ReportWire

Tag: Theater

  • Best Bets: Black Art Houston, Danish String Quartet and Vintage Toys

    Best Bets: Black Art Houston, Danish String Quartet and Vintage Toys

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    Happy day-after-Valentine’s-Day! If you’re not quite ready to let go of the holiday spirit, we’ve got great love songs and a love-at-first-sight musical. If you’re over it, we’ve got a ton of art, short films, and one of the country’s most popular game shows visiting Houston. Keep reading for these and more of our picks for the best things you can do over the next seven days.

    We may be post-Valentine’s Day, but you’ve got one more chance for a program of reimagined love songs with one of Houston’s most talented performers tonight, Thursday, February 15, at 7:30 p.m. when The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts presents Holland Vavra in LOVE, Holland (Vavra – not the country). During the cabaret-like experience, part of The Hobby Center’s new “Live at the Founders Club” series, you can hear Vavra take on love songs from artists like Huey Lewis & The News, Marvin Gaye, Elvis Presley, and more. The series will continue this season with performers like Michael Cavanaugh, Belinda Munro and Camille Zamora, doing the music of Billy Joel, Elton John, Natalie Cole and more. Tickets for tonight’s show are still available and can be purchased here for $49 to $59.

    It’s love at first sight and some very concerned parents in Craig Lucas’s Tony Award-winning musical The Light in the Piazza, which Opera in the Heights will open on Friday, February 16, at 7:30 p.m. The company’s artistic and general director, Eiki Isomura, recently told the Houston Press that the show’s score, written by Adam Guettel, “is a blend of popular and operatic styles,” and he attributes the popularity of the show to “how utterly gorgeous the music is” and “the way the setting transports the audience to Florence and then Rome.” Performances, which will be sung in English and Italian with English surtitles, are also scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Saturday, February 17, and 2 p.m. Sunday, February 18, at Lambert Hall. Tickets are available and can be purchased here for $29 to $85.

    You can hear “one of the pillars of the chamber music repertoire,” Franz Schubert’s String Quartet in D Minor, D. 810 – more commonly known as “Death and the Maiden” – on Friday, February 16, at 8 p.m. when DACAMERA welcomes the Danish String Quartet back to Houston and to the Wortham Theater Center. In addition to Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden,” which wasn’t published until three years after the composer’s death, the Grammy-nominated quartet (comprised of violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørensen, violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, and cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin) will play Henry Purcell’s Chaconne in G Minor, Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet in G Minor, and Dmitri Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 7 in F-sharp Minor. Tickets to the performance can be purchased here for $46 to $76.

    On Saturday, February 17, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will kick off Black Art Houston, a weekend of events all celebrating contemporary Black art all around the city. The citywide initiative not only includes the opening of the MFAH’s new exhibition “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage,” but exhibitions, open studios, writing workshops and panels at a variety of community partner locations, including the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Houston Museum of African American Culture, Project Row Houses, and many more. You can view the full schedule of events and locations here. Many events are free, but check the schedule for any potential cost, too. (Also, “Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage” will continue through May 12.)

    When you think about your favorite toy from childhood, what do you think of first? Maybe G.I. Joe or Barbie, or possibly a Lego structure towering over the coffee table in your family’s living room (with a parent yelling in the background after stepping on a stray Lego for good measure). If you’re interested in a little blast-from-the-toy-box-past, swing by the Houston Toy Museum on Saturday, February 17, starting at 10 a.m. when Texas Time Warp Collectibles takes over the space for their Vintage Toy Show. You can browse the museum’s exhibits while also browsing through the wares of over 20 vendors for all your throwback toy needs, such as Star Wars figurines, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and more. Admission to the event is $5 at the door.

    Experience the world of Daniel Johnston, described by Rolling Stone as “the outsider folk artist whose childlike pleas for love captivated the likes of Kurt Cobain and Tom Waits,” on Saturday, February 17, from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. when Deborah Colton Gallery hosts the opening reception of their latest exhibition, “Daniel Johnston: I am a Baby in My Universe.” With almost 200 works of art representing 45 characters, the exhibit will serve as a comprehensive introduction to the characters that populated Johnston’s imaginative world. Saturday night’s reception, which also marks the gallery’s 20th anniversary, will also welcome Johnston’s sister, Marjory Johnston, and special musical guest Kathy McCarty and Speeding Motorcycle. If you can’t make it, the exhibition will continue through March 16.

    Certain prognosticators may be predicting Wes Anderson’s “utterly delightful” The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar – “a densely detailed journey with an intricate Russian doll story structure” – to take home this year’s Oscar for Best Live Action Short, but you can decide if Anderson’s Roald Dahl adaptation is the best of the nominees on Sunday, February 18, at 5 p.m. when the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston presents 2024 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Live Action. The five nominated short films will be screened again at 7 p.m. on February 24, March 1 and March 8 leading up to the Academy Awards on March 10. And if short films are your thing, the museum will also screen the nominees for animation and documentary, too. Tickets to the screenings are available for $7 to $9.

    In the United States, it’s the longest-running syndicated game show. It’s current incarnation, starring Pat Sajak and Vanna White, celebrated 40 seasons just last year. Of course, we’re talking about Wheel of Fortune, and the series’ famous wheel and word puzzles are coming to town on Sunday, February 18, at 7:30 p.m. when Wheel of Fortune LIVE! visits The Hobby Center for the Performing Arts. Mark L. Walberg will host the tournament-style proceedings, with groups of three randomly selected audience members invited on stage to play the fame with the goal of making it to the Bonus Round (and win very real destination trips and cash prizes). Tickets to the show are available here for $29.50 to $49.50

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    Natalie de la Garza

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  • Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

    Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

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    Carmen M. Herlihy and April Matthis in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    The Apiary | 1hr 15mins. No intermission. | Second Stage Theatre’s Tony Kiser Theater | 305 West 43rd Street | 212-392-1818

    Science fiction may be a natural fit for movies and TV, where budgets allow CGI world-building and eye-popping F/X, but the genre flourishes in humbler forms of storytelling. Caryl Churchill probed the existential horror behind cloning in A Number and Jordan Harrison walked the uncanny valley with aide-mémoire androids in Marjorie Prime. Where does The Apiary rank among futuristic stage work? In Kate Douglas’s dark farce set a persnickety 22 years from now, bee populations are shrinking (even more) due to climate change. A pair of technicians who run a synthetic apiary think they’ve found a solution. But it’s going to take a lot of human corpses. The scientific stakes are fairly high—Earth is, um, dying—but after 75 minutes of tonal wobble, you may flit from Second Stage Theatre with little to buzz about.

    The Kate Whoriskey–directed production is part of Second Stage’s inaugural Next Stage Festival, which gives emerging playwrights an extra bump of prestige by opening in the institution’s midtown home. A piece such as The Apiary—compact, high in concept but green in execution—would make sense in the more intimate Uptown series on 78th Street, where the offerings are promising if rarely excellent. Douglas aims high by focusing her grim environmental fable through the lens of workplace farce and veering into pathos toward the end, but shiny design and an overqualified cast only highlight its limitations.

    Taylor Schilling and Nimene Wureh in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    Zora (all-star April Matthis) is a new employee at the apiary where high-strung supervisor Gwen (Taylor Schilling) and earnest woman-child Pilar (Carmen M. Herlihy) feed and study endangered honey bees. (Healthy bee populations mean robust, pollinated crops for humans.) With her PhD in biochemistry and a longstanding admiration for the fuzzy insects, Zora wants to make a difference. First she surrounds the artificial colonies with fake flowers to stimulate activity. No good. When their co-worker Cece (Nimene Wureh) is found dead on the floor one morning (stage four thyroid cancer), everyone is shocked. Then Zora discovers bees hiving in Cece’s torso, and suddenly the queen’s egg-laying goes through the roof. Zora’s hypothesis: “The bees consumed and stored the flesh, like they would pollen. And the queen was breeding like mad in there.” So, behind Gwen’s back, Zora and Pilar begin to recruit women with terminal cases of cancer to donate their mortal coil to science. All of this is played, more or less, for ostensible laughs. When Gwen announces that the Netherlands is shipping five million bees to their lab, Zora and Pilar do the math and start freaking out.

    Occasionally, Douglas cuts to Cece at a support group for cancer patients talking about her mother’s superstitious belief that you must tell bees about all the good and bad happening in your life or they’ll sicken and stop producing honey. (Over the course of the play Wureh portrays three other “volunteers.”) During transitions between scenes, a dancer (Stephanie Crousillat) pops up inside the apiary’s “graveyard”—an enclosed glass area —to writhe and shimmy like a bee. Wearing skintight gray leggings and a gas mask, the lithe and sinewy Crousillat is a macabre but engaging sight. She is also, unfortunately, emblematic of Whoriskey’s tendency to throw ideas against the wall to buck up a sketchy text. 

    April Matthis and Carmen M. Herlihy in The Apiary. Joan Marcus

    The strained black comedy and one-note characters (Zora is controlling; Pilar is naïve; Gwen is selfish) would be forgivable if the world-building were credible or sustained. We get hints the climate is broken and all the research money is going into space exploration, but the latter point is used mostly as a punch line. It’s not remotely believable that Zora and Pilar would find dozens of willing suicides, much less smuggle them past security and keep them in the lab long enough for bees to colonize them. Much is made of the oppressive bosses “upstairs,” (cue actors actually tilting their heads up), but if we’re living in a bureaucratic dystopia, the CCTV is on the fritz.

    It’s a pity, because there is poetry at the center of Douglas’s vision: bees thrive when they feast on dead people. A metonym for the Anthropocene: enfeebled nature can only dance on humanity’s grave. Would-be weighty but disappointingly slight, The Apiary apologizes for its morbid topic with jarring zaniness and a twee last gesture at healing. There are valid ideas zipping through in the air—what constitutes a good death, can we be saved by communal matriarchy—but they lack a solid framework. Too much honey, not enough comb. 

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    Review: Second Stage Theatre’s ‘The Apiary’: Stinging or Sweet As Honey?

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    David Cote

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  • Review: Fake News Makes Musical Headlines in ‘The Connector’

    Review: Fake News Makes Musical Headlines in ‘The Connector’

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    Ben Levi Ross in The Connector. Joan Marcus

    The Connector | 1hr 45mins. No intermission. | MCC Theater| 511 W 52nd Street | 646–506-9393

    Musicals love a con artist. Harold Hill, Max Bialystock, the fraudsters and flimflammers of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Catch Me If You Can—flamboyant prevaricators really inspire show tunes. In 2016, an arguably more nuanced fibber arrived with Dear Evan Hansen, in which the awkward titular teen became social-media famous through deceit. DEH casts a twitchy shadow over The Connector, the wan, predictable tale of a cub reporter who fabricates his way to success at a prestigious magazine. Indeed, the lead role of Ethan Dobson belongs to Ben Levi Ross, who played Evan on Broadway two years ago. (Even the character names echo.) But whereas the Pasek & Paul hit evoked sympathy for their troubled antihero, The Connector is a tedious shuffle to Ethan’s inevitable unmasking. With songs. 

    No spoiler alert needed. Since we already know that director Daisy Prince got the initial concept from the Stephen Glass publishing scandal, Ethan’s career is fated to flop. Glass was a clever thing fresh out of college who won the admiration of editors at The New Republic, until they realized that his too-good-to-be-true political and cultural exposés were…yeah, made up. This all went down in the mid– to late ’90s, roughly two centuries ago in publishing years. (In 2003, the whole saga was recounted in a novel by Glass and as well as a movie.) Today, the tale of authorial hubris in a world with editorial standards seems downright quaint, as media smolders on a bonfire of algorithms while AI weaponizes disinformation for the illiterate.  

    Scott Bakula and Ben Levi Ross in The Connector. Joan Marcus

    Book writer Jonathan Marc Sherman and composer-lyricist Jason Robert Brown have been busy with their tracing paper. Like Glass, Ethan is Jewish and an Ivy League grad with a supposedly brilliant prose style (which Sherman quotes sparingly from). An article that ran in Ethan’s Princeton paper made a splash and, faster than you can say, “narcissistic personality disorder,” the weaselly scribe has flattered his way into the heart of Conrad O’Brien (Scott Bakula), the crusty boozehound who edits The Connector, a vaguely political, vaguely literary rag. In Beowulf Boritt’s spare but inventive scenic design, the back wall of the stage is hung with galley pages which Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lights and projections play upon evocatively. (Another thing marks this piece as a creature of the 1990s: at a climactic moment, the set dramatically “collapses.” Once upon a time, every director did that.)

