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      in Theater

      Antonio Skármeta, Who Wrote of Chile’s Tears and Turmoil, Dies at 83

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      His literary career traced the arc of his country’s modern political journey in stories about ordinary citizens facing repression and arbitrary government.Antonio Skármeta, a Chilean novelist, screenplay writer, playwright and television presenter who captured his country’s affections with warmhearted tales of its suffering and redemption through dictatorship and democracy, died on Oct. 15 at his home in Santiago. He was 83.His death, after a long struggle with cancer and Alzheimer’s disease, was announced by President Gabriel Boric Font of Chile on his X account.Mr. Boric paid tribute to the leading role Mr. Skármeta played in his country’s cultural life. He praised Mr. Skármeta “for the life you lived,” adding: “For the stories, the novels and the theater. For the political commitment. For the book show that expanded the boundaries of literature.”Mr. Skármeta’s literary career traced the arc of Chile’s modern political journey in lightly ironic stories that depicted the strategies of ordinary citizens faced with repression and arbitrary government.He lived that journey himself — as an activist supporting the leftist government of Salvador Allende in 1970; as a political exile in Argentina and in Germany after the 1973 coup d’état that inaugurated Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 15-year military dictatorship; as host of a popular television program about literature (the “book show” Mr. Boric mentioned) in the 1990s, after democracy returned to Chile; and as his country’s ambassador in Berlin from 2000 to 2003.His best-known work, the 1985 novel “Ardiente Pacienca” (“Burning Patience”) — the story of a postal worker who befriends Chile’s national poet Pablo Neruda and used the friendship to woo a young local woman — illustrated a method Skármeta typically used: weaving real-life figures and disasters with fictional characters who must cope with them, often with bumbling but very human ineptitude.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      The Holocaust’s Grandchildren Are Speaking Now

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      Toward the end of “A Real Pain,” a movie written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg coming to theaters on Nov. 1, two first cousins played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin approach the house in a Polish town where their recently deceased grandmother had lived before the Holocaust.Eisenberg’s character, David, the more reserved of the pair, proposes the two leave stones on the doorstep, riffing on the Jewish tradition of placing stones on graves.“She’s not buried here,” says Culkin’s cousin, Benji.“Yeah, I know, but it’s the last place she was in Poland,” says David. “It’s the last place any of us were.”The improvised remembrance, the interruption of self-awareness, the confused sense of duty — all are characteristic of how American descendants of the Holocaust’s victims two generations removed today commemorate an event that, nearly 80 years after it ended, can feel like something that still governs their lives, not to mention the lives of Jews and everyone else.This cohort is known as the third generation of Holocaust survivors, and “A Real Pain” is representative of their output. Which is to say: It is often not about the Holocaust at all. The cousins go together on an organized tour of Holocaust sites and memorials in Poland, but much of it — excepting a visit to the Majdanek concentration camp — is lighthearted. David and Benji grieve mainly not for the Holocaust but for their grandmother, who survived it. They struggle with their own problems, including the dissipation of their relationship. They question why they are even there.Jesse Eisenberg on the set of his new movie, “A Real Pain,” about the grandsons of a Holocaust survivor visiting Poland.Agata Grzybowska/Searchlight PicturesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Movies

      Hollywood Can Be Hell for a Writer, as Two New Books Remind Us

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      Dorothy Parker worked on the script for “A Star Is Born,” but the tragic ending was all hers, while Bruce Eric Kaplan manages to find the mordant laughs in today’s industry foibles.This week the former magazine queen Tina Brown started a Substack called Fresh Hell, after an expression oft-attributed to Dorothy Parker. Of course I subscribed immediately, considering Brown’s book “The Vanity Fair Diaries” one of her crowning achievements. Chattiness is her idiom. But also because of the Parkerly promise.This archetype of archness, whose death in 1967 at 73 was front-page news, persists into the 21st century partly because of her pith, eerily well suited to the slicing and dicing of contemporary online culture. Long before X she was dishing out quotes of 280 characters or fewer: “Men seldom make passes at girls who wear glasses” and other tablespoons of hot honey diluted into shampoo commercials and beyond.Less known is her work for the movie industry, Gail Crowther’s focus in DOROTHY PARKER IN HOLLYWOOD (Gallery Books, 291 pp., $29.99). Parker’s copious if frequently forgotten credits include Oscar nominations a decade apart for the original “A Star Is Born” (1937) and “Smash-Up: The Story of a Woman” (1947), both with alcoholic protagonists.She was writing what she knew. Booze pickled her career and second and third marriages, both to the actor and screenwriter Alan Campbell, who died swathed in a dry-cleaning bag and surrounded by Seconal capsules. In a late, sad photograph enlisted as caution by at least one recovery organization, alcohol almost seems to be dissolving her, as water did the Wicked Witch of the West.Parker wasn’t wicked but she could be very, very cruel, Crowther reminds readers (there have been several previous, fuller biographies, from which she draws, along with archival material). To the 11-years-younger Campbell, whom she called “pansy,” “fairy” and worse; to acquaintances she’d butter up in person, then roast at scorching temperature the minute they left the room; and to a literary community that kept coming back for more abuse. Esquire kept the older Parker on retainer as a book reviewer for years, though her copy rarely materialized. (Click forthwith on Wyatt Cooper’s unpaywalled homage to her there, “Whatever You Think Dorothy Parker Was Like, She Wasn’t.”) She agreed to judge a University of Michigan poetry competition, but “upon receiving the shortlisted poems,” Crowther writes, “she replied that none were worthy of any award or indeed of any consideration whatsoever.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Television

