mezzocchi, who is stepping in front of the camera to recount a haunting story that happened to his family in their home state of New Hampshire.“I’ve never seen myself as a tech person,” he said in an email. “Hell, I was an actor my whole childhood and through grad school. Multimedia became an extension of myself as a storyteller — not the other way around. So this is a really thrilling moment of convergence for me.”Based in Silver Spring, Md., Mezzocchi maintains strong ties to New Hampshire: Since 2015, he has been the producing artistic director at Andy’s Summer Playhouse in Wilton, which he attended as a kid and where he now implements many of his ideas about the interconnection of community, art and technology.He discussed them and more in a pair of conversations conducted on — what else? — Zoom.Mezzocchi described the chance to perform “Someone Else’s House,” an interactive play about his family, as a “thrilling moment of convergence for me.” Greg Kahn for The New York TimesDo you think the disappearance of live theater has changed the way we approach storytelling?Without getting into better or worse, I think this period has allowed for more strategies to emerge. Think of TikTok or Snapchat: We hear words with visuals in a way that we weren’t 10 years ago — we’re now telling full stories with a series of memes online. The most successful works I’ve seen this year had technology as a scene partner, not as lipstick and blush. I hope that remains when we get back to in-person.Ideally, what should happen when in-person performances return?First, everyone’s like, “I can’t wait for theater to be back.” I don’t want to nitpick, but I would love us to say: “I can’t wait for in-person theater to allow us to create story inside of a venue again.” People are making performance right now, and we need to embrace that. A lot of theaters are not going to stop the digital marketplace because they’ve seen great value in the accessibility to it. I’m excited for where that takes us when digital performance is a choice rather than survival.Haskell King in “Russian Troll Farm: A Workplace Comedy,” which Mezzocchi co-directed.via TheaterWorks HartfordYou were a video projectionist at the Manhattan nightclub Santos Party House for a few years starting in 2008. How did that influence your theater work?I would spend hours making the perfect thing, and no one would care, and then I would put up a cat video and everyone would cheer! Learning pop culture, learning how to engage with an audience, how to listen to a D.J., how to engage with a band — it became much more musical to me. Sarah Gancher comes from a musical background, and on “Russian Troll Farm” we found ourselves talking about cadence, tempo, percussiveness. It’s not about, “This is what it’s going to look like,” but, “Here’s the energy we’re trying to generate.”In an essay for Howlround Theater Commons, you wrote that “theater must stop making films during the pandemic.” Ouch! Do you think being live defines theater?Absolutely, and that’s unchangeable for me. You make different decisions when you have to make them in the moment, and I think it has to do with audience engagement. If an audience feels like it’s important that they’re there and listening, they’re going to listen differently. And if the performer knows there’s an audience listening in a particular way, it’s going to be different. Is it perfect? Totally not [laughs]. Digital technology’s value system, for whatever reason, is married to spectacle and a different kind of quality. I’ve noticed a lot of people running from liveness so they can get a higher spectacle at a higher quality. I’d rather be rough and dirty and maintain liveness.You often talk about community-building, which has included instituting talkbacks at Andy’s Summer Playhouse. Why is that important to you?It’s important to leverage localism so that we can really understand communities. Right now the only way into a community is often a national tragedy, and that’s too late. How can art help? Well, there’s no tragedy involved when you’re creating something. I love Andy’s because it reminds people that debate is important, and that kids can and should lead a lot of conversations in local environments. They are the reminder that change is beautiful and necessary. More

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    Dominic Fike Video Shows Paul McCartney and New York Times

    Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.At a New York Times printing plant in College Point, Queens, the soundtrack is usually the rapid thwap, thwap, thwap of blank paper turning into the next edition. But one night in February, thanks to a famous Beatle and the singer Dominic Fike, things got a little more musical.“Have you,” Mr. Fike sings in a music video shot at the plant, “read the paper?” The song is a cover of Paul McCartney’s “The Kiss of Venus,” and Mr. Fike is shown at the plant taking in the 14 miles of conveyor belts ferrying copies of The Times all around him.With the presses rolling and assembled copies sailing overhead, he glances at the dizzying activity and sings, in verses he added to the track, about people’s differences on issues and the media. “What’s your take on it?” he asks.The 78-year-old former Beatle himself makes a cameo at the end of the video, seated on a bench outside London. He whistles the tune as the camera zooms in on the copy of The New York Times International issue he is perusing. Mr. McCartney slowly lowers the paper to reveal wide eyes and a shock of gray hair. Then he raises his eyebrows and grins.