    On the sidelines watching Ethan’s methodical ascent is Robin Martinez (Hannah Cruz, sharp and appealing), who works the copy-edit desk when not pitching Conrad articles he never greenlights. Robin correctly identifies the secret sauce of Ethan’s success as being male. In no time, Ethan begins turning in a series of colorful essays that are suspiciously light on verifiable sources. There’s a Greenwich Village Scrabble master (Max Crumm, hamming it up) who hustles competitors with wildly obscure words. When Ethan interviews a street-smart youth (Fergie Philippe) who claims to have witnessed the mayor of Jersey City smoking crack with teenagers, the Connector’s staunch fact-checker, Muriel (Jessica Molaskey) begins to suspect embellishment. Given how Ethan whipsaws from swagger to squirming in Ross’s mannered performance, you wonder why no one else see red flags. Because writers are weirdos? Since the main dramatic tension is guessing when Ethan will be caught, one wishes Sherman had crafted a wittier, more charismatic cad, or allowed us to admire the mechanics of his deception (as Patricia Highsmith does so zestfully in her Ripley books).

    Ben Levi Ross and Hannah Cruz in The Connector. Joan Marcus

    This brings up an overall weakness: whom are we supposed to root for? Sherman’s often leaden and stilted book won’t convince anyone who has worked in media, and he half-heartedly builds up Robin as the real hero of the story, too little too late. (She leads the charge to reveal his ethical lapses.) As a complacent, cliché-spouting Boomer, TV veteran Bakula does his gruff best, and he’s surrounded by usually effective actors (such as Daniel Jenkins and Mylinda Hull) forced to breathe life into broad caricatures: The Connector’s overly stuffy lawyer and an OCD fan of the magazine who sends persnickety, fact-checking letters. “I wonder if [Ethan’s] from New England,” goes one of her notes. “He sure writes like it.” Flattering Robin, Ethan tells her, “You write like a modern combination of Eudora Welty and Janet Malcolm.” Such stuff doesn’t even look good on paper.

    Following a book that lurches from satire to workplace drama, Brown’s score surfs various idioms, none of which really stick. There are stretches of ’90s power pop (reminiscent of Jonathan Larson), bossa nova, Hamilton–style hip hop, and an overblown sequence set in Israel (or which Ethan claims happens in Israel) where klezmer rock gives way to a Bo Diddley beat. Brown is too strong a composer not to produce intriguing melodies and colorful orchestration and arrangements, but few songs emerge from dimensional people with conflicts we can care about; it’s mostly abstract notions of language, truth, or sexist power structures. Having contributed major works such as Parade and The Bridges of Madison County, plus the beloved two-hander The Last Five Years, Brown deserves a better foundation for his talents.

    Perhaps you know the five reporting essentials: the Who, What, When, Where, and Why. I’ll stick with Why. Why make this a musical? Lying equals heightened reality equals breaking into song? Journalism scandals have been explored more satisfyingly in plays such as The Lifespan of a Fact and CQ/CX. Another Why: Why should we care? Toward the end as Ethan spirals in flames, he sings an angry, nihilistic rant that expands into something bigger and darker:

    There never was a notebook.

    There never was a phone call.

    There never was a magazine.

    There never was, there never was.

    There never was an airplane,

    There never was a prophecy,

    There never was a motorcade,

    There never was a Holocaust.

    It’s unclear why this disgraced, unreliable person is bitterly alluding to Holocaust denial or conspiracies around 9/11 and JFK’s assassination in light of his own falsehoods. Is he awed by the power of writing to shape perceptions of reality, or consumed by shame? Either way, it feels like pure posturing by the creative team: manipulative shorthand to make us believe this dated cultural footnote is Extremely Relevant. Cynical distrust of modern media is as old as Citizen Kane. I don’t buy the suggestion that a fantasist at The New Republic paved the way for FOX News or Russian bots on social media. Do a rewrite; they don’t connect.

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    Review: Fake News Makes Musical Headlines in ‘The Connector’



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    David Cote

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  • David Cromer Juggles Directing and Acting In Some Of This Season’s Most Exciting Work

    David Cromer Juggles Directing and Acting In Some Of This Season’s Most Exciting Work

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    Tasha Lawrence, Uly Schlesinger, and David Cromer in The Animal Kingdom Emilio Madrid

    You might recognize the title of The Animal Kingdom from the 1930s Philip Barry comedy of manners about a man trying to justify his love for both his wife and his mistress. Well, forget it. That is emphatically not The Animal Kingdom which restlessly inhabits the Connelly Theater these days.

    This new Animal Kingdom—by British TV writer Ruby Thomas, imported to these shores by producer-director Jack Serio—has a man, Tim (played by David Cromer), who resolved that quaint wife/mistress quandary years ago. He married the mistress and started a new family, only to dragged back into therapy sessions with the family he left behind: his logorrheic wife Rita (Tasha Lawrence), his ignored daughter Sofia (Lily McInerny), and his anguished son Sam (Uly Schlesinger), fresh from a suicide attempt that brought on this forced “reunion.” A zoology major in college, Sam sees the women in his home as bonobos and his emotionally pent-up dad as a hippopotamus with a submerged, slow-beating heart—thus, evidently, an animal kingdom.

    “Sam understands the animal world,” Cromer tells Observer, “but can’t manage the human world.” 

    There is much to unpack here, and it’s handled with remarkable compassion and patience by a soft-spoken psychotherapist, Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith), who does all he can in six sessions.

    Like Austin Pendleton and Joe Mantello, Cromer is a hyperactive hyphenate—a theatrical professional who wears two interchangeable hats: one for acting, and one for directing. 

    “I like it very much,” he says. “I’ve a complicated relationship to acting. Acting’s something I cared about very much when I was young, and I don’t think I spent the intervening years owning it. I’ve gone back to it a few times and, mostly, just encountered my own limitations, but I always come back to the idea that it’s an interesting challenge. It’s interesting to go on the other side. I learn more about directing while acting and more about acting while directing.”

    It can get “a little overwhelming.”  But, he adds, “I guess I like the idea that if your brain’s working that hard all the time on a bunch of problems—it keeps you limber, and it keeps your brain agile.”

    Actor and director David Cromer. Courtesy of David Cromer

     

    That professional duality has followed him since he reached New York from his native Chicago. Early on, he staged the longest run Thornton Wilder’s Our Town ever got (one directorial flourish: it was the first time Emily smelled breakfast bacon when she returned for her 12th birthday). He also acted the Stage Manager, soliciting audience questions about his community.

    Almost 20 years later, The Animal Kingdom continues his two-hatted tradition. He found—or made—time to play the bottled-up dad trying to make belated amends for his family failings. 

    “Tim still has a very close relationship with all of them. It’s not a warm relationship because he’s not that kind of person. It is recognizable to me in my relationship with my own family, my relationship with my father, my father’s relationship to me. I feel like my dad in this, and I feel like I was Sam when I was young and my dad was Tim. There’s a point where you don’t get what your children are like. For someone who is as emotional and as volatile as Sam, that would be really difficult to Tim. He loves his kids. I don’t think he likes them to the extent he’s capable.

    “The time I spend in the play, I gather that I have served my family poorly. I admit it. I say I’ve been a bad father. I didn’t learn how to do it. That’s not an excuse. I’m trying to be different with Elsie, who is his new child with his second wife. I’m trying to be better, but I can’t go back.”

    This role materialized just when Cromer was locked into two important projects as a director.

    Molly Ranson, Francis Benhamou, Nael Nacer, Aria Shahghasemi, Betsy Aidem, and Anthony Edward (from left) in Prayer for the French Republic. Jeremy Daniel

    First, he had to ready his Off-Broadway hit, Joshua Harmon’s Prayer for the French Republic, for Broadway and Tony consideration. “Remounting is always an opportunity to upgrade how we executed things and how safe it is to revisit all our choices,” Cromer admits. “We were trying to do something that is very like a Broadway play on an Off-Broadway schedule. The play is very ambitious in its scope and in its length. Josh did a little shaping, but he didn’t change much.

    “I thought very differently about the sound and the music than I did before. We had the chance to explore low-lighting in a richer way than we did in a smaller space with fewer resources.”

    Before and after performing The Animal Kingdom, Cromer is busying himself with a bizarre project that will reunite him with his Tony-wining teammates from The Band’s Visit, composer David Yazbek and book writer Itamar Moses. It’s called Dead Outlaw, and it starts previews at the Minetta Lane Feb. 28 and opens March 10.

    Yazbek, who’s collaborating with Erik Della Penna on the songs, is the one who stumbled across this true, but decidedly odd, story: a successful alcoholic but failed train-robber, Elmer McCurdy was killed by a sheriff’s posse and embalmed. No one claimed the body, so, in an effort to keep the body, it was embalmed with a lot of arsenic (which was a preservation they used to use in embalming). He was mummified, did not decompose and was displayed for decades. “Come see the famous outlaw!” The body got passed around and shown at various carnivals and traveling shows and museums until eventually people forgot that this was a real person. When they accidentally discover that he was, it is a real showstopper—in several senses of the word.

    That’s a lot of balls in the air—plus, Cromer managed to act in a couple of plays getting full-scale productions here later this season: Chekov’s Uncle Vanya and Lucy Prebble’s The Effect.

    His presence in The Animal Kingdom he explains in two words: Jack Serio. “I have a really good relationship with him. We did Uncle Vanya together last summer, and we just love to talk about plays. He found this play, and I thought it a beautifully wrought play about attempted suicide.

    “My younger brother, Michael, committed suicide in 2015. That’s a specific part of my life, where my brain is, where my understanding of life is, so I found the survival aspect of this story worth doing. I knew I’d be too busy and exhausted, but I really couldn’t walk away from it.”

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    David Cromer Juggles Directing and Acting In Some Of This Season’s Most Exciting Work



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    Harry Haun

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  • Social Bonding Through Movies: The Emotional Magic Behind Watching Films Together

    Social Bonding Through Movies: The Emotional Magic Behind Watching Films Together

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    Movies can be an excellent social bonding experience in a variety of situations, including first dates, family movie nights, group watches, couples therapy, and professional settings. Learn more about the emotional dynamics behind watching films together.

    Beyond being a source of entertainment, films have the power to foster social bonds and create shared experiences among individuals.

    Whether it’s getting together at a friend’s house on a weekend night, embarking on a first date at the theaters, or upholding a family tradition of watching the same movie during holidays, watching movies together is one of the most common ways we connect with others.

    But what’s the psychology behind these cinematic connections? Let’s dive into the many social benefits behind movie watching and how they can improve our relationships in a number of different social settings.

    Shared Experiences

    Every time you press “Play” on a new movie, you are starting a collective journey with whoever you are watching with. No one knows what will happen, so you are both entering the unknown together and experiencing it for the first time.

    Every film is a rollercoaster of different emotions – joy, laughter, surprise, fear, suspense, disgust, sadness, anger – and everyone is experiencing those emotions together as a “hive mind.” Research shows emotions are contagious, and when multiple people are experiencing the same emotion in unison, feelings are often amplified more than if you were just experiencing it by yourself.

    Movies create new shared experiences that mark new chapters throughout our relationship. “Remember that one time we saw Wolf on Wall Street? That was fun!” A memorable movie can become a distinct event in our relationship’s storyline, especially if it symbolizes a special day like a first date, birthday, or anniversary, giving us a positive memory to look back on and reminisce about.

    Watching movies together doesn’t require much work, it effortlessly creates a sense of unity among the people watching. Even if everyone hates the movie, it still creates a shared bond, “Wow, that movie was really stupid!” and then you can all laugh about it.

    Icebreaker and Conversation Starter

    Watching films together serves as an excellent icebreaker, especially in situations where individuals may be meeting for the first time or trying to strengthen new connections.

    The movie theater, often considered a classic venue for a first date, provides a natural conversation starter. After the credits roll, initiating a conversation becomes as easy as asking, “Did you like the movie? Why or why not?” Ask about favorite scenes or whether they’ve seen other movies featuring the same actor or actress.

