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New York Times
27-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Dead Outlaw' Review: This Bandit Has Mummy Issues
Out on the plains, around a campfire, the violent drifter sings a beautiful song. 'The sky is black but filled with diamonds / You can almost hold them in your hands' goes the yearning lyric, with a fingerpicked accompaniment and twangs from a lap steel guitar. But listen a little longer. 'Up there God is preaching,' the man continues, bitterly. 'Laughing while you're reaching.' And then this amateur Nietzsche, wondering why he should care about a universe that evidently does not care about him, jumps up with his gun to go rob a train. That's the gorgeously perverse opening of 'Dead Outlaw,' the feel-good musical of the season, if death and deadpan feel good to you. As directed by David Cromer, in another of his daringly poker-faced stagings, the show is to Broadway what a ghost train is to an amusement park, with screams and laughs but much better music. That it should be on Broadway at all is a scream and a laugh. Developed by Audible, and performed last year at the 390-seat Minetta Lane Theater in Greenwich Village, 'Dead Outlaw' was a critical darling and insider hit, the kind that seems to do best doing least. No matter how cosmic its concerns, it was deliberately small — eight performers, five musicians, one set — and deliberately niche. It was not, in other words, for all markets. Yet here it is, surprisingly intact, at the 1,048-seat Longacre Theater, where it opened on Sunday in the biggest market of all. You know what else is surprisingly intact? That singing bandit. Born Elmer McCurdy in 1880, he spends his first 30 years on earth alive, the next 65 not. The embalmer did a good job. The funny-gross story is largely true, and feels even truer as pared to the bone by Itamar Moses in the musical's terse, brisk, sure-footed book. After that campfire prologue, and a barnburner of a welcoming number that establishes the theme — 'Your mama's dead / Your daddy's dead / Your brother's dead / And so are you' — the narrative cuts to Elmer's childhood in Maine, normal on the surface, wackadoodle underneath. Let's just say he already has mummy issues. Drawn to violence even at play, Elmer (Andrew Durand, terrific) is an angry soul, or rather, as a later song puts it, 'just a hole where a soul should be.' As he grows, he tries to fill that hole with alcohol, which can always be counted on to find the fights he's looking for. After one of these fights, he flees to a Kansas boomtown where he hopes he might live a normal life, with a job and a girl. Backed up by a narrator played with wolfish charm by Jeb Brown, he sings, 'Don't know what I want to be / Just as long as it ain't me.' But no, he can't even be that. The songs, by David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, set harsh ideas to rowdy music that somehow makes even nihilism catchy. The piquant result, as played with glee by the guitar-forward band, will remind you less of Yazbek's recent Broadway scores — 'The Band's Visit,' 'Tootsie,' 'Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown' and 'Dirty Rotten Scoundrels' — than of his 2000 debut, 'The Full Monty,' with its scrapy, scrappy grunge. Or perhaps it's his album 'Evil Monkey Man,' with Della Penna on guitars, that feels most like 'Dead Outlaw,' in a genre you might call cheerful melancholy. But after McCurdy is killed in a shootout in 1911, the polarities flip to melancholy cheer. The progress of his embalmed corpse across thousands of miles in seven decades with dozens of abuses is noted in scenes as sharp and vivid as the stations of the cross, albeit funnier. In the song 'Something for Nothing,' it dawns on the undertaker who performed the autopsy (Eddie Cooper) that he can monetize the abandoned corpse. (Two bits a peep.) In 1928, Elmer is the unlikely mascot (and sideshow attraction) for a cross-country foot race. Some years later, stored in the home of a B-movie director — a mummy makes a great extra in an exploitation flick — he becomes the confidant of the director's teenage daughter. 'I'm Millicent,' she says upon meeting him. 'But everyone calls me Millie.' Which in Julia Knitel's dry-as-dust performance is somehow hilarious. By the time Elmer winds up, in 1976, on the dissecting table of Thomas Noguchi, Los Angeles's so-called coroner to the stars, he is a horribly shriveled thing, with DayGlo red skin and deciduous fingers. (The mummy is the work of Gloria Sun, but for most of the second half of the show Durand plays his own corpse, beautifully.) And though Noguchi (Thom Sesma) may be the first man to treat postmortem Elmer with dignity, or at least with clinical propriety, he is like everyone else in getting weird pleasure from his encounter with the corpse, as we learn in his Sinatra-style 11 o'clock number. 'Dead Outlaw' is about that strange reaction. For a show content to offer itself as just a fabulously twisted yarn, that's in fact its big subject: How humans are excited, as if recognizing a long-lost relation, by their intermittent and usually unacknowledged adjacency to death. Cromer makes sure we acknowledge it though, in his uncanny pacing (including a 42-second eternity of silence) and in the work he draws from the designers. That effort is all of a piece: the musicians crammed onto their rotating coffin of a bandstand (sets by Arnulfo Maldonado), the sound (by Kai Harada) full of mournful train whistles and erratic heartbeats, the clothing (by Sarah Laux) rumpled as if for an eternity, the lighting (by Heather Gilbert) often vanishingly dim. So why with all that darkness is 'Dead Outlaw' so funny? Why does a long concrete chute sliding slowly onto the stage without any comment produce a huge laugh? At another moment, why does a safe that shoots off in the other direction do the same thing? In part it's the extreme discipline of the performances. Even playing as many as 13 characters each, the ensemble members (including Dashiell Eaves, Ken Marks and Trent Saunders as sad sacks, hucksters and Douglas MacArthur) never resort to shortcuts or winks. And in part it's the respect the authors show the audience by leaving us to assemble the jokes for ourselves, using the components they provide: contrast, surprise, pattern and disruption. Though that is already surpassingly rare on Broadway, even rarer is the way the show forces us, through pure entertainment and with no pathos, to think about things our intelligence busily helps us avoid. Why are we alive? As long as we are, what should we do about it? And do we have our papers in order? 'Dead Outlaw' does. It should have a hell of an afterlife.
Yahoo
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Texas A&M's Drag Ban Shows the Threat to Campus Free Speech Is Bipartisan
This week a federal judge stepped in to save a student-sponsored drag show at Texas A&M University. The need for that intervention shows that efforts to control on-campus speech, long decried by conservatives who complained of censorship by intolerant progressives, are a bipartisan phenomenon. Men have been dressing as women in theatrical performances for millennia—a history that includes ancient Greek dramas, 16th century productions of Shakespeare's plays, and popular films such as Hairspray, Tootsie, Mrs. Doubtfire, and White Chicks. But the continuation of that tradition was too much for the Texas A&M Board of Regents, which last month banned "drag shows that involve biological males dressing as women" from "special event venues." That decree put the kibosh to Draggieland, an annual event sponsored by the Texas A&M Queer Empowerment Council. The organization had already reserved the Rudder Theatre at the university's College Station campus and sold tickets for the show, which was scheduled for March 27. The theater previously had been available for a wide variety of events, including comedies, musicals, ballet, political speeches, and a fraternity-sponsored beauty pageant. Although the theater had never rejected a reservation request, the regents unanimously decided that Draggieland was beyond the pale because it was "likely to create or contribute to a hostile environment for women," thereby violating federal law and the university's "anti-discrimination policy." The regents also cited President Donald Trump's January 20 executive order aimed at "defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government," which Texas Gov. Greg Abbott had welcomed in a January 30 letter instructing state officials that their policies must conform with "the biological reality that there are only two sexes." The regents worried that allowing drag shows "may be considered promotion of gender ideology in violation of the Executive Order and the Governor's directive." These concerns were legally and logically frivolous. It was utterly implausible that an annual event attended only by paying patrons could result in harassment "severe" and "pervasive" enough to create a "hostile environment," and it was quite a stretch to suggest that cross-dressing in the context of a drag show denies the "biological reality" that Abbott is keen to uphold. Even as the regents worried that Draggieland promoted "gender ideology," they argued that it did not actually send any message at all—a point that was crucial to their position that canceling the event did not implicate the First Amendment. And even as they explicitly targeted a particular viewpoint, they denied that they were doing any such thing. U.S. District Judge Lee H. Rosenthal had little trouble seeing through the double-talk. In the decision that allowed Draggieland to proceed as planned, she noted that federal courts had almost uniformly recognized drag shows as a form of constitutionally protected expression. Rosenthal, who was appointed by George H.W. Bush in 1992, is hardly a "Radical Left Lunatic"—the label that Trump reflexively applies to judges who disagree with him. Nor is U.S. District Judge David Hittner, a Ronald Reagan appointee who ruled that a Texas law "touted as a 'Drag Ban'" was unconstitutional in a 2023 decision that Rosenthal cited. "In recent years, the commitment to free speech on campuses has been both challenging and challenged," Rosenthal noted. "There have been efforts from all sides of the political spectrum to disrupt or prevent students, faculty, and others from expressing opinions and speech that are deemed, or actually are, offensive or wrong." The victims of those efforts have included conservatives who condemn abortion, promote "a Christian perspective," or chafe at speech restrictions in the guise of fighting "discriminatory harassment"—exactly the tactic that Texas A&M attempted in this case. Instead of picking up the unconstitutional weapons that have been deployed against them, conservatives who want to ensure their own protection should take a page from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, which represented Draggieland's sponsor in this case, by embracing an even-handed application of free speech principles. © Copyright 2025 by Creators Syndicate Inc. The post Texas A&M's Drag Ban Shows the Threat to Campus Free Speech Is Bipartisan appeared first on
BBC News
03-03-2025
- Entertainment
- BBC News
Jessica Lange: 'At a certain age in the eyes of Hollywood you are finished'
Since her debut in the 1976 remake of King Kong, Jessica Lange has never shied away from hard work.A double Oscar winner for 1982's Tootsie, and 1994's Blue Sky, she's starred in roles as eclectic as The Postman Always Rings Twice, Cape Fear, Rob Roy, Big Fish and Broken television she played Joan Crawford in Feud, took home an Emmy for Grey Gardens and a stash of awards for one of the many roles she played in the American Horror Story she's also a familiar figure on the stage – in London and on Broadway – where she's appeared in classics A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie and Mother Play. And it's that ability to cross between stage and screen, classic plays and pulp fiction, which means that everything she attaches herself to is guaranteed a loyal latest film is an adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night. The Pulitzer Prize winning play was written in 1940 but not staged until after O'Neill's death in 1956.A semi-autobiographical work dedicated to his wife, O'Neill described it as "play of old sorrow, written in tears and blood.""It has not been an easy project to get off the ground," Lange admits."This is a throwback to another kind of filmmaking and another kind of storytelling but in my mind this is the greatest American play ever written."It has this universality, this emotional depth. You'd be hard pressed not to relate to something in it, especially in the world we live in now."She plays Mary Tyrone, the matriarch of an American family who's addicted to morphine since the birth of her sons, who struggles with loneliness and fears about her boys' health."Mary Tyrone is one of these parts which mean the world to me," says Lange."It may sound corny but I love her. It's thrilling as an actor to have a part like this." She's played the role twice before on stage and it's the 2016 Broadway version, directed by Jonathan Kent, which has been brought to the screen. Filming wrapped in 2022 but it's only now that Lange and co-star Ed Harris have been able to premiere it in Dublin and arrived at the Glasgow Film Festival on Friday just as Tim Roth, who appeared in the opening film Tornado, two actors were in the 1995 film Rob Roy, she as Mary McGregor, wife of Liam Neeson's Rob Roy, and he as the villainous Archibald while Roth's abiding memories were of his war with the Highland midgie, Lange recalls a much more pleasant experience."It was such a marvellous time, up in the Highlands where I'd never spent time before and it was extraordinarily beautiful," she says."I had the whole family here and the kids had a whole life of their own going on."It was a very special time and I liked the film. Some locations and some projects you think, 'oh Christ why did I bother doing that?' and others you think 'that was something very special'."Her next projects will also focus on women. She's set to star in the film adaptation of Joan Didion's 2005 memoir The Year of Magical she's also keen to explore an extraordinary chapter in the life of the German actress Marlene focuses on the period when she moved to America and took US citizenship and the programme will reunite her with Feud and American Horror Story creator Ryan Murphy. "At a certain age in the eyes of Hollywood you are finished," says Lange."We touched on this in Feud about Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. This was the time in Dietrich's life, when she segued into this weird Las Vegas act and the story is about her meeting a young composer who helps her launch a whole new career as a performer."That composer was Burt Bacharach and for five years their unlikely partnership revived her career."It's an interesting period," says Lange."It's also the time she goes back to Germany for the first time after the war, and takes her up to those years when she was living as a complete recluse in Paris."She hopes the project will be up and running before the end of the may have a reputation for writing off its older women, but Jessica Lange, at 75, is still fighting their corner.
The Guardian
02-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Relentless hunt for profits still not matching global popularity
When William Goldman wrote in his memoir Adventures in the Screen Trade that in Hollywood 'nobody knows anything', he coined a phrase that spoke directly to the chaos at the heart of the movie industry. It was a remark made in 1983, the year of classic movies such as Tootsie, Trading Places and Local Hero and an era when the box office was booming. The phrase came to mind this past week in the ballroom of the Peninsula hotel in London, where the great and the good and the rest of the global football industry gathered for the latest FT Business of Football Summit. Just like Hollywood in the early 80s, the football industry has a lot to shout about today. There is the success of the expanded Champions League (at least in the sense it has increased income for a greater number of clubs and nations). There is more power for clubs within the European system, a response in part to the Super League plot. There is the ubiquitous refrain that, in a world of limitless content, nothing does what live sport can. For the Premier League, it can even point to continued growth in the value of its media rights. Despite all this, the background noise was one of people scratching their heads. For all the brand awareness, the eyeballs and the solidarity payments, most in the business of football are struggling to make the whole thing profitable. When it comes to a diagnosis of the problems and the solutions that should be pursued, opinions differ wildly. Todd Boehly was the headline act and gave a distinctly low-energy tour around his thinking. For the Chelsea co-owner, the future is Netflix. Or at least, it is the Premier League striking a worldwide media rights deal with a global brand (like the MLS has with Apple or the NFL with DAZN). A one-stop shop for every fan across the world, the scale of the opportunity, Boehly thinks, means it has to be an option the league considers and is, in his opinion, 'where we're headed'. That is all well and good for the richest domestic football league in the world, but for others such an opportunity may not be viable. For clubs such as Marseille there need to be 'new ideas'. For their president, Pablo Longoria, that involves turning the Stade Vélodrome into a destination outside matches and making better use of 'digital opportunities'. For Sporting in Portugal and their executive André Bernardo, dynamic ticket pricing needs to be on the table. For Giorgio Chiellini, the legendary defender turned head of football institutional relations at Juventus, more games are inevitable, but the proceeds from those games should be shared. 'It's hard to go back and the direction of travel is more games,' he says. 'The only answer is more redistribution.' While every executive appears to have an idea on how to make things better, there is not a consensus on which approach is most likely to work. Equally, there is no agreement about the other end of the money puzzle: what regulations are necessary to create the holy grail of financial sustainability and competitive balance. A topic at the heart of the debate over the independent regulator for English football, it is something everyone in European football (including its American owners) says they want, but in their own way. For Richard Masters and the Premier League, the imposition of an independent regulator will be overly restrictive, with the 'unintended consequences' an even greater risk. For Charlie Marshall, chief executive of the European Club Association, which speaks for more than 700 men's and women's clubs, the concern is also 'over-regulation' and 'rules that don't allow for dynamism'. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion For Fausto Zanetton, an Inter board member and investor, however, the focus must be instead on stemming losses, and for Ian Lynam, a leading sports lawyer, concerns over tighter regulation are outweighed by the risks of laxer rules. 'You can't say that more competitive balance means a better league,' he says, 'but a complete absence of it leads to destruction.' The lack of agreement was striking, as was the tendency for speakers to use the same terms ('financial stability and competitive balance' among them) to mean very different things. This reflects the problems of a sport that has never been more globally popular but is not generating revenues to match. But perhaps it also reveals the complicated and complex reasons why investors get into football in the first place. For all that sportswashing and financialisation may play a part, listening to owners and executives you also hear very strong personal motivations: a desire for legacy, for excitement and, even, for affection. The human component in any business decision, especially a business as emotional as football, is perhaps undervalued.
Yahoo
27-02-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Gene Hackman and Wife Betsy Arakawa Found Dead Inside New Mexico Home
Gene Hackman and his wife Betsy Arakawa have been found dead at their home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In a statement to the BBC, the Santa Fe County Sheriff in New Mexico said: 'We can confirm that both Gene Hackman and his wife were found deceased Wednesday afternoon at their residence on Sunset Trail. More from The Hollywood Reporter Gene Hackman, Oscar-Winning Star of 'The French Connection,' Dies at 95 Teri Garr, Sweet Star of 'Tootsie' and 'Young Frankenstein,' Dies at 79 Elizabeth MacRae, Actress in 'Gomer Pyle: USMC' and 'The Conversation,' Dies at 88 'This is an active investigation — however, at this time we do not believe that foul play was a factor.' The bodies of Hackman and Arakawa were not formally identified until Thursday morning. According to a report in the Sante Fe New Mexican newspaper, Sheriff Adan Mendoza added that Hackman and Arakawa's dog was also found dead. Santa Fe County Sheriff's Public Information Officer Denise Avila told ABC News that the couple was found during a welfare check after their neighbor called in concerned about their well-being. No cause of death has been revealed yet. Hackman, 95, and Arakawa, 64, had lived in Santa Fe since the 1980s, and their home was located in a gated community northeast of the city. Hackman was a two-time Oscar-winning actor, known for playing tough guys and starred in such classic films as The French Connection, Bonnie and Clyde, I Never Sang for My Father, The Conversation, Hoosiers and Unforgiven. He retired from acting in his 70s, and was last seen on screen in the 2004 satirical comedy Welcome to Mooseport. Since he quit acting, Hackman had lived a quiet and private life in Santa Fe and rarely gave interviews. Hackman divorced his first wife Faye Maltese in 1986. He met Arakawa, a classically trained pianist, while she was working part-time in a California fitness center. Hackman and Arakawa moved to Sante Fe in the late 1980s, and married in 1991. She became stepmother to his three children Christopher, Elizabeth Jean and Leslie Anne. Arakawa was a private person, had no social media and gave no interviews. In interviews, Hackman, who pivoted away from acting to writing novels in the 2000s, very rarely spoke about Arakawa but did say that his wife helped him to hone his writing. Arakawa was reportedly born in Hawaii. Best of The Hollywood Reporter Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2025: Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar & SZA, Sabrina Carpenter and More Hollywood's Highest-Profile Harris Endorsements: Taylor Swift, George Clooney, Bruce Springsteen and More Most Anticipated Concert Tours of 2024: Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo and More