“Paul whistled that perfectly the first time,” Jack Begert, who directed the video, said. “He’s elite.”Mr. Begert added that the image of Mr. McCartney enthusiastically poring over a copy of the paper underscores that he, ultimately, is the source of the music. “Even though Dom reimagined that song, at the end of the day, it’s a Paul McCartney song,” Mr. Begert said.Last year, Mr. McCartney wrote and recorded “The Kiss of Venus,” a smooth acoustic ballad, for his recent solo album “McCartney III.” Mr. Fike’s reimagined version — an R&B pop earworm — is part of the album “McCartney III Imagined,” out Friday, which features A-listers covering “McCartney III” tracks.So how did The New York Times score a starring role in Mr. Fike’s video?Mr. Begert said that he considered “The Kiss of Venus” a reflection of the stop-and-go energy of modern life — and that when the time came to conceptualize a video, his first thought was New York. “It’s still and beautiful, but also crazy,” he said.The video’s creative director, Reed Bennett, suggested the Times printing plant. “I was like, ‘That’s perfect,’” Mr. Begert said. “I wanted to link back to the theme of one person feeling small but also like they have a really important place in the universe.”The cavernous, 550,000-square-foot plant — about the size of 11 and a half football fields — prints copies of The Times each night, along with copies of Newsday and USA Today.At College Point in Queens, the presses are several stories tall. Clayborne BujorianThe presses are generally quiet during the day, but at night, the seven cerulean blue behemoths — each several stories tall — roar to life. “It gets your adrenaline pumping,” Nick D’Andrea, the vice president of production at the College Point plant, said. “You get that excitement as they start up to get the paper out.”The late edition of the paper goes to press at about 10:15 p.m., so a video crew of eight showed up a little before then on a Friday night in February to scout potential shots, Mr. Begert said. After that, the pressure was on: They had a few hours — max — until the presses shut down for the night.“We just knew we had to move as quickly as possible to get all the different shots we wanted,” Sam Canter, the executive producer of the video, said.Once they began shooting, Mr. Fike marveled at the organized chaos happening around him.“I don’t know what I expected, but it was surreal,” he said in an interview. “It felt like the North Pole, like Santa’s elf factory on the evening of Christmas.”Although Dominic Fike isn’t a frequent consumer of the news, he was struck by the machinery required to print it. Clayborne BujorianThis isn’t the plant’s first on-screen appearance. It got around two minutes of time in a scene in “The Bourne Legacy” — which took three days to shoot — and has been featured in episodes of “30 Rock,” “Elementary” and a couple of commercials.Mr. D’Andrea, who has worked at Times production facilities for 46 years, said visitors were often taken aback by the plant’s team of laser-driven robots, which glide around replacing rolls of paper on the presses.“People are always like, ‘I didn’t know you could do that,’” he said.But Mr. Fike had the opposite reaction. “I was surprised by all the original machinery and how old it was,” he said. “Everything that ever happened was printed there, recorded and written down.” Maybe not quite everything, but still plenty of history. Mr. Fike said he was particularly taken with a page (printed at a different plant) showing the 1969 moon landing.Although Mr. Fike is not an avid news consumer, the experience of seeing the presses and sensing some of the history there might have had an influence on him. “I’m not a news guy. But I love the NYT and I’m going to start reading the news,” the 25-year-old singer said. “That’s what people do when they get older.”Well, perhaps, but reading the news can help keep you young, too. Just ask a 78-year-old whistler. More

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    Setting the Stage Once Again for Shakespeare, and Live Theater

    With coronavirus restrictions easing in England, several venues have plans to give classic plays new life.LONDON — Shakespeare is coming back, and I can’t be the only person who has missed him.There are signs of renewed activity at Shakespeare’s Globe, and talk of at least one star-studded production that is, after many delays, scheduled to be performed — can you believe it? — live. This comes after a year of a pandemic that has affected in various ways what has, and hasn’t, been staged, with Shakespeare a particular casualty.Understandably so. Amid a theatrical state of affairs dominated by Zoom and a brief return of live performances of small-scale shows in London that came to an abrupt halt in mid-December, the logistics of Shakespeare have seemed pretty daunting. How do you accommodate a writer whose capacious narratives depend on size, scope and dimension in these strange, socially distanced times? It’s far easier to return to the two-character environs of, say, “Love Letters” or “The Last Five Years,” to name just two titles that could be (and were) easily married to coronavirus rules.A lining of sorts to this bleak cloud came in