    Use the film as a springboard into other topics to talk about. If you’re skilled at conversation threading, you should be able to take one thing from the film and branch off into more important subjects. If it’s a film about music, inquire about their musical preferences or whether they play an instrument. For sports-themed movies, explore their favorite sports or childhood sports experiences.

    Icebreakers aren’t exclusive to first dates; they’re equally helpful in building connections in various scenarios, whether it’s getting to know a coworker outside the office or deepening a friendship.

    One fair criticism of movies as a bonding experience is that you don’t get to do much talking during them. It’s a passive experience, not an active one. But there are also benefits to this: it’s a shared experience with little effort (no pressure, just sit and watch), and it gives you a convenient starting point for more meaningful conversation later on.

    Nostalgia and Tradition

    For many, watching films together is not just an occasional activity but a cherished tradition that spans multiple generations.

    Family movie nights play a pivotal role in strengthening the bonds between parents and children. Holiday film marathons, especially during festive seasons, elevate our collective spirit and enhance the joyous atmosphere. Revisiting favorite childhood movies creates a profound sense of nostalgia, keeping us connected to our past.

    One popular family tradition may be during Christmas, such as having A Christmas Story playing in the background as you decorate the tree or watching It’s A Wonderful Life every Christmas eve.

    These traditions are about more than just the movie; they’re about creating a whole family experience. Infuse your own unique twist by turning it into a game, baking homemade cookies before watching, or simply enjoying jokes and good company. The film itself is just one aspect of a complete family ritual and bonding experience.

    When families embrace these shared traditions, they contribute to a profound sense of belonging and unity. These rituals become the threads weaving together the fabric of family ties and friendships over long periods of time.

    Team Building and Group Bonding

    Beyond personal connections, watching films together can be an effective team-building activity in professional settings.

    Organizational unity can be difficult to achieve for many companies, especially when workers have radically different jobs and skillsets, often being assigned to work within one department of a company but being siloed off from the organization as a whole.

    Movie nights and film screenings can be an effective way to provide employees with a stronger sense of unity and camaraderie. Different departments that normally don’t see each other get to cross-pollinate and make connections with faces they don’t often get to see. Scheduled events like this can foster a team of teams mindset, helping to interconnect different departments into a cohesive whole.

    Perhaps certain movies depict an idea, philosophy, or mindset that an organization wants to embrace more of. Requiring every employee to watch a movie together is more than just making friends at work, it can also tap into a deeper meaning behind the organization’s mission and purpose.

    Couples Therapy

    Movies can serve as bouncing points to important conversations that need to be had between spouses and loved ones.

    It’s not always easy to bring up certain topics of conversation, but through film you can organically dive into subjects that otherwise wouldn’t get brought up in everyday discourse, like mental health, sex and intimacy, or experiencing grief after a tragedy or loss.

    It’s common for a couples therapist to recommend a specific movie to their clients. You may already know of a movie that you’d like to share with someone. You can also ask friends or seek recommendations online. Ask yourself, “What’s something I really want to talk about with my partner?” then “What’s a good movie that can introduce this topic?”

    A powerful film can help couples process their relationship more clearly. It shows the universality of humanity – you’re not alone with whatever you are going through – and brings ideas out in the open that need to be expressed or talked about.

    One exercise you can try together is to each take notes or fill out a movie analysis worksheet while watching.

    Communal Bonding and Bridging Social Divides

    On a larger scale, film watching can help bridge cultural and social divides, as well as be used as a tool for communal bonding.

    Social events such as public screenings, outdoor showings, movie festivals, or drive-thru theaters are great settings to watch a movie among a large and diverse group of people within your community.

    These days with easy access to streaming services at home, most people watch movies all by themselves, but there used to be a time when movie-watching was an intrinsically social activity done in public spaces.

    As we continue to see a decline in community feeling, movies may be one avenue to start bringing people together again as a cohesive group.

    One idea is for local organizations to throw more public events with film features to celebrate holidays or special events – or you can set up a projector on your garage door and invite some neighbors for a weekend movie watch.

    Conclusion

    Watching films together is more than just a passive form of entertainment; it is a dynamic social activity that brings people together, creating lasting bonds and shared memories.

    Films are universal connectors. Whether it’s with family, friends, or colleagues, the act of watching a movie together creates an automatic bond and sense of unity.

    Are you a big movie watcher? In what situations can use film watching to improve your relationships with family, friends, loved ones, or coworkers?


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    Steven Handel

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  • Los Angeles Opera to present Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ reimagined on film soundstage

    Los Angeles Opera to present Puccini’s ‘Madama Butterfly’ reimagined on film soundstage

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    LOS ANGELES — The Los Angeles Opera opens its 2024-25 season Sept. 21 with Puccini’s “Madama Butterfly” reimagined in a film studio and said Saturday it will present the company premiere of Osvaldo Golijov’s “Ainadamar” while reducing its offerings from six main-stage productions to five.

    Mario Gras’s “Butterfly” staging, first seen at Madrid’s Teatro Real in 2017, stars Karah Son as Cio-Cio-San and Jonathan Tetelma as Pinkerton in their company debuts. James Conlon conducts in the start of his 19th season as music director.

    “Because it’s set on this vintage Hollywood soundstage, the director, Martin Gas, he contextualizes the ersatz vision of Japan because he puts a frame around it,” LA Opera CEO Christopher Koelsch said. “Because of the Hollywood connection, even though it was not conceived for us, it feels particularly apt for this city.”

    Revenue has recovered from the coronavirus pandemic shutdown, with three main-stage productions thus far this season generating $5.2 million. The six main-stage productions in 2022-23 brought in $9.4 million; the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season resulted in just under $7 million from four stagings.

    “What I’m trying to do is build resiliency and strength for the organization in the long term,” Koelsch said.

    “Ainadamar (Fountain of Tears)” opens on April 26, 2025, starring Ana María Martínez and Daniela Mack in a Deborah Colker staging that first appeared at the Scottish Opera in 2022, was at the Detroit Opera and Welsh National Opera last year and is scheduled for the Metropolitan Opera this fall.

    “That’ll be our ninth main-stage opera in Spanish in the company’s 38-year history,” Koelsch said.

    Ian Judge’s 2005 staging of Gounod’s “Roméo et Juliette” will be revived starting Nov. 2 with Duke Kim and Amina Edris in their debuts.

    Michael Cavanagh’s production of Mozart’s “Così fan tutte,” first seen at the San Francisco Opera in 2021, opens March 8, 2025, with Conlon leading a cast that includes Erica Petrocelli and Rihab Chaieb.

    Tomer Zvulun’s staging of Verdi’s “Rigoletto,” which premiered at the 2019 Houston Grand Opera, opens May 31, 2025, with Quinn Kelsey, Rosa Feola in her company debut and René Barbera.

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  • ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story

    ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story

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    Clockwise from left: Tasha Lawrence, Uly Schlesinger, David Cromer, Calvin Leon Smith and Lily McInerny in The Animal Kingdom Emilio Madrid

    The Animal Kingdom | 1hr 20mins. No intermission. | Connelly Theater Upstairs | 220 East 4th Street 

    Theater critics and therapists have things in common. Both sit and listen to people talk about themselves, taking notes about telling turns of phrase or behavioral tics. After a session, both study their notes, assessing strengths and weaknesses. The main difference is that critics can’t prescribe; if we could, we’d be snorting Zoloft in the bathroom at intermission. On the plus side, the reviewer’s job is over after filing copy, whereas a shrink’s labor can drag on for years.

    Happily, the road to mental health is only 80 minutes in The Animal Kingdom, an oddly flat and obvious portrait of a family. Set entirely at group sessions, the play orbits around the attempted suicide of college student Sam (Uly Schlesinger), only 21 but with a decade of escalating self-harm under his belt. (Not that he’s allowed a belt in the treatment facility.) Sam and his timid younger sister, Sofia (Lili McInerny), are the products of a broken home. Rita (Tasha Lawrence) and Tim (David Cromer) are several years divorced but prone to glare and snipe.

    The family is (or was) nuclear and their psychodynamics follow the same symmetry. Withholding father uses silence as a weapon; mother fills the void with chatter to deflect and control; daughter follows after father in shut-down taciturnity; and son has inherited extreme depression from the maternal side. All very balanced, all very gendered. Sam is queer, which Rita insultingly implies was caused by the divorce, sending the boy into spasms of screaming rage. Honestly, I wish their problems were more interesting. Far be it from me to contradict the author of Anna Karenina but Leo, baby, are unhappy families really so unique?

    Calvin Leon Smith, David Cromer, and Uly Schlesinger in The Animal Kingdom. Emilio Madrid

    Kindly and soft-spoken therapist Daniel (Calvin Leon Smith) is a model of the mind-healing empath: sensitive eyes, encouraging murmurs, and a soothing ensemble of brown, orange and khaki. He painstakingly draws Sam out of his terrified shell, arms evolving from defensively crossed over chest to wearing shirts that don’t hide the scars. Likewise, each family member gets the chance to confess and process: Tim hugs, Rita sobs, and Sofia admits both anger at Sam and her own brushes with self-violence.

    Apart from giving actors a workout and fragile spectators a good cry, it’s not clear what playwright Ruby Thomas (also an actor) intends to say, except that the talking cure cures. The Animal Kingdom premiered at London’s Hampstead Theatre to admiring notices. Do they not talk about mental health in England? We can’t shut up about our trauma. The cast plays it American with no appreciable loss (or gain) of cultural authenticity, given how deracinated and circumscribed this world is. From the title on down, metaphors derived from nature pepper the script. Sam frequently alludes to examples among critters of self-harm, same-sex attraction, and infanticidal parents. When he notes that his major is in zoology, I dearly wanted Daniel to smack his forehead and say, “No wonder you keep making those annoying comparisons!” Perhaps the playwright wants us to view families as zoos, where beasts are unnaturally confined.

    Calvin Leon Smith and Uly Schlesinger in The Animal Kingdom. Emilio Madrid

    Visually, we never leave the zoo. A two-way mirror covers the upstage area of Wilson Chin’s austere, claustrophobic set, which includes a mint-green rug, gray plastic chairs, and little else. 

    Chalky white illuminates this sterile island from Stacey Derosier’s jumbo hanging light box. Completed by Ricky Reynoso’s just-stylish-enough costumes and sinister transition sounds by Christopher Darbassie, The Animal Kingdom is certainly attractively designed, its accomplished actors emotionally transparent and scrupulous in their vocal and physical “tells.” Director Jack Serio, who favors tasteful, intimate immersions (such as last summer’s site-specific Uncle Vanya) stages the affair cleanly, for better or worse. Given that Sam has long been a danger to himself, the story can resolve one of two ways. Was it bestial of me to thirst for blood?

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    ‘The Animal Kingdom’ Review: This Family Therapy Weepie Is a Flat Zoo Story



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    David Cote

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  • Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

    Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’

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    Sutton Foster in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    Once Upon a Mattress | 2hrs 15mins. One intermission. | New York City Center | 131 West 55th Street | 212-581-1212

    After suffering through Once Upon a One More Time last summer, I concluded that musicals about princesses had become a royal bore; no more singing and dancing tiaras for me, please. And yet Sutton Foster’s full-body comic onslaught as Winnifred the Woebegone in Once Upon a Mattress has restored my fealty to throne. Playing her first stage princess since the ogre-besotted Fiona in 2008’s Shrek, Foster musters every talented inch of her limber frame, rubber face, and iron lungs to generate waves of zany ecstasy in this delightful concert version for City Center Encores!

    An urbane riff on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Princess and the Pea,” Mattress was an early pioneer of the musical fractured fairytale in 1959, decades before composer Mary Rodgers’ lifelong buddy Stephen Sondheim had a go at the Grimms with Into the Woods. Not so coincidentally, the production is helmed by Encores! artistic director Lear de Bessonet, who staged the luminous revival of Woods that transferred to a hot-ticket Broadway run. It’s unclear if the same trajectory awaits Mattress, a lightweight goof with an old-fashioned score that nevertheless has a role any comic diva would die for.