      Sex, Horses and Stately Homes: Bringing a Naughty British Romance to TV

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      Walking into Jilly Cooper’s house in the English countryside is like stepping inside one of her novels.The living room walls are covered in pictures or bookshelves, and the surfaces by ceramic cats, dogs and horses. Pictures of loved ones (family) and notables (royal family) are scattered throughout the room. The windows look over a landscape of rolling hills.It was from this 14th-century home, and on a manual typewriter, that Cooper, 87, wrote the “Rutshire Chronicles,” an 11-book series of romance novels featuring the handsome and troubled horse-riding hero Rupert Campbell-Black. The novels sold 12 million copies in Britain, where they shaped a generation readers’ ideas about romance, sex and the upper classes in the ’80s and ’90s.Known as “the queen of the bonkbuster” — an amalgam of “blockbuster” and “bonking,” a very English way of referring to you-know-what — Cooper’s name is synonymous in Britain with juicy romance and well-heeled naughtiness. In the United States, it has less resonance.Disney+ and Hulu are hoping to change that with the premiere, on Friday, of “Rivals,” an eight-part series based on Cooper’s 1988 novel of the same title from the “Rutshire Chronicles.”“I’m knocked out, because I love this book so much,” Cooper said in a recent interview. “I think it’s my favorite one.” Seeing it turned into a series, she said, was a “great treat,” especially at her age. “Eighty-seven is so old,” she said. “What’s 87 in dog years?”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

    • 138 Shares129 Views

      in Television

      Allan Blye, 87, Dies; ‘Smothers Brothers’ Writer and ‘Super Dave’ Creator

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      In his wide-ranging career, he also helped write Elvis Presley’s comeback special and appeared on an early version of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”Allan Blye, a television comedy writer and producer who helped cement the Smothers Brothers’ reputation for irreverence in the late 1960s and later collaborated with Bob Einstein to create the hapless daredevil character Super Dave Osborne, died on Oct. 4 at his home in Palm Desert, Calif. He was 87.His wife, Rita Blye, confirmed the death. She said he had been in hospice care for Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Blye was a writer and singer on variety shows in Canada when he received a surprise call in 1967 from Tom Smothers asking him to join the writing staff of the series that he and his and his brother, Dick, would be hosting on CBS.“I couldn’t believe it was Tom Smothers,” Mr. Blye said in an interview with the Television Academy in 2019. “I thought it was Rich Little doing an impression of Tom Smothers.”Tom, left, and Dick Smothers on the set of “The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” in 1967. Mr. Blye helped establish the show’s outspoken tone. CBS, via Getty Images“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour” was unlike any other variety show. The brothers were renowned as a comical folk-singing duo: Tom played the naïve, guitar-playing buffoon, and Dick, who played the double bass, was the wise straight man. They had creative control of the series, which emboldened them and their writers to be more outspoken as they addressed politics, the Vietnam War, religion and civil rights — and their forthrightness during a divisive era increasingly angered some viewers, CBS censors, some of the network’s affiliates and conservative groups.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88

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      Kris Kristofferson, the singer and songwriter whose literary yet plain-spoken compositions infused country music with rarely heard candor and depth, and who later had a successful second career in movies, died at his home on Maui, Hawaii, on Saturday. He was 88.His death was announced by Ebie McFarland, a spokeswoman, who did not give a cause.Hundreds of artists have recorded Mr. Kristofferson’s songs — among them, Al Green, the Grateful Dead, Michael Bublé and Gladys Knight and the Pips.Mr. Kristofferson’s breakthrough as a songwriter came with “For the Good Times,” a bittersweet ballad that topped the country chart and reached the Top 40 on the pop chart for Ray Price in 1970. His “Sunday Morning Coming Down” became a No. 1 country hit for his friend and mentor Johnny Cash later that year.Mr. Cash memorably intoned the song’s indelible opening couplet:Well, I woke up Sunday morningWith no way to hold my head that didn’t hurtAnd the beer I had for breakfast wasn’t badSo I had one more for dessert.Expressing more than just the malaise of someone suffering from a hangover, “Sunday Morning Coming Down” gives voice to feelings of spiritual abandonment that border on the absolute. “Nothing short of dying” is the way the chorus describes the desolation that the song’s protagonist is experiencing.Steeped in a neo-Romantic sensibility that owed as much to John Keats as to the Beat Generation and Bob Dylan, Mr. Kristofferson’s work explored themes of freedom and commitment, alienation and desire, darkness and light.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Theater