the form of theatrical archives. With playhouses less inclined to revive Shakespeare, recordings of past productions were made available, giving theater fans a new chance to see or revisit notable performances. Shakespeare’s Globe, the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theater were among the venues in Britain that drew upon a sizable back catalog. The Globe reported an increase of nearly 500 percent in its video-on-demand GlobePlayer service.What better chance was there to be reacquainted with the National’s thrilling 2018 production of “Antony and Cleopatra,” which remains among the few productions of this play in my experience with an Antony, in Ralph Fiennes, worthy of his Cleopatra, the sinuous Sophie Okonedo. The R.S.C.’s extensive archive offered up a 2015 “Othello” that, in a first for that company, cast a Black actor, Lucian Msamati, as Iago, opposite Hugh Quarshie as Othello; the result was both riveting and revelatory.The actress Rebecca Hall, right, rehearsing opposite Luisa Omielan for an online presentation of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” directed by Hall’s half sister, Jenny Caron Hall.But it wasn’t until the start of this year that theatermakers appeared to find a way to present Shakespeare afresh, even if the same few titles seemed to be under consideration. (My visions of numerous anxious Hamlets subjecting their best “To be or not to be” to the vagaries of YouTube went unrealized.) Sam Tutty, who won an Olivier Award for the West End production of “Dear Evan Hansen,” widened his range in a newly conceived “Romeo and Juliet” that was streamed online in February. In accordance with pandemic-era requirements, the play was filmed with the actors in isolation for the most part, then joined up in the editing. For all its best intentions, this approach just couldn’t deliver the reactive thrill that comes from performers sharing a scene in real time and space.The Royal Shakespeare Company offered the tech-intensive “Dream,” which filleted the multiple plot strands of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” into a brief if ambitious exercise in interactivity that was arresting to look at but didn’t reveal much about the oft-revived play itself. The result may have suggested new ways of looking at Shakespeare, but it didn’t help us hear him anew.A direct contrast was the rehearsed reading this past Wednesday of the same play, directed by Jenny Caron Hall, whose father, Peter Hall, founded the Royal Shakespeare Company and was Laurence Olivier’s successor running the National Theater. As might be expected from such a lineage, Jenny Hall’s emphasis on her starry reading of the play via Zoom lay very much with the text, which looked to be in safe hands at a rehearsal I eavesdropped on the previous week: It helped, of course, to have doubling as Titania and Hippolyta the supremely accomplished Rebecca Hall, Jenny Hall’s younger half sister, who brought clarity and a welcome playfulness to some of Shakespeare’s most ravishing verse. (Rebecca Hall played Viola in her father’s final production for the National, a mortality-inflected “Twelfth Night,” in 2011.)Jessie Buckley and Josh O’Connor as the young lovers in a coming screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Behind them is Lucian Msamati as Friar Laurence.Rob YoungsonLooking ahead, audiences have every reason to anticipate a marriage of sumptuous visuals and textual expertise from a new screen version of “Romeo and Juliet.” For this heavily cut rendering of the play, Simon Godwin, the director of the National’s “Antony and Cleopatra,” is refashioning on film a production that had been intended for the National stage. The change means that the leads, Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley, will be joined by a heady lineup that includes Tamsin Greig, Adrian Lester, Deborah Findlay and Msamati — deft Shakespeareans all. (This “Romeo and Juliet” will air on Sky Arts in Britain and PBS in the United States.)As for breathing the same air as the actors, even through a mask, that enticement draws nearer daily. Shakespeare’s Globe has announced a mid-May reopening, albeit with a capacity of up to only 500 in a popular auditorium that can hold as many as 1,700. The coveted standing places that allow the so-called Globe groundlings to jostle one another, and on occasion the actors, will be replaced by seats; a lack of intermissions will further limit unwanted contact. The idea is to return to normal practice, assuming restrictions ease as the summer season continues.Not to be outdone, the West End’s most recent Lear, Ian McKellen, is opening his deliberately age-blind Hamlet in a repertory season that will include “The Cherry Orchard” and is due to start at the Theater Royal Windsor, west of London, on June 21.That’s the very day long earmarked as the end to the social restrictions in England that have been in place to varying degrees since March 2020.Will these productions go ahead, returning actors and spectators alike to the mutual discourse and interplay upon which the theater thrives and that no degree of technical finesse or Zoom-era sophistication can replace? As ever, time will tell. But the London theater seems poised for action, and the readiness, as Shakespeare knew so well, is all. More

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    Is Livestreamed Stand-Up Here to Stay?