    Sutton Foster and Michael Urie (center) in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    Or dive for: Winnifred throws herself into a moat and swims to the castle in search of her prince, sight unseen. When Foster is pulled up onto the stage, she is a dripping vision in algae: an eel down her dress, an enraged beaver tangled in her bun. The sort of gal folks used to call a tomboy, Winnifred is exuberantly uncultured and has boundary issues: in her intro tune, “Shy,” she bellow the title word, bowling everyone over. It’s right there in her name; half of her is soft and feminine: Winnie. The other half is, well, Fred. She can lift weights, sing like a nightingale and chug gallons of ale. Even with today’s hypersensitivities, the material’s flipping of gender stereotypes comes across as cute, not cringe. Mary Rodgers’ music doesn’t reinvent the swooning, jazz-inflected style she inherited from her father, Richard, but combined with Marshall Barer’s slyly camp lyrics, the score carries a gently subversive charge.

    Part of the freshness is due to strategic book rewrites by Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), who sharpens the feminist jabs and underscores the vanity and thickness of the men. One of the thickest is Sir Harry (Cheyenne Jackson), a clueless knight whose union with the pregnant Lady Larken (Nikki Renée Daniels) is held up by ridiculous trials devised by the scheming Queen Aggravain (Harriet Harris) to delay marriage for her coddled son, Prince Dauntless (Michael Urie). When Winnifred enters the picture, the wicked monarch devises an impossible test: she plants a pea under 20 downy mattresses and will deny Winnifred’s royal status if she fails to detect the intruding legume.

    Harriet Harris and Francis Jue in Once Upon a Mattress. Joan Marcus

    As she did with Into the Woods, De Bessonet maintains a charming balance between earnestness and ironic sauciness in this no-frills but still attractive staging (economical and colorful sets by David Zinn and mock-medieval frocks by Andrea Hood). Her ensemble (a well-oiled machine after only ten days of rehearsal) is an embarrassment of riches: Daniels and Jackson’s voices blend lusciously on their romantic duets; as a petulant man-boy and embittered dragon lady, respectively, Urie and Harris mug with flamboyant glee; J. Harrison Ghee’s narrating Jester in glitter lipstick and fuscia garb lends a genderfluid vibe; and, as the kindly, mute King, David Patrick Kelly expresses much with his powerful, compact frame. 

    So Foster isn’t alone up there, but it is hard to notice anyone else when Winnifred is warbling tenderly about “The Swamps of Home” or struggling to find a comfy spot on her mountain of bedding through an increasingly agitated series of contortions. A star since she Charlestoned into Broadway lovers’ hearts some 22 years ago in Thoroughly Modern Millie, Foster is the perfect physical comedian and singer to revivify the role that made Carol Burnett famous. Foster doesn’t need the career boost; if Mattress does extend in a bigger venue, she already has her next gig: baking people into meat pies over at Sweeney Todd. 

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    Review: Don’t Sleep on Splendiferous Sutton Foster in ‘Once Upon a Mattress’



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    David Cote

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  • In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

    In the biographical drama ‘Rob Peace,’ Chiwetel Ejiofor reframes a life

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    PARK CITY, Utah — PARK CITY, Utah (AP) — Chiwetel Ejiofor had read Jeff Hobbs’ “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” years before Antoine Fuqua asked if he might consider writing and directing an adaptation.

    The book, which explores the complex life of a brilliant boy who grew up in the crime ridden and blighted East Orange, New Jersey, was written by Peace’s old Yale roommate. His story did not fit neatly into familiar tropes about rough beginnings, incarcerated fathers or overly simplistic ideas about success and “getting out.” This was a person who wanted to remain tied to his community, to his father, and also to succeed in his schooling and athletics (water polo) first at St. Benedict’s Preparatory School in Newark and then at Yale where he studied molecular biochemistry and biophysics.

    Nine years after he graduated from university, in which he spent time teaching at his old prep school, traveled extensively, considered grad school and made money selling marijuana, Peace was killed. Some of the narratives chalked it up to the fact that he went back to where he came from. Ejiofor said Peace’s mother told them that in the aftermath of his death, television crews came and filmed the garbage on the streets instead of the community.

    But Hobbs and, subsequently, Ejiofor saw something more complicated and nuanced about the flawed idea of “social mobility” and about the “confluence of race, housing, education and the criminal justice system.” And, most importantly, he felt like he hadn’t seen these ideas engaged with in film.

    “I thought it was very special and very powerful,” Ejiofor told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “It was sort of coincidental that I had had this big response to the book, but I hadn’t pursued it in any way. I jumped at the opportunity.”

    Fuqua, who had teamed up with Hobbs’ wife, Rebecca, to adapt the film, thought Ejiofor would be the right person after seeing his feature debut, “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” about a 13-year-old boy in Malawi who gets inventive after his family can no longer afford school.

    “I knew it was meant to be a film,” Antoine Fuqua wrote in an email. “It was clear that (Chiwetel’s) humanistic approach to storytelling was a perfect fit to bring Rob’s life to screen.”

    “Rob Peace” is having its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on Monday, where it hopes to find a distributor to get it out to the world.

    “Movies like this need to be loved into existence, and that takes a village,” said producer Alex Kurtzman, who got close to Ejiofor while directing him in “The Man Who Fell to Earth” series. “You don’t make movies like this for money. You don’t make movies like this for any reason other than this is an important story to tell. And some reason, we are lucky enough to be able to tell it.”

    To play Rob, who would have to carry the film and live in the very different worlds he traversed in his life, Ejiofor and his casting director found Jay Will, a recent Juilliard graduate.

    “I never felt that it was a story about somebody who was able to play a role in different places,” Ejiofor said. “It was a story about somebody who very naturally and consistently was all of these things at once. You really had to invest and believe that about him. Jay very naturally did that because that’s part of his experience as well. He’s also just a fabulous actor and has this great charisma and real charm.”

    The performance is a meaty showcase for a fresh face who had done some television, including “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and Taylor Sheridan’s “Tulsa King,” which had not yet come out.

    Mary J. Blige was already on board to play his mother, Jackie, and Camila Cabello plays an on and off girlfriend Naya. Ejiofor cast himself in the role of the father, Skeet, self-aware enough to know that because it was in his wheelhouse, he’d just be directing another actor to play him as he would.

    “He’s kind of a of mercurial character in a way,” Ejiofor said. “There has to be a sequence of question marks about him, but you also have to be very compelled by him. And Rob’s journey is pulled by that sort of magnetic link he has to this to his father.”

    As with “The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind,” the director-actor, father-son dynamic actually ended up helping the film, too.

    Kurtzman marveled at Ejiofor’s ability to elegantly and calmly navigate three very different roles — writer, director and actor — under the high pressure environment of making a low-budget indie in just 28 days with no money for overtime.

    “I never saw him crack, break, get stressed ever,” Kurtzman said. “That he was able to hold space for all of those three things at the same time and know how to put them in a box while the clock was ticking, that’s a true artist.”

    Equally important to Ejiofor was to make the film look beautiful. He’d been appalled by the story of the TV crews and the garbage and sought out “Beanpole” and “The Last of Us” cinematographer Ksenia Sereda to realize this vision.

    “What she’s done here is elevated this with a real elegance and beauty and a style of telling the story, which doesn’t necessarily feel like we’ve seen before within this kind of cinematic experience,” he said.

    All of these facets work together to upend stereotypes and expectations. Ejiofor wants audiences to have a sense of hope in Rob’s story as well as to feel enriched by knowing him.

    “By the end of the film, you’re not just left with this bleakness. It’s obviously a tragic story, but it’s much, much richer than that,” he said. “Understanding his journey, I think, is profoundly important and enriching and enlightening. It has been for me.”

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  • 'Succession' dominates drama Emmys, 'The Bear' claims comedy and Quinta Brunson makes history

    'Succession' dominates drama Emmys, 'The Bear' claims comedy and Quinta Brunson makes history

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    LOS ANGELES — LOS ANGELES (AP) — “Succession” secured its legacy with its third best drama series award, “The Bear” feasted as the night’s top comedy, and the two shows about squabbling families dominated the acting awards at Monday night’s Emmys.

    Quinta Brunson of “Abbott Elementary” and Steven Yeun and Ali Wong of “Beef” also had historic wins at the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards, in a Martin Luther King Jr. Day ceremony that was finally held four months late after a turbulent year of strikes in Hollywood.

    “Succession,” the HBO saga of the dysfunctional generations of a maladjusted media empire, won the top prize for its fourth and final season. It also won best actress in a drama for Sarah Snook and best actor in a drama for Kieran Culkin.

    “We all put our all into it, and the bar was set so high,” Snook said.

    “The Bear,” the FX dramedy about a contentious family and a struggling restaurant at the center of the life of a talented chef, won best comedy series for its first season. It also made a meal of the comedy acting categories, with Jeremy Allen White winning best actor, Ayo Edebiri winning best supporting actress, and Ebon Moss-Bachrach taking best supporting actor. All three were first-time nominees.

    “This is a show about family, and found family and real family,” Edebiri said from the stage as she accepted the first trophy of the night at the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles.

    Instead of the usual producer speeches, Matty Matheson, a real-life elite chef who plays a kitchen newbie and repairman on “The Bear,” spoke for the show while surrounded by the cast near the end of the Fox telecast.

    “I just love restaurants so much, the good and the bad, we’re broken inside,” Matheson said before getting a long kiss on the mouth from Moss-Bachrach.

    Brunson won best actress in a comedy for the show she created, ABC’s “Abbott Elementary,” becoming the first Black woman to win the award in more than 40 years and the first from a network show to win it in more than a decade.

    “I am so happy to be able to live my dream and act out comedy,” Brunson said during her acceptance, fighting back tears. The writer-actor was among the stars with standout looks on the Emmys’ silver carpet.

    “Succession” won six Emmys overall including best supporting actor in a drama for Matthew Macfadyen and best writing in a drama for show creator Jesse Armstrong. The only drama acting category it didn’t win was supporting actress, taken for the second time by Jennifer Coolidge of “The White Lotus.”

    “The Bear” won in every category it was nominated for Monday night, and along with the four it had won previously at the Creative Arts Emmys, took 10 overall, the most of any show.

    “Beef” from Netflix won best limited series, while Yeun and Wong became the first Asian Americans to win in their categories – Yeun for best actor in a limited series and Wong for best actress. Creator Lee Sung won Emmys for writing and directing. It had eight Emmys overall after three wins at the Creative Arts Emmys.

    Brunson had won a writing Emmy for “Abbott Elementary,” her mockumentary about a predominantly Black and chronically underfunded grade school in Philadelphia, but this was her first for acting. Isabel Sanford of “The Jeffersons” was the only previous Black woman to win the category in 1981.

    The show held on the King holiday saw three Black women win major awards: Brunson, Edebiri and Niecy Nash-Betts, who won best supporting actress in a limited series for “Dahmer – Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story.”

    On the Netflix show, Nash-Betts played a neighbor of the serial killer whose complaints to authorities about his behavior go unheeded.

    “I accept this award on behalf of every Black and brown woman who has gone unheard and over-policed,” she said.

    “Everybody having fun at the chocolate Emmys tonight?” host Anthony Anderson said during the show. “We are killing it tonight! … This is like MLK Day and Juneteenth all rolled up in one!”

    The tweaked awards calendar made for some oddities. Edebiri and White won their Emmys for the show’s first season eight days after winning Golden Globes for the second season.

    Culkin as little brother Roman Roy outshined the older brother and the father to win the last lead actor Emmy for “Succession.”

    He had twice been nominated for best supporting actor for “Succession” without a win. But in the final season, in which his character goes from sideline wisecracker to emotional disaster at the center of the show’s drama, he was put in the lead category and won over his fictional father Brian Cox and brother Jeremy Strong.

    After praising his on-screen family, he shifted to his own family, getting big laughs during his speech when he told his wife Jazz Charton that their two young kids weren’t enough. “I want more,” he said. “You said if I won, we could talk about it.”

    Snook took her first Emmy in three nominations for “Succession” for playing the family’s lone daughter Shiv Roy, and her show-husband Macfadyen won the second Emmy of his career for playing Tom Wambsgans, the son-in-law that began the HBO series as a hanger-on and ended it as the closest thing it had to a victor.

    Emotions ran high from the start of the ceremony. Edebiri and Brunson were both quick to cry as they took the stage, and the first presenter, Christina Applegate, who said in 2021 that she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, got a standing ovation as she came out using a cane, helped by Anderson. As the tears welled in her eyes, she struggled to get through the nominees and winner.

    Anderson told the nominees at the beginning of the night that instead of having their speeches cut off by music, his mother, actor Doris Bowman, sitting in the audience, would tell them when it was time to move on. But she more often shouted down her son in the running gag.

