Category: Entertainment

Ahead of tonight’s final “Cats: The Jellicle Ball” show, composer Andrew Lloyd Webber is speaking out about how producing on Broadway has become “unsustainable.”

“I’m gutted that the wonderful Broadway production of ‘Cats: The Jellicle Ball’ is closing today,” Lloyd Webber wrote on Instagram. “I’m immensely proud to have been a part of an incredibly daring production whose cast and creative team broke new ground on Broadway and gave 17 actors their Broadway debut.”

He also took the opportunity to call out the larger issues affecting the industry: “Maybe the show’s closing just might be remembered as the moment that caused everyone involved with Broadway to come to their senses and address the unsustainable cost of producing and running any new show now on The Great White Way, let alone doing new work.”

“The Jellicle Ball” breathed new life into “Cats” by restaging the popular show as a fierce competition between drag performers. Webber’s original show premiered on Broadway back in 1982 and ran through 2000, winning seven Tony awards. In 2019, it was infamously turned into a critically panned film from “The King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper.

But despite the Tonys awarding “The Jellicle Ball” three awards for best costume design, best direction of a musical and best choreography, strong reviews and online buzz didn’t stop the show from closing five months before planned at the Broadhurst Theatre.

“The Jellicle Ball” started as an off-Broadway production in June 2024. When it premiered on Broadway back in April, the show was initially earning between $900,000 to $1 million a week. But those numbers dropped sharply after “The Jellicle Ball” lost the best revival of a musical Tony Award to “Ragtime.”

This isn’t the first time Lloyd Webber has spoken out about the show’s premature end. In July, he wrote on Instagram: “Without action, Broadway risks rivaling Hollywood’s empty soundstages: increasingly dark theatres where bold new work once lived.”

“The painful truth is that, with things as they are, bringing almost any new show to Broadway makes little financial sense,” Lloyd Webber continued. “The costs are immense. Creators, writers and directors are often forced to accept minimal royalties simply to get work staged.”

Next up, Lloyd Webber and “Sunset Blvd.” director Jamie Lloyd are working on bringing “Evita” with Rachel Zegler to Broadway after its successful West End run.

For the opening night of the 24th annual Martha’s Vineyard African American Film Festival (MVAAFF), “Children of Blood and Bone” director Gina Prince-Bythewood and star Thuso Mbedu shared never-before-seen clips of the forthcoming African fantasy film and dished about making the movie.

“Obviously films like this don’t get made very often,” Prince-Bythewood told “The View’s” Sunny Hostin during the Q&A. “They say 70% of directing is casting, and that’s what this was. To be able to put together a cast like this. There are no skips. Everybody is amazing. … And as I was working on the script, I started to envision people that I wanted.”

Based on Tomi Adeyemi’s acclaimed 2018 novel of the same name, Paramount’s “Children of Blood and Bone” was shot on location in South Africa, which subbed in for the fictional kingdom of Orïsha, where magic has been prohibited. There, the logline explains, “a young woman goes on a quest to reclaim the magic that was violently stolen from her people. She and her brother ally with the daughter and son of the king to fight back against his brutal rule.”

Mbedu (“The Underground Railroad,” “The Woman King”) stars as Zélie Adebola, the young woman in question, who has the power to command the undead. Starring alongside her are Damson Idris as Prince Inan, Amandla Stenberg as Princess Amari, Tosin Cole as Zélie’s brother Tzain and Regina King as Queen Nehanda. Lashana Lynch, Idris Elba, Cynthia Erivo and Viola Davis round out the A-list cast.

Mbedu was thrilled to return to her native South Africa to work, and she began preparing for the role — including her stunt training — nearly one year before filming began. “I leaned into the source material a lot,” she said. “I don’t know how many times I read and reread the book, putting it next to the screenplay.” (Prince-Bythewood and Adeyemi share screenplay credit.)

“Tomi created a massive world, a huge world,” Mbedu continued. “We don’t have enough hours to put everything on screen. So finding the moments where, even if we’re not seeing it on screen, how am I bringing the reality of the history or the backstory of what we might have meant into the next moment.”

Though the film does not debut until Jan.15, 2027, Adeyemi, who also served as an executive producer on the film, recently announced that she will not watch the finished product. On social media, Adeyemi shared that she left the “Children of Blood and Bone” set “hyperventilating and sobbing” and that she is “still being antagonized behind the scenes.” Neither Prince-Bythewood nor Mbedu directly addressed Adeyemi’s claims at MVAAFF, but the director of “The Woman King” did speak positively about the novelist and the world she crafted.

“Tomi’s a genius,” Prince-Bythewood said. “It’s a beautiful book, incredible characters. And this time when I read it, I was so connected to Lali’s character. And this young woman who was fighting to bring magic back- and we know what magic means for us. And her resilience, her fight and her search for purpose just spoke to me.”
​
The “Love and Basketball” director also spoke about casting Stenberg as Princess Amari. When the actress’ hiring was announced, there was an outcry over allegations of colorism due to Stenberg’s mixed-race status and lighter skin tone. Additionally, in a now-deleted TikTok video [via the L.A. Times], Adeyemi posted what appeared to be a group chat that included Stenberg. The author wrote, “Do not ever use my name in an interview or video again. Do not text me. Do not call me” and appeared to block the actor. Prince-Bythewood did not address