    Two online business models see a future post-pandemic, but success might depend on cooperating with actual clubs.The cultural legacy of the pandemic may not only be shows canceled, careers derailed and theaters and clubs closed. There has also been innovation, like the emergence of the virtual comedy club.What began out of desperation has matured into a new digital genre that has drawn sizable audiences in the habit of buying tickets to livestreaming stand-up from the comfort of their own homes. As clubs now start to reopen, and comics and patrons return to their old haunts, the next few months will be a key test of this business. Was it a pandemic-era fad or will it be an enduring part of the landscape?On a video call from her San Francisco home, Jill Paiz-Bourque, the chief executive of RushTix, perhaps the biggest digital comedy club, made the case that the lockdown only accelerated an already inevitable revolution. “Why did Netflix eclipse television?” she rhetorically asked. “It’s streaming, unlimited, global. Why did Spotify eclipse terrestrial radio? It’s streaming. It’s global. It’s unlimited. And that’s why livestreaming with RushTix eclipses Live Nation eventually because it’s streaming, it’s global, it’s unlimited.”Many are skeptical, including fans who badly miss being surrounded by echoing laughter and stand-ups who are exhausted by performing for screens and who widely prefer telling jokes in the same room as crowds. While conceding that nothing replaces the traditional comedy format, Paiz-Bourque said the doubts will look as shortsighted as early mockery of Twitter, podcasting and so many other now common internet forms. She has good reason for such swagger. Paiz-Bourque’s business, which she calls “a Silicon Valley start-up,” regularly sells over 1,000 tickets to see comics like Sarah Silverman, Patton Oswalt and Maria Bamford. In February, she sold 15,000 tickets to eight shows, bringing in close to $280,000 in revenue.“Once we got our first taste of 5,000 ticket shows, that was intoxicating,” Paiz-Bourque said (Colleen Ballinger, the popular YouTuber best known for “Miranda Sings,” was the breakthrough artist).As touring resumes, Paiz-Bourque is tweaking her vision, moving away from a tight focus on those headlining and radically increasing volume. By the summer, her goal is to produce five shows a day, every day. In other words, to live up to the slogan that appeared on her site before a recent show: “The biggest comedy club on the planet.” She said she wasn’t worried about clubs reopening because “I have way more supply than they have access to.”Laura Silverman and Jonathan Katz from “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.”RushTixIn the next month and half, she’s rolling out nine original, interactive series, including competitions (“Very Punny With Kate Lambert”), a cooking show (“Baking It Better with Tom Papa”) and a dating one (“Find Your Boo With Reggie Bo”). She’s also adding closed captioning, a subscription package and new technology that allows patrons to move around the “club” and hear different levels of laughter.The overall vision is to produce new work with emerging artists during the week while doubling down on headliners on Friday and Saturday nights. How will she compete when stars are eager to tour and return to live stages? Simple, she says: Make comics offers “worth their while.” After previously offering 80 percent of tickets sales, she’s recently started guaranteeing up to five figures. She says six figures will become common among an elite few. “I’ve gotten pushback on this from Day 1,” she said about enlisting comics. “Then you start wiring thousands and tens of thousands of dollars and they were like: I get it.”RushTix is hardly the only player in this market. Nowhere Comedy Club, a smaller, scrappier operation that was started by the comedians Ben Gleib and Steve Hofstetter, has booked a stellar lineup of comics, including Mike Birbiglia, Gilbert Gottfried and Nikki Glaser. In something of a coup, Bill Burr recently performed in a benefit production from a studio that Gleib built in his home, a booking that Paiz-Bourque said she was “devastated” she didn’t get a chance on. (She just announced that Burr will be appearing at RushTix on May 16 in a live version of the animated