    Honoring television history was the theme at the 75th Emmys. Anderson opened the show on a “Mr. Rogers” set and performed TV theme songs including “Good Times,” and several cast reunions were spread throughout the show.

    Cast members including Martin Lawrence and Tisha Campbell from “Martin,” Ted Danson and Rhea Perlman from “Cheers,” and Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers from “All in The Family” performed short bits from recreations of their sitcom sets before presenting awards.

    Tina Fey and Amy Poehler reunited to present in the form of their 2001-2005 “Weekend Update” team-up from “Saturday Night Live.”

    “We’ve reached the stage in life where we’ll only present awards sitting down,” Fey said.

    One notable appearance came from Katherine Heigl, who joined Ellen Pompeo and other former “Grey’s Anatomy” castmates on a hospital room set after leaving the show, now about to start its 20th season, on less than ideal terms in 2010.

    “Yes, there have been changes over the years,” Heigl said with a wry smile, “But the one constant is the amazing fanbase.”

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  • 'Oppenheimer' dominates Golden Globes, 'Poor Things' upsets 'Barbie' in comedy

    'Oppenheimer' dominates Golden Globes, 'Poor Things' upsets 'Barbie' in comedy

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    Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster biopic “Oppenheimer” dominated the 81st Golden Globes, winning five awards including best drama, while Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein riff “Poor Things” pulled off an upset victor over “Barbie” to triumph in the best comedy or musical category.

    If awards season has been building toward a second match-up of Barbenheimer, this round went to “Oppenheimer.” The film also won best director for Nolan, best drama actor for Cillian Murphy, best supporting actor for Robert Downey Jr. and for Ludwig Göransson’s score.

    “I don’t think it was a no-brainer by any stretch of the imagination to make a three-hour talky movie — R-rated by the way — about one of the darkest developments in our history,” said producer Emma Thomas accepting the night’s final award and thanking Universal chief Donna Langley.

    Along with best comedy or musical, “Poor Things” also won for Emma Stone’s performance as Bella, a Victorian-era woman experiencing a surreal sexual awakening.

    “I see this as a rom-com,” said Stone. “But in the sense that Bella falls in love with life itself, rather than a person. She accepts the good and the bad in equal measure, and that really made me look at life differently.”

    Lily Gladstone won best actress in a dramatic film for Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon.” Gladstone, who began her speech speaking the language of her native tribe, Blackfeet Nation, is the first Indigenous winner in the category.

    “This is a historic win,” said Gladstone. “It doesn’t just belong to me.”

    The Globes were in their ninth decade but facing a new and uncertain chapter. After a tumultuous few years of scandal, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association was dissolved, leaving a new Globes, on a new network (CBS), to try to regain its perch as the third biggest award show of the year, after the Oscars and Grammys. Even the menu (sushi from Nobu) was remade.

    “Golden Globes journalists, thank you for changing your game, therefore changing your name,” said Downey in his acceptance speech.

    It got off to a rocky start. Host Jo Koy took the stage at the Beverly Hilton International Ballroom in Beverly Hills, California . The Filipino American stand-up hit on some expected topics: Ozempic, Meryl Streep’s knack for winning awards and the long-running “Oppenheimer.” (“I needed another hour.”)

    After one joke flubbed, Koy, who was named host after some bigger names reportedly passed, also noted how fast he was thrust into the job.

    “Yo, I got the gig 10 days ago. You want a perfect monologue?” said Koy. “I wrote some of these and they’re the ones you’re laughing at.”

    Downey’s win, his third Globe, denied one to “Kenergy.” Ryan Gosling had been seen as his stiffest competition, just one of the many head-to-head contests between “Oppenheimer” and Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie.” The filmmakers faced each other in the best director category, where Nolan triumphed.

    It was two hours before “Barbie,” the year’s biggest hit with more than $1.4 billion in ticket sales, won an award Sunday. Billie Eilish’s “What Was I Made For?” took best song, and swiftly after, “Barbie” took the Globes’ new honor for “cinematic and box office achievement.” Some thought that award might go to Taylor Swift, whose “Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour” also set box-office records. Swift, though, remains winless in five Globe nods.

    Margot Robbie, star and producer of “Barbie,” accepted the award in a pink gown modeled after 1977’s Superstar Barbie.

    “We’d like to dedicate this to every single person on the planet who dressed up and went to the greatest place on Earth: the movie theaters,” said Robbie.

    “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” two blockbusters brought together by a common release date, also faced off in the best screenplay category. But in an upset, Justine Triet and Arthur Harari won for the script to the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall.” Later, Triet’s film picked up best international film, too.

    Though the Globes have no direct correlation with the Academy Awards, they can boost campaigns at a crucial juncture. Oscar nomination voting starts Thursday, and the twin sensations of Barbenheimer remain frontrunners.

    Other contenders loom, though, like “Poor Things” and “The Holdovers.”

    Paul Giamatti and Da’Vine Joy Randolph both won for Alexander Payne’s “The Holdovers.” Giamatti, reuniting with Payne two decades after “Sideways,” won best actor and Randolph won for her supporting performance as a grieving woman in the 1970s-set boarding school drama.

    “Oh, Mary you have changed my life,” Randolph said of her character. “You have made me feel seen in so many ways that I have never imagined.”

    Hayao Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron” won best animated film, an upset over “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.”

    The final season of “Succession” cleaned up on the television side. It won best drama series for the third time, a mark that ties a record set by “Mad Men” and “The X-Files.” Three stars from the HBO series also won: Matt Macfadyen, Sarah Snook and Kieran Culkin.

    “It is bittersweet, but things like this make it rather sweeter,” said “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong.

    Hulu’s “The Bear” also came away with a trio of awards, including best comedy series. Jeremy Allen White won for the second time, but this time he had company. Ayo Edebiri won her first Globe for her leading performance in the Hulu show’s second season. She thanked the assistants of her agents and managers.

    “To the people who answer my emails, you’re the real ones,” said Edebiri.

    “Beef” won three awards: best limited series as well as acting awards for Ali Wong and Steven Yeun.

    The Globes also added a new stand-up special award. That went, surprisingly, to Ricky Gervais, who didn’t attend the show he so often hosted. Some expected Chris Rock to win for “Selective Outrage,” his stand-up response to the Will Smith slap.

    A few years ago, the Golden Globes were on the cusp of collapse. After The Los Angeles Times reported that the HFPA had no Black members, Hollywood boycotted the organization. The 2022 Globes were all but canceled and taken off TV. After reforms, the Globes returned to NBC last year in a one-year deal, but the show was booted to Tuesday evening. With Jerrod Carmichael hosting, the telecast attracted 6.3 million viewers, a new low on NBC and a far cry from the 20 million that once tuned in.

    The Golden Globes were acquired by Eldridge Industries and Dick Clark Productions, which Penske Media owns, and turned into a for-profit venture. The HFPA (which typically numbered around 90 voters) was dissolved and a group of some 300 entertainment journalists from around the world now vote for the awards.

    Questions still remain about the Globes’ long-term future, but their value to Hollywood studios remains providing a marketing boost to awards contenders. (The Oscars won’t be held until March 10.) This year, because of the actors and writers strikes, the Globes are airing ahead of the Emmys, which were postponed to Jan. 15.

    With movie ticket sales still 20% off the pre-pandemic pace and the industry facing a potentially perilous 2024 at the box office, Hollywood needed the Golden Globes as much as it ever has.

    The most comical evaluation on the Globes came from presenters Will Ferrell and Kristin Wiig, who blamed the awards body for the constant interruption of a song they found irresistible while otherwise solemnly presenting best actor in a drama.

    A furious, dancing Ferrell shouted: “The Golden Globes have not changed!”

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  • Carrie Coon Loves Your Mean 'Gilded Age' Tweets

    Carrie Coon Loves Your Mean 'Gilded Age' Tweets

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    Bertha Russell did the damn thing. In The Gilded Age’s second season finale, Carrie Coon’s ruthless robber baroness emerged the victor in the great war between her beloved Metropolitan Opera and The Academy of Music, championed by old-money society queen Lina Astor (played by Donna Murphy). Even those casually acquainted with American history most likely had an inkling as to who would reign supreme—these days, the Met is arguably New York’s grandest cultural institution, while the Academy of Music has gone the way of the dodo. Still, the battle was thrilling all the same.

    “The stakes come from not knowing what the cost will be to each individual person,” Coon says over Zoom. “Also, a lot of people in the audience don’t know any of this history. They don’t know there’s a Metropolitan Opera in New York. I mean, that’s stuff that I didn’t know growing up in Ohio. I didn’t know there were mansions in Newport people lived in for six weeks in the summer.” She laughs at the extravagance. “Bananas.”

    What’s bananas is Coon’s ferocious performance as Mrs. Russell, loosely based on historical millionaire-wife and Anderson Cooper relative Alva Vanderbilt. In a cast absolutely stacked with theater luminaries —including Murphy, Christine Baranski and Audra McDonald—Coon still stands out, enough to land a spot on Vanity Fair’s list of the best performances of 2023. She credits the love of her character partially to Bertha’s relationship with her husband, Mr. Russell, played by Morgan Spector, which she cheekily calls “#couplegoals.”

    “I think people have found themselves rooting for robber barons in spite of themselves on the show, partly because Julian [Fellowes] has written such a solid, cohesive, sexy marriage,” says Coon. “Even as they are ruthless in the world of business and in their social climbing, they are ultimately looking out for their children. Bertha can’t be a senator. She can’t be a CEO. She’s not the president of anything. This is her purview.”

    Below, Coon goes deep on filming season two’s grand finale, Gilded Age: The Musical, and potentially saying goodbye to the series for good.

    The season finale seemed to strongly imply that Bertha offered up her daughter, Gladys (Taissa Farmiga), as a sacrificial lamb to get the Duke in his seat. Did she promise Gladys’s hand in marriage just to get him to come to the Met?

    It’s not explicit, but we know how George feels about it. And we’ve seen many, many times that Bertha has done something in spite of George’s counsel. I think we can absolutely assume Bertha would, in a heartbeat, trade Gladys for that status.

    Now, Bertha doesn’t see herself as any kind of villain. Bertha is gifting the city of New York a brand new opera house with the best singers in the world, and an entertaining evening with a Duke. And they were all anglophiles. Everyone was obsessed with British status. It’s the reason Mrs. Astor had the families of the 400—all the rules were social constructs designed to catch people out so they wouldn’t get entree into this society. You had to really learn those rules before you could play the game.

    Bertha is a quick study, and she’s also willing to call bullshit when she sees it. She believes that people should be able to earn their way in. She believes she’s earned her way in, and she believes that she’s living in a meritocracy. For her, that’s true. For people of color and the immigrants being crushed under the capitalist machine, that was not true—but she really in her heart believes that. I think that’s why the rise of Turner (Kelley Curran) is so interesting, because, given the same circumstances, I think Bertha is not sure she could have accomplished what Turner has accomplished. I think that’s very intimidating for her.

    It was exciting to see the Russells fight about Mrs. Turner’s indiscretions earlier in the season. During their fight, we saw a rare crack in Mrs. Russell’s emotional armor.

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  • ‘Stranger Things’ Is a Monster Hit. But What’s It Like Onstage?

    ‘Stranger Things’ Is a Monster Hit. But What’s It Like Onstage?

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    The creators of Stranger Things know all about expectations. Ever since the series became one of the most successful shows in Netflix’s history—it was the most streamed program of 2022—every subsequent installment has had to try not to collapse under the heavy hopes of millions of fans. Anticipation for the first official Stranger Things stage production is similarly through the roof. Rarely has a theater seen such an ardent base rock up, demanding to be entertained.

    The venue is London’s 1,028-seat Phoenix Theatre. (If you wanted to bring all of the adults who watched the first season within its first 35 days to see the play, it would need to be staged roughly 13,687 times.) Stranger Things: The First Shadow follows two comedies recently staged there: the beloved British farce Noises Off and the comedy puppet show Spitting Image: The Musical. “We chose a very small theater to do our very big play in,” says codirector Justin Martin, speaking from the snug “company office,” where a shower is visible behind him.

    Olivier Award–winning director Stephen Daldry was the man with the provocative idea to bring Stranger Things, conceived by brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, to the stage. Around the time the fourth season was being written, Daldry teamed up with producer colossus Sonia Friedman to approach Netflix about what Martin calls its “catalog.” “The Duffers, to their credit, went, ‘You’re mad, but yeah, let’s see if we can find something within this world,’” says Martin, who has worked with Daldry for 16 years. “The honest truth is, the idea of turning the show into a play would’ve never crossed our minds,” the Duffers say by email. “This is fully the brainchild of Stephen Daldry.”

    Producer Friedman and writer Jack Thorne, who are responsible for the mammoth theatrical success of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, were a reassuring presence. But First Shadow was complex territory. “The cycle of Potter was complete, and therefore we had access to the full canon [for Cursed Child],” Friedman says. She can’t think of another live show emerging mid-canon like this. Arriving while we wait for the series’ season five (its strike-delayed filming is due to start next month), First Shadow takes place before the first season, in 1959, and explores the high school past of Henry Creel, dramatizing how he became the murderous Vecna we meet in season four.

    “The mythology is quite complicated,” says Friedman, speaking in the sing-song style of someone who has just stumbled on an r/StrangerThings Reddit thread. Thorne bowed out after one draft, passing the baton to Kate Trefry, who has written for Stranger Things since season two. “It’s just like a huge jellyfish of interlocking pieces,” Trefry says. “We wanted to hit this sweet spot where the play can stand on its own as an independent work but also connect to everything in four, but also be looking forward to five.” We meet younger versions of Joyce Byers, née Maldonado (Isabella Pappas), Jim Hopper (Oscar Lloyd), and Bob Newby (Christopher Buckley), who investigate some neighborhood pet deaths; we also meet Dr. Brenner (Patrick Vaill) and come to understand why he began his horrifying experimentation on Eleven and other children.

    First Shadow is visually stunning and could easily make stars of its young cast, principally Louis McCartney, who plays Henry, and Ella Karuna Williams, who portrays new character Patty Newby. Martin says that they told casting director Jessica Ronane, “We want to find the next Ben Whishaw and Andrew Garfield.” The real star of the show, however, may be the often jaw-dropping stagecraft. The program claims that First Shadow is “the most technically advanced show in the West End,” an assertion that’s hard to test but easy to believe.

    Chris Fisher and Jamie Harrison, who head up the illusions and visual effects team, took a trip to Vegas to see how the world’s biggest magicians pull it off. “When you’ve got a show of this scale and a show of this budget as well, you can really push the boundaries,” says Harrison.

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  • 'The Zone of Interest' named best film of the year by Los Angeles Film Critics Association

    'The Zone of Interest' named best film of the year by Los Angeles Film Critics Association

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    LOS ANGELES — Jonathan Glazer’s chilling Auschwitz-set drama, “The Zone of Interest,” has been named best movie of the year by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association.

    The critics group, which announced its picks late Sunday after a day-long meeting, also awarded prizes for Glazer’s directing and Mica Levi’s score. It selected Sandra Hüller, who stars in both “The Zone of Interest” and the French courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” for one of its two lead performance awards.

    The critics, as they often do, deviated considerably from their East Coast corollary, the New York Film Critics Circle. That group earlier named Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon” the year’s best film.

    The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which doesn’t delineate gender in its acting categories, gave all four of its acting awards to women.

    In the lead acting category, the winners were Hüller and Emma Stone, the star of Yorgos Lanthimos’ Frankenstein riff “Poor Things.” The supporting performance prizes went to Rachel McAdams for the Judy Blume adaptation “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”; and to Da’Vine Joy Randolph, co-star of the boarding school comedy-drama “The Holdovers.”

    Last year, “Tár” and ”Everything Everywhere All at Once” tied for the group’s top prize. This year’s awards will be handed out in a ceremony on Jan. 13.

    Here’s a full list of the picks by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association:

    Best Film: “The Zone of Interest”

    Best Director: Jonathan Glazer, “The Zone of Interest”

    Best Lead Performance: Sandra Hüller, “Anatomy of a Fall” and “The Zone of Interest”; and Emma Stone, “Poor Things”

    Best Supporting Performance: Rachel McAdams, “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret”; and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, “The Holdovers”

    Best Non-English Language Film: “Anatomy of a Fall”

    New Generation Award: Celine Song, “Past Lives”

    Best Screenplay: Andrew Haigh, “All of Us Strangers”

    Best Documentary: “Menus-Plaisirs — Les Troisgros”

    Best Animated Film: “The Boy and the Heron”

    Best Editing: Laurent Sénéchal, “Anatomy of a Fall”

    Best Production Design: Sarah Greenwood, “Barbie”

    Best Score: Mica Levi, “The Zone of Interest,” with a recognition also of sound designer Johnnie Burn

    Best Cinematography: Robbie Ryan, “Poor Things”

    Douglas Edwards Experimental Film Prize: “Youth (Spring)”

    Career Achievement Award: Agnieszka Holland

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  • ‘Past Lives,’ wins at Gotham Awards, while De Niro says speech was edited

    ‘Past Lives,’ wins at Gotham Awards, while De Niro says speech was edited

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    NEW YORK — Celine Song’s wistful romance “Past Lives” earned top honors at the Gotham Awards on Monday evening at an award-season kickoff where the night’s biggest drama came in a political speech by Robert De Niro that the actor claimed had been edited without his permission.

    “Past Lives,” a breakout at the Sundance Film Festival in January and an arthouse hit in June for A24, may be poised to be an Oscar sleeper this year after winning best feature film at the Gothams. Affection is strong for Song’s directorial debut, starring Greta Lee as a woman born in Seoul who, after marrying an American (John Magaro), reconnects with a childhood friend from South Korea (Teo Yoo).

    “This is the first film I’ve ever made and a very personal film about an extraordinary feeling I had in an ordinary bar in the East Village, not too many blocks away from here,” said Song, accepting the award. “As this film has been shared with the world, it has taught me — and taught us — that you’re never alone in that extraordinary feeling.”

    “Past Lives” was expected to win, but the ceremony went off-script when De Niro, co-star in Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” took the podium to present a tribute award to the film. While giving his remarks, De Niro noticed a section had been omitted on the teleprompter. After attempting to scroll back through, he completed his speech before returning to read from his phone.

    “The beginning of my speech was edited, cut out,” De Niro said. “I didn’t know about it.”

    De Niro, known for his fiery rhetoric against former President Donald Trump, then expanded on what he called America’s “post-truth society” and chided Hollywood — specifically John Wayne — for earlier depictions of Native Americans.

    “The former president lied to us more than 30,000 times during his four years in office, and he’s keeping up the pace with his current campaign of retribution,” De Niro said. “With all of his lies, he can’t hide his soul. He attacks the weak, destroys the gifts of nature and shows his disrespect for example using Pocahontas as a slur.”

    De Niro seemed to blame Apple, which produced “Killers of the Flower Moon,” for the changes to his speech.

    “So I’m going to say these things — to Apple and thank them, all that. Gothams. Blah blah blah. Apple. But I don’t really feel like thanking them at all for what they did,” said De Niro. “How dare they do that, actually.”

    Apple didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment late Monday evening.

    It was still a big night for Scorsese’s epic, about the Osage murders in the early 20th century, even though Scorsese unexpectedly wasn’t in attendance. Lily Gladstone, who stars in the film opposite Leonardo DiCaprio, won for best lead performance — though not for that performance.

    Gladstone won for a lesser-known film released earlier in 2023: “The Unknown Country,” in which stars as a woman embarking on a road trip though the Midwest. In each of her speeches — for “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Unknown Country” — Gladstone praised the filmmakers for prioritizing Native perspectives.

    “I challenge everybody in this room who makes films: Invest. When you have a budget, invest it in the people,” said Gladstone. “Invest in the people that you’re telling your story about. Your film will be better for it. Your lives will be better for it.”

    The Gotham Awards, now in their 33rd year, leapfrog most of the major ceremonies that lead up to the Academy Awards. But over time, they’ve established themselves as the first big party of the season, and an early hint at some of the favorites.

    Put on by the Gotham Film & Media Institute and held annually at Cipriani Wall Street, the Gothams have some quirks that make them different than other awards. Prizes are chosen by small committees of film professionals, critics and journalists. Their acting categories are also gender neutral, with 10 actors nominated for lead performance, and another 10 up for supporting performances.

    This year, one of the most competitive categories was best international film. There, Justine Triet’s Palme d’Or winning courtroom drama “Anatomy of a Fall” triumphed over the likes of “Poor Things,” “All of Us Strangers” and “The Zone of Interest.” Triet’s film also won for best screenplay.

    Andrew Haigh’s tender metaphysical drama “All of Us Strangers,” starring Andrew Scott as a screenwriter cast back into his childhood while developing a relationship with a neighbor (Paul Mescal), had come into the Gothams as the lead nominee with four nods, but went home without a trophy.

    The Gothams this year removed a $35 million budget cap for nominees, but many big-budget films still opted not to submit themselves. The monthslong Screen Actors Guild strike meant awards season got off to a slower start, but one of the early questions is if anything can rival those diametrically opposed summer sensations of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer.”

    Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie of “Barbie” were among the numerous tribute awards. In their joint speech, Gerwig said her partner, Noah Baumbach, found out he was co-writing the movie with her from a Variety article that cited them both. He sent the article to Gerwig with just a question mark, she said.

    “Then he wrote back: ‘It’s OK, we’ll make each other laugh,’” added Gerwig.

    Best supporting performance went to Charles Melton of Todd Haynes’ “May December.” He plays a young father who first began his relationship with his wife (Julianne Moore) when he was a minor.

    A.V. Rockwell, whose directorial debut “A Thousand and One” stars Teyana Taylor as a single mother, won for breakthrough director. She noted all of her fellow nominees were women. “It’s a fight just to get here,” she said.

    “Just to be frank, it is very hard to tell a culturally specific story when you look like this,” said Rockwell.

    Best documentary went to Kaouther Ben Hania’s Tunisian film “Four Daughters,” a true story about a Tunisian women with two daughters who became radicalized. The film reconstructs their disappearance.

    In the TV categories, the Netflix series “Beef,” starring Steven Yeun and Ali Wong as a pair locked in a feud after a road rage incident, won for both breakthrough series under 40 minutes and for Wong’s performance.

    “If you haven’t seen ‘Beef’ yet, I swear it’s more than me and Steven crying.” Wong said.

    Tribute awards ensured that some star power hit the Gothams stage. They were given to: Bradley Cooper, the director, star and co-writer of “Maestro”; Ben Affleck, the director and co-star of “Air”; George C. Wolfe, the director of “Rustin”; and Michael Mann, the director of “Ferrari.”

    Affleck, however, wasn’t in attendance. The film’s screenwriter, Alex Convery, instead accepted the award.

    “Well, you thought you were getting Ben Affleck,” said Convery. “Sorry.”

    The Gothams have a checkered history of forecasting future awards glory. Last year, it was the first win in what became a runaway Oscar campaign for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and where Ke Huy Quan’s supporting-actor bid got its start. The year before that, Gotham winner “The Lost Daughter” faded on the campaign trail, but 2020-winner “Nomadland” went the distance to the Academy Awards.

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  • Colman Domingo’s time is now

    Colman Domingo’s time is now

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    NEW YORK — Colman Domingo has a commanding physical presence, an expressive face and soulful eyes. But his most limber and powerful tool is his voice.

    It can go low in a bone-rattling baritone, like in his Nigerian-accented pimp in Janicza Bravo’s “Zola.” Or it can rise to the warm, erudite rhythm of civil rights leader Bayard Rustin, in “Rustin.” In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” Domingo’s voice, as a union soldier, is the first thing you hear.

    Domingo, himself, isn’t sure when his voice became so resonate. Tracing it sends him back to his childhood, growing up a self-described outsider — gay, awkward, unsure of himself — in west Philadelphia. That voice, he says, wasn’t there 20 years ago.

    “At some point, as I grew into this person, comfortable in my own skin, sexuality, my mind, my intentions, who I am in the world, I think my voice developed more,” Domingo says. “I don’t know that I had this voice before. All the resonance in my voice, I can hear it. There’s confidence. There’s gravitas to it. I hear exactly what people hear now.”

    People are finally hearing Domingo. His performance in George C. Wolfe’s “Rustin” — Domingo’s first time atop the call sheet — has made the 53-year-old journeyman actor a favorite for a best actor Oscar nomination. It’s a deft and dazzling leading performance that channels all the complexities of the March on Washington architect.

    Domingo also co-stars as Mister, the abusive antagonist of “The Color Purple,” one of the most anticipated holiday releases. The roles couldn’t be more different. Throw in the fall-festival hit “Sing Sing,” in which Domingo stars alongside a cast of mostly formerly incarcerated actors (A24 will release it in 2024), and you have the full spectrum of what Domingo is capable of.

    Years of struggle as a supporting player in service of others have finally led to his turn in the spotlight.

    “I started to feel like: Well, what happened, God? What is my journey? At some point, my journey felt like Bayard’s journey, which is maybe why I feel we’re so close,” Domingo says. “You know, I’ve assisted many people getting Oscars. I’ve assisted many people getting a lot of shine and love.”

    On the heels of the actors strike ending, Domingo met recently at a Manhattan hotel overlooking Central Park. After months of being unable to promote that part of his life, he had been thrown straight into late-night appearances, interviews and a “Rustin” screening in Washington, with Barack and Michelle Obama, whose Higher Ground Productions produced the film. Domingo threw a bunch of cold-weather clothes together and jumped on a plane from Los Angeles.

    “Basically, I was shot out of a cannon,” he says, smiling.

    Domingo, sincere and amiable in conversation, had the appearance of someone eminently aware that a hard-earned moment had finally arrived.

    “I keep telling people that I’m 54 years old. Because for this to happen now, it’s unusual,” Domingo says. (His birthday is Nov. 28.) “Suddenly, after 32 years, it seems like the sun is shining on every corner of my career.”

    Domingo was raised in a working-class family by his mother and step-father. Domingo’s father, whom he’s named after, wasn’t a part of his life. It wasn’t until he took an acting class at Temple University that he began acting. In regional theater, starting in San Francisco, he honed the wide-ranging ability of a character actor.

    “Growing up, I never thought I was much to look at it. I think it liberated me,” Domingo says. “I know I can play a handsome man and a hideous man because I’m liberated. I can play anything. I’m not looking at myself. I’m not taking myself too seriously. I have the body of a clown.”

    To “The Color Purple” director Blitz Bazawule, Domingo is belatedly becoming the leading man he was destined to be after years of out-acting more famous co-stars.

    “Colman comes from the old-school of actors. You think about Bogart or you think of Daniel-Day,” says Bazawule. “These people, the minute you hear them or see them, there’s a clear presence. I think he is in that tradition of leading men. Colman takes the frame.”

    Voice played a central role in Domingo finding Rustin. The film, which is streaming on Netflix, depicts the tireless grassroots activism of Rustin, who was openly gay, in organizing the 1963 march where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. would give his “I Have a Dream” speech. Domingo was flummoxed by the origin of Rustin’s Mid-Atlantic accent before talking with Rachelle Horowitz, who organized transportation for the march.

    “She said, ‘He made that up,’” Domingo says. “I thought that was key. Here was someone who truly created themselves at a time when everyone was trying to write you off or box you in or violate your body because you’re Black and queer. I thought: That’s courage.”

    Domingo’s own path also required self-invention. His first breakthrough came in the play “Passing Strange,” which ran at the Public Theater in 2007 before opening on Broadway in 2008. Though celebrated — Colman shared in an Obie award for ensemble — once the play closed, Domingo found himself bartending again.

    Resolving to make his own opportunity, Domingo wrote and staged the autobiographical “A Boy and His Soul,” a dexterous one-man play that used the soul music of his youth (Earth Wind & Fire, Donna Summer) to evoke his life story and the inspirational figure of his mother, his greatest champion. In it, he recalls his mother telling him: “Keep a song in your heart, and you will always find your way.” She and Domingo’s stepfather died in 2016.

    “I started writing my solo show in the last year of my mother’s life and I didn’t know that that writing was going to save my life,” Domingo says. “I was writing so I could be with my family 90 minutes a day.”

    Domingo’s production company, Edith, is named after his mother. When her son was struggling to catch a break, she wrote at least six letters to Oprah Winfrey, Domingo says. “She said, ‘She could help you. I want you to know her.’ I was like, ‘Mom, Oprah doesn’t care about me.’”

    “The prayers and wishes people have for you are sometimes more profound than what you imagine, yourself,” says Domingo.

    In the years that followed, Domingo’s range only extended. He did comedy on the series “The Big Gay Sketch Show.” He was Tony-nominated for “The Scottsboro Boys” on Broadway. “Fear the Walking Dead,” in which he played Victor Strand over eight years, brought him to his widest audience yet. Directors like Barry Jenkins (“If Beale Street Could Talk”) and Bravo (“Zola”) came calling.

    “When I was cast in ‘Zola,’ I thought, ‘Me, playing a pimp? What? In this dark comedy? What do you see in me?’” says Domingo. “And Janicza Bravo said, ‘I see that the possibilities of the way you think are endless.’

    Wolfe, the esteemed theater director, first cast Domingo in “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” alongside Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman, as the trombone-player Cutler. Gradually, he came to see Domingo as Bayard Rustin.

    “I would be talking with Mark Rickler the production designer, ‘Oh, Colman could do that.’ Part of my brain would go, ‘Oh, Colman could do that,’’ recalls Wolfe. “It was an organic conversation that had a degree of inevitability but I didn’t realize it at the time. I think all good smart decisions, there’s a sense of inevitability.”

    Now, Domingo finds himself collaborating with some of the Hollywood legends his mother envisioned him with. Winfrey is a producer on “The Color Purple” and the two have become friendly. During a hike for Ava DuVernay’s birthday in Hawaii (DuVernay cast Domingo in “Selma”), he told Winfrey about the letters his mother wrote her.

    “I said, ‘I think I just realized that you answered her letters,’” Domingo says. “And she clutches her heart and says, ‘Oh, Colman.’ And then we started hiking again.”

    ___

    Follow AP Film Writer Jake Coyle at: http://twitter.com/jakecoyleAP

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  • What to stream this week: Dolly Parton rocks out, ‘The Crown’ returns, ‘Rustin’ creates a march

    What to stream this week: Dolly Parton rocks out, ‘The Crown’ returns, ‘Rustin’ creates a march

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    Colman Domingo’s incredible performance in the civil rights biopic “Rustin” and Dolly Parton’s rock music album are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.

    Also among the offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists are a series where Godzilla, King Kong and other monsters are real, the fifth Persona video game and return of “The Crown.”

    — A powerhouse performance by Colman Domingo fuels the Netflix drama “Rustin,” streaming Friday Nov. 17, about the civil rights pioneer and March on Washington architect Bayard Rustin. The film, directed by George C. Wolfe, chronicles the run-up to the indelible 1963 march where Rev. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Rustin,” the first narrative feature from Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, is a portrait of grassroots activism and of the often under-sung Rustin, an openly gay man combating injustice on numerous fronts. In his review, the AP’s Mark Kennedy praised Domingo’s “debonair, frisky, droll, passionate and utterly captivating” performance.

    — The shorts by the “Saturday Night Live” trio Please Don’t Destroy – Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy – have for several years been a highlight on the NBC sketch show. In “Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” they, like “SNL” standouts before them, get their first feature-film shot. In the film, directed by Paul Briganti and produced by Judd Apatow, the trio embark on a ludicrous adventure that nevertheless preserves their relaxed surrealism. “SNL” castmate Bowen Yang drops in, too, though it’s Conan O’Brien who nearly steals the show as Marshall’s disapproving father. Streaming Friday, Nov. 17, on Peacock.

    — November is the month for noir on the Criterion Channel (which is hosting a series of favorites) and on TCM, which will marathon classics like “Detour” (1945) and “The Narrow Margin” (1952) on Friday, Nov. 17. But also seek out the Criterion Channel’s “Women of the West” series, streaming this month. The western may be a predominantly male genre, but some of the best ever made are centered on strong frontier women who back down from no one. Among them here are Marlene Dietrich (“Rancho Notorious”) and Barbara Stanwyck (“Forty Guns,” “The Fluries”), but nothing beats Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Technicolor masterpiece “Johnny Guitar.” Joan Crawford as saloon owner Vivienne remains one of the most raging, smoldering performances you’ll ever seen.

    — AP Film Writer Jake Coyle

    — Last year, Dolly Parton politely asked to be removed from consideration for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. She thought that as a country musician, not a rock ‘n’ roll one, she didn’t deserve the honor. Of course, her musical legacy is undeniable, and they brought her in anyway. The move inspired “Rockstar,” her first release in the rock genre. Out Friday, Nov. 17, it is 30-tracks of star-studded covers, from “Let It Be” with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to “What’s Up?” with Linda Perry and Lizzo lending her flute-chops to “Stairway to Heaven.” There are also nine originals, written across the last few decades. Now, surely only Parton herself would doubt that she’s earned a spot in the Hall and then some — but the fact that it produced a leather-clad, anthemic, barn-burnin’ record? That’s gold.

    — Danny Brown is one of the most inventive, at times, absurdist contemporary rappers in the game – so when he releases a new full-length record, there’s no telling which direction he’s moving in. “Quaranta,” named after the Italian word for “40” — though it certainly sounds similar to a less attractive “qu-“ word in “quarantine” — is Brown’s sixth solo studio album, a highly-anticipated follow-up to 2019’s “Uknowhatimsayin¿” via Warp Records. He considers it a “spiritual sequel” to “XXX,” his 2011 break out album. On “Quaranta,” the lead single “Tantor” teeters is skonk-y avant-rap, a track that plays like an unearthed recording captured decades in some techno-future. He’s called the album his more personal to date, written and recorded before long stint in rehab. “It was almost like, if I died, this is what I have to say,” he told Rolling Stone.

    — Twenty years ago, a mall goth battle cry rung out across the world: “Bring Me to Life,” the lead single from nu-metal alt-rock band Evanescence’s debut album “Fallen” connected with an apathetic audience searching for dooming catharsis – frontwoman Amy Lee’s airy soprano challenged traditional images of the genre. Then, of course, were the other Myspace-ready records on “Fallen”: “My Immortal,” “Everybody’s Fool,” and “Going Under.” Now, two decades removed, “Fallen” is getting a remastered release — and it sounds as immediate as ever.

    — AP Music Writer Maria Sherman

    — Season 21 of “NCIS” is delayed due to the actors’ strike but fans can get their fix with the franchise’s first international spin-off, “NCIS: Sydney.” Debuting Tuesday on CBS, the series follows a task force of U.S. and Australian law enforcement investigating naval crimes in waters connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans known as Indo Pacific. Episodes will also stream on Paramount+.

    — The new limited series “A Murder at the End of the World” has a “Knives Out” vibe but with Emma Corrin as the detective. When a reclusive billionaire (Clive Owen) hosts a retreat in a remote location and one of the guests ends up dead, Corrin’s character Darby launches an investigation. The show also stars Brit Marling, who co-created, wrote and directed the series with Zal Batmanglij. The first two episodes drop Tuesday on FX on Hulu.

    — The first half of the sixth and final season of “The Crown” returns to Netflix on Thursday. The episodes begin with Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) connecting with Dodi Fayad as Dominic West’s Prince Charles seeks the Queen’s (Imelda Staunton) blessing of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

    — Swizz Beatz isn’t just a music producer, he’s also an avid car enthusiast and collector. In his new Hulu docuseries “Drive with Swizz Beatz”, Beatz and his son, Nasir Dean, travel to destinations near and far (such as Atlanta, Houston, Japan and Saudi Arabia) to experience their car culture and learn about what inspires, or drives, their communities. “Drive with Swizz Beatz” debuts Thursday on Hulu.

    — Sarah Lancashire returns as Julia Child for season two of the Max series “Julia.” In the new episodes, Julia and Paul (David Hyde Pierce) return to Boston from a sojourn in France and she’s ready to resume her popular cooking show, “The French Chef.” As Julia’s profile rises, the personal and professional demands on her increase too. “We need new content yesterday,” declares the station manager in a scene that seems very timely. Can this chef maintain her joie de vivre? The first three episodes drop Thursday.

    — Kurt and Wyatt Russell star in the new MonsterVerse series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” but the real-life father and son don’t have scenes together. That’s because they play the same character at different ages. Wyatt plays army officer Lee Shaw in the 1950s and Kurt steps in as the character in present day. The live-action series takes place in world where Godzilla, King Kong and other monsters are real, and a secret multi-government agency known as Monarch tracks and studies them. In the series, Monarch becomes threatened by Shaw’s monster knowledge. “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” premieres Friday, Nov. 17 on Apple TV+

    — An eight-episode anime series inspired by the 2010 movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 17. “ Scott Pilgrim Takes Off ” features the voices of the film cast including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Brie Larson and Anna Kendrick.