      Review: Roald Dahl Is Antisemitic, but Not a Cartoon Villain, in ‘Giant’

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      A new play in London portrays the beloved children’s author as a rounded character, while making no apology for his bigotry.It started with a book review.In the August 1983 issue of Literary Review, a British journal, the beloved children’s author Roald Dahl reviewed an eyewitness account of Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. In a strident piece, Dahl mourned the disproportionate loss of Arab civilian life in that conflict, and appeared to crassly conflate the actions of the Israeli state with the will of the Jewish people. He also asserted that all Jews had a responsibility to denounce Israel.Later that month, in an interview in The New Statesman newsmagazine, he was asked to clarify those remarks. Dahl went further, saying, “There is a trait in the Jewish character that does provoke animosity.” He went on: “I mean, there’s always a reason why anti-anything crops up anywhere. Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”This shameful episode, which left a stain on Dahl’s reputation, is the subject of a new play, “Giant,” written by Mark Rosenblatt and directed by Nicholas Hytner, that runs at the Royal Court Theater in London through Nov. 16. It is an admirably evenhanded treatment that walks a delicate tightrope: “Giant” portrays Dahl as a rounded — and occasionally sympathetic — character while making no apology for his bigotry.We meet Dahl (John Lithgow) and his fiancée Felicity Crosland (Rachael Stirling) in the living room of their countryside home, which is under renovation. (The set, with dust sheets and ladders here and there, is by Bob Crowley). Dahl is poring over the proofs for his next novel, “The Witches.” The Literary Review article has come out and Dahl is facing a backlash. His British publisher, Tom Maschler (Elliot Levey), and an emissary from its American counterpart, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, descend on Dahl and urge him to make an apology, but he’s having none of it.The U.S. publisher’s representative, Jessie Stone (Romola Garai), who is Jewish, suggests to Dahl that “The Witches” — about a secret society of evil child-snatchers — could, in light of his offensive remarks, be interpreted as dog-whistle antisemitism, echoing the Jewish blood libel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Billy Edd Wheeler, Songwriter Who Celebrated Rural Life, Dies at 91

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      His plain-spoken songs were recorded by Elvis Presley, Kenny Rogers and many others. The duo of Johnny Cash and June Carter made his “Jackson” a huge country hit.Billy Edd Wheeler, an Appalachian folk singer who wrote vividly about rural life and culture in songs like “Jackson,” a barn-burning duet that was a hit in 1967 for June Carter and Johnny Cash as well as for Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood, died on Monday at his home in Swannanoa, N.C., east of Asheville. He was 91.His death was announced on social media by his daughter, Lucy Wheeler.Plain-spoken and colloquial, Mr. Wheeler’s songs have been recorded by some 200 artists, among them Neil Young, Hank Snow, Elvis Presley, and Florence & the Machine. “Jackson” — a series of spirited exchanges between a quarrelsome husband and wife — opens with one of the most evocative couplets in popular music: “We got married in a fever, hotter than a pepper sprout/We’ve been talkin’ about Jackson, ever since the fire went out.”From there the husband boasts about the carousing he plans to do in Jackson, as his wife scoffs at his hollow braggadocio. “Go on down to Jackson,” she goads him on, emboldened by the song’s neo-rockabilly backbeat. “Go ahead and wreck your health/Go play your hand, you big-talkin’ man, make a big fool of yourself.”Written with the producer and lyricist Jerry Leiber, with whom Mr. Wheeler had apprenticed as a songwriter at the Brill Building in New York, “Jackson” was a Top 10 country hit for Ms. Carter and Mr. Cash and a Top 20 pop hit for Ms. Sinatra and Mr. Hazlewood. The Carter-Cash version won a Grammy Award in 1968 for best country-and-western performance by a duo, trio or group.The 1967 album “Carryin’ On With Johnny Cash & June Carter” included Mr. Wheeler’s song “Jackson,” which would reach the country Top 10 as a single and win a Grammy.ColumbiaMr. Wheeler’s original pass at the song, though, was anything but auspicious. In fact, when Mr. Leiber first heard it, he advised Mr. Wheeler to jettison most of what he had written and to use the line “We got married in a fever” in the song’s opening and closing choruses.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