TV show “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist.”)Gleib, who began Nowhere after ending a presidential campaign in 2019 that left him nearly broke, also performs his own show online every week. And while he is optimistic about the future of livestreaming, he sounded more anxious than Paiz-Bourque about losing comics to touring. “I think we can peaceably coexist,” he said. But as he approaches Nowhere’s anniversary next week, his strategy is not to rebrand or recast so much as make Nowhere fit more seamlessly into the existing ecosystem.He recently started geotargeting, a technology that restricts consumers from certain areas from buying tickets, a tactic he called potentially “game-changing.” This enables a comic heading out on a tour to block the places he’s visiting so as not to depress sales there.Emilio Savone, the co-owner of the New York Comedy Club, which begins indoor shows on Friday, when the city will begin allowing indoor shows at 33 percent capacity with a limit of 100 people, said such digital theaters have a future. “Do I think it can sustain as a seven-night-a-week type of thing? Maybe not?” he wrote in an email. “But I do think it’s a good tool for comedians to work on material, and it offers another way for the comic to engage and reach their audience.”Ben Gleib in soundcheck on Sunday.Nowhere Comedy ClubFelicia Madison, who runs the West Side Comedy Club in Manhattan — which will begin outdoor shows on April 14 but not indoor shows until the city allows for 50 percent capacity — also sees a future involving a hybrid of traditional and digital clubs. “If they’re smart, they’ll work with clubs” to livestream from there, she said.RushTix is already doing that, with the stand-up comedian Godfrey performing from the Gotham Comedy Club on April 7. But neither Paiz-Bourque nor Gleib sound enthusiastic about the economics of such arrangements. Gleib argued that strength of Nowhere was in the relationships it has developed with new comedy audiences. “We’ve reached huge demographics that have never been serviced by comedy clubs,” Gleib said, pointing to patrons who live in remote areas or those with disabilities or social anxiety. “Then there’s the lazy,” he added. “We’re great for lazy people who don’t want to go out.”Nowhere puts fans’ faces onscreen and allows everyone to talk, laugh or even heckle (though they can muted for that, too). This creates a freewheeling show that emphasizes the community of audience and performer. By contrast, RushTix keeps the audience to a chat room and limits laughter to 20 people. Gleib called this “elitist,” saying the RushTix approach didn’t resemble live stand-up.Paiz-Bourque doesn’t argue, saying that since no online show can duplicate a live one, her goal is to produce the best experience. “We gave up on trying to emulate the live experience and the more we gave up on that, the more we started opening up barrels of creativity,” she said.Maria Bamford on her livestream show, “Vindicated.”RushTixIf anything, she wants to move away from a dependence on conventional stand-up, while still booking big names. It’s why one of the first comics she recruited was Bamford, a natural experimentalist who is putting on an unusual show on April 17: after doing a set, she will film herself sleeping for the next eight hours. You can watch and join her for breakfast the next day.Bamford already has a dedicated audience that will follow her wherever she goes. The real test for these clubs will be whether they can develop enough loyalty to get audiences to try less established talents. These platforms tend to benefit those who already have large and engaged online fan bases. When clubs and theaters return, they are going to be booking acts that they know can sell tickets, which may make them more wary of adventurous or emerging comics.There is a real danger right now that we are entering a very cautious moment in comedy as institutions struggle to rebuild, and Paiz-Bourque, a former comic gifted in the art of selling a premise, argues now is the moment for her to fill another niche.Pointing to a logjam of early- and midcareer stand-ups whose careers have been slowed by the pandemic, she said, “Not only is this going to be a business that works. It needs to creatively for all these comedians.” More