    — Alicia Rancilio

    — Atlus’ Persona 5 dazzled role-playing game fans back in 2016, and its characters are so beloved that they’ve branched out into three spinoffs. In the latest, Persona 5 Tactica, Joker, Morgana and the rest of the Phantom Thieves are summoned to an oppressive dystopia and tasked with leading an “emotional revolution.” As usual, our teenage heroes can fight with standard weaponry like swords and firearms — or they can conjure up mythical beasts to get the job done more quickly. Tactica takes P5’s flashy animation and puts it in colorful, 3D battle arenas, and it looks quite a bit more challenging than the flagship’s dancing spinoff. While we’re all waiting for Persona 6, it’s still nice to see the gang reunite, starting Friday, Nov. 17, on Xbox X/S/One, PlayStation 5/4, Nintendo Switch and PC.

    — Lou Kesten

    ___

    Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/entertainment.

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  • What to stream this week: Dolly Parton rocks out, ‘The Crown’ returns, ‘Rustin’ creates a march

    What to stream this week: Dolly Parton rocks out, ‘The Crown’ returns, ‘Rustin’ creates a march

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    Colman Domingo’s incredible performance in the civil rights biopic “Rustin” and Dolly Parton’s rock music album are some of the new television, movies, music and games headed to a device near you.

    Also among the offerings worth your time as selected by The Associated Press’ entertainment journalists are a series where Godzilla, King Kong and other monsters are real, the fifth Persona video game and return of “The Crown.”

    — A powerhouse performance by Colman Domingo fuels the Netflix drama “Rustin,” streaming Friday Nov. 17, about the civil rights pioneer and March on Washington architect Bayard Rustin. The film, directed by George C. Wolfe, chronicles the run-up to the indelible 1963 march where Rev. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. “Rustin,” the first narrative feature from Barack and Michelle Obama’s production company Higher Ground, is a portrait of grassroots activism and of the often under-sung Rustin, an openly gay man combating injustice on numerous fronts. In his review, the AP’s Mark Kennedy praised Domingo’s “debonair, frisky, droll, passionate and utterly captivating” performance.

    — The shorts by the “Saturday Night Live” trio Please Don’t Destroy – Ben Marshall, John Higgins and Martin Herlihy – have for several years been a highlight on the NBC sketch show. In “Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” they, like “SNL” standouts before them, get their first feature-film shot. In the film, directed by Paul Briganti and produced by Judd Apatow, the trio embark on a ludicrous adventure that nevertheless preserves their relaxed surrealism. “SNL” castmate Bowen Yang drops in, too, though it’s Conan O’Brien who nearly steals the show as Marshall’s disapproving father. Streaming Friday, Nov. 17, on Peacock.

    — November is the month for noir on the Criterion Channel (which is hosting a series of favorites) and on TCM, which will marathon classics like “Detour” (1945) and “The Narrow Margin” (1952) on Friday, Nov. 17. But also seek out the Criterion Channel’s “Women of the West” series, streaming this month. The western may be a predominantly male genre, but some of the best ever made are centered on strong frontier women who back down from no one. Among them here are Marlene Dietrich (“Rancho Notorious”) and Barbara Stanwyck (“Forty Guns,” “The Fluries”), but nothing beats Nicholas Ray’s 1954 Technicolor masterpiece “Johnny Guitar.” Joan Crawford as saloon owner Vivienne remains one of the most raging, smoldering performances you’ll ever seen.

    — AP Film Writer Jake Coyle

    — Last year, Dolly Parton politely asked to be removed from consideration for Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction. She thought that as a country musician, not a rock ‘n’ roll one, she didn’t deserve the honor. Of course, her musical legacy is undeniable, and they brought her in anyway. The move inspired “Rockstar,” her first release in the rock genre. Out Friday, Nov. 17, it is 30-tracks of star-studded covers, from “Let It Be” with Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr to “What’s Up?” with Linda Perry and Lizzo lending her flute-chops to “Stairway to Heaven.” There are also nine originals, written across the last few decades. Now, surely only Parton herself would doubt that she’s earned a spot in the Hall and then some — but the fact that it produced a leather-clad, anthemic, barn-burnin’ record? That’s gold.

    — Danny Brown is one of the most inventive, at times, absurdist contemporary rappers in the game – so when he releases a new full-length record, there’s no telling which direction he’s moving in. “Quaranta,” named after the Italian word for “40” — though it certainly sounds similar to a less attractive “qu-“ word in “quarantine” — is Brown’s sixth solo studio album, a highly-anticipated follow-up to 2019’s “Uknowhatimsayin¿” via Warp Records. He considers it a “spiritual sequel” to “XXX,” his 2011 break out album. On “Quaranta,” the lead single “Tantor” teeters is skonk-y avant-rap, a track that plays like an unearthed recording captured decades in some techno-future. He’s called the album his more personal to date, written and recorded before long stint in rehab. “It was almost like, if I died, this is what I have to say,” he told Rolling Stone.

    — Twenty years ago, a mall goth battle cry rung out across the world: “Bring Me to Life,” the lead single from nu-metal alt-rock band Evanescence’s debut album “Fallen” connected with an apathetic audience searching for dooming catharsis – frontwoman Amy Lee’s airy soprano challenged traditional images of the genre. Then, of course, were the other Myspace-ready records on “Fallen”: “My Immortal,” “Everybody’s Fool,” and “Going Under.” Now, two decades removed, “Fallen” is getting a remastered release — and it sounds as immediate as ever.

    — AP Music Writer Maria Sherman

    — Season 21 of “NCIS” is delayed due to the actors’ strike but fans can get their fix with the franchise’s first international spin-off, “NCIS: Sydney.” Debuting Tuesday on CBS, the series follows a task force of U.S. and Australian law enforcement investigating naval crimes in waters connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans known as Indo Pacific. Episodes will also stream on Paramount+.

    — The new limited series “A Murder at the End of the World” has a “Knives Out” vibe but with Emma Corrin as the detective. When a reclusive billionaire (Clive Owen) hosts a retreat in a remote location and one of the guests ends up dead, Corrin’s character Darby launches an investigation. The show also stars Brit Marling, who co-created, wrote and directed the series with Zal Batmanglij. The first two episodes drop Tuesday on FX on Hulu.

    — The first half of the sixth and final season of “The Crown” returns to Netflix on Thursday. The episodes begin with Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) connecting with Dodi Fayad as Dominic West’s Prince Charles seeks the Queen’s (Imelda Staunton) blessing of his relationship with Camilla Parker Bowles.

    — Swizz Beatz isn’t just a music producer, he’s also an avid car enthusiast and collector. In his new Hulu docuseries “Drive with Swizz Beatz”, Beatz and his son, Nasir Dean, travel to destinations near and far (such as Atlanta, Houston, Japan and Saudi Arabia) to experience their car culture and learn about what inspires, or drives, their communities. “Drive with Swizz Beatz” debuts Thursday on Hulu.

    — Sarah Lancashire returns as Julia Child for season two of the Max series “Julia.” In the new episodes, Julia and Paul (David Hyde Pierce) return to Boston from a sojourn in France and she’s ready to resume her popular cooking show, “The French Chef.” As Julia’s profile rises, the personal and professional demands on her increase too. “We need new content yesterday,” declares the station manager in a scene that seems very timely. Can this chef maintain her joie de vivre? The first three episodes drop Thursday.

    — Kurt and Wyatt Russell star in the new MonsterVerse series “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” but the real-life father and son don’t have scenes together. That’s because they play the same character at different ages. Wyatt plays army officer Lee Shaw in the 1950s and Kurt steps in as the character in present day. The live-action series takes place in world where Godzilla, King Kong and other monsters are real, and a secret multi-government agency known as Monarch tracks and studies them. In the series, Monarch becomes threatened by Shaw’s monster knowledge. “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” premieres Friday, Nov. 17 on Apple TV+

    — An eight-episode anime series inspired by the 2010 movie “Scott Pilgrim vs. the World” is coming to Netflix on Friday, Nov. 17. “ Scott Pilgrim Takes Off ” features the voices of the film cast including Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Kieran Culkin, Brie Larson and Anna Kendrick.

    — Alicia Rancilio

    — Atlus’ Persona 5 dazzled role-playing game fans back in 2016, and its characters are so beloved that they’ve branched out into three spinoffs. In the latest, Persona 5 Tactica, Joker, Morgana and the rest of the Phantom Thieves are summoned to an oppressive dystopia and tasked with leading an “emotional revolution.” As usual, our teenage heroes can fight with standard weaponry like swords and firearms — or they can conjure up mythical beasts to get the job done more quickly. Tactica takes P5’s flashy animation and puts it in colorful, 3D battle arenas, and it looks quite a bit more challenging than the flagship’s dancing spinoff. While we’re all waiting for Persona 6, it’s still nice to see the gang reunite, starting Friday, Nov. 17, on Xbox X/S/One, PlayStation 5/4, Nintendo Switch and PC.

    — Lou Kesten

    ___

    Catch up on AP’s entertainment coverage here: https://apnews.com/entertainment.

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  • SEE IT: Renee Rapp appears in trailer for ‘Mean Girls’ musical movie

    SEE IT: Renee Rapp appears in trailer for ‘Mean Girls’ musical movie

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    Renée Rapp is reprising her role as superficial teen queen Regina George in the big-screen adaptation of the “Mean Girls” musical that stormed Broadway in 2018.

    But she isn’t singing a word in the first trailer for the film, which arrives in theaters Jan. 12.

    Paramount Pictures released the trailer for the movie, promoted as Tina Fey’s “new twist on the modern classic” — the original 2004 film that made stars out of Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams and Amanda Seyfried.

    Angourie Rice stars as Cady Heron with Christopher Briney taking on the role of her object of desire, Aaron Samuels. Auli’i Cravalho portrays Regina’s ex-bestie and Cady’s new friend, Janice Ian. 2022 Tony Award nominee and Drama Desk Award winner Jaquel Spivey makes his feature film debut in his role as Janis’ bestie Damien.

     

    Directed by Arturo Perez Jr. and Samantha Jayne, the “Mean Girls” movie will also star Tim Meadows reprising his role from the 2004 film.

    Fey, who wrote and portrayed Ms. Norbury in the original screenplay for the original movie, co-wrote the 2018 Broadway musical, which garnered 12 Tony Award nominations.

    Jon Hamm, Jenna Fischer, and Busy Philipps join them among the adult cast.

    “Emily in Paris” star Ashley Park, who also starred in the 2018 Broadway production, will play North Shore High’s French teacher.

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    Karu F. Daniels

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  • The final ‘Yellowstone’ episodes delayed until late 2024 due to Hollywood strikes

    The final ‘Yellowstone’ episodes delayed until late 2024 due to Hollywood strikes

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    The final episodes of “Yellowstone” starring Kevin Costner will air in November 2024, a delay of a year

    ByThe Associated Press

    November 2, 2023, 1:41 PM

    This image released by Paramount Network shows Kelly Reilly, left, and Kevin Costner in a scene from “Yellowstone.” (Paramount Network via AP)

    The Associated Press

    The long-awaited final installment of “Yellowstone” — featuring Kevin Costner ’s final episodes — has been delayed until November 2024, the Paramount Network announced Thursday.

    Originally scheduled to return this month, Paramount says production was delayed by this year’s strikes by actors and screenwriters. The first half of the fifth season debuted in November 2022.

    Paramount also announced two spin-offs, a prequel tentatively called “1944” and a sequel to the current series, called “2024.” There’s no word yet on any casting for either series.

    “Yellowstone” has been a phenomenon for Paramount Network. The premiere episode of season five was watched by 12.1 million people, more than for any other scripted series airing at the time.

    CBS also began airing “Yellowstone” from the beginning this fall to help fill out its primetime schedule due to the strikes, and 21.6 million people tuned in to season one. It’s now begun airing season two.

    “Yellowstone” is a contemporary Western drama that follows the Duttons, a wealthy family in Montana that owns the largest ranch in the United States. Its patriarch is John Dutton III, played by Costner. It’s created by Taylor Sheridan.

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