One of the Jessies, in Waitress. Performers of the kind whose names run above the title on Broadway musicals often have a signature — an idiosyncrasy, some way of essentially playing themselves. Jessie Mueller’s performances diverge to the extent they seem to come from different people. She’s played characters drawn from everything from farce to biography, and sung music that ranges from scatting to balladry.
In Carousel, opening April 12, Mueller plays the innocent Julie Jordan, who falls for the rough Billy Bigelow.
Eurovision doesn’t do subtle. When the first Eurovision contest was held, in May 1956, founder Marcel Bezençon couldn’t have imagined his soon-to-be wildly famous Pan-European song competition would one day give us the likes of dancing grannies, rapping astronauts, and the almighty Ukrainian drag queen Verka Serduchka. But as the contest for catchy three-minute tunes has grown, so has its propensity for outlandish costumes, staging, and choreography. As many of its most unforgettable moments prove, some of the best Eurovision competitors involve one country submitting a performance with the simple hope that millions of others will either tap their feet or get the joke.
The other day, I was visiting the offices of a certain publication to get an early listen of a heavily anticipated album (no spoilers!), when an editor popped his head into the listening room: “This sounds like the Tough Alliance!” One of the twentysomethings in the room quizzically asked, “Who are the Tough Alliance?” With mock astonishment, the editor implored her to check out the Swedish agit-pop duo’s brief, beautiful discography first thing after work.
Ye. Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, is facing a mountain of lawsuits over Yeezy business practices, sexual harassment claims, alleged use of racist, inflammatory language and berating employees because of their various identities, and the handling of the controversial school he founded in 2022, Donda Academy. While erratic behavior and a litany of legal complaints are nothing new for the rapper, his recent batch of lawsuits comes amid backlash over the public antisemitic and anti-Black comments West made in October 2022, forcing the fashion world to largely abandon the artist, his brand partnerships to crumble, and his overall stock to plummet.
Michael Showalter and David Wain’s They Came Together is meant to be a parody of romantic comedies — that’s comedies, plural — but its premise is even more specific: A candy store competing with a larger candy conglomerate, a man and a woman who initially hate each other, a severe Upper West Side fetish (and the rest of NYC being a “character” in the film). Yes, they’re doing You’ve Got Mail, and practically every big ha-ha moment is AOL-related; there’s even a Starbucks dis.
It’s been over a year since we have huddled together inside the human aquarium of Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley), deep in the basement of his wife’s bakery, pondering the lengths to which any (in)sane person would go for True Love™. Netflix has divided the upcoming fourth season of You into two installments, the first of which will be released on February 9 — just in time for Valentine’s Day! If you’re thinking you can’t possibly recall what went down in Madre Linda and where we last left our deep-voiced, brooding psycho killer, fret not.
These two… yikes. The second-season finale of You aired in December 2019. Given everything that has occurred since then — an election and an insurrection, fires and floods, a literal plague — it’s completely understandable if your fragile brain has not held onto the finer plot details of this gloriously deranged, deeply twisted love story. With Netflix dropping season three this Friday, it is my sacred duty to recap my recaps so you can show up knowing your stairwell urchins from your balcony sprites, your blunt-force traumas from your emotional stranglings, your successful homicides from your whoopsies-she-was-buried-alives.
Of course, you remember Joe Goldberg, but do you remember precisely how many people he killed in just ten short episodes of television? If you’re the kind of person whose idea of holiday fare is less “Candace Cameron Bure realizes she should never have wasted her life working a Soulless Job in the Big City and must return to her hometown to decorate gingerbread houses with Stock-Photo Handsome Man” and more “semi-ironic psychosexual thriller about a low-voiced serial killer’s obsession with women he barely knows,” then the return of You to Netflix is nothing short of a Hanukkah miracle.
Comedian Vera Drew’s debut film is radical, moving, and definitely not affiliated with the DCEU or Warner Bros. in any official capacity. Last Friday night at the IFC Center, a line snaked all the way to the Papaya Dog on the corner of West 4th Street, full of freaks and geeks bouncing with excitement for the 9:45 screening of comedian Vera Drew’s debut feature, The People’s Joker. The sold-out screening before it had gone a bit long; Jeremy O.
Spend 47 days in the art world with Seen. Spend 47 days in the art world with Seen. 15 Orient is both the name and the address of a gallery inside an inconspicuous Brooklyn home located near the Graham Avenue L train station. Its proprietors, Paul Gondry and Shelby Jackson, first repurposed the living room into an exhibition space to showcase their own work back in 2016 and since they’ve mounted nine more shows, mostly by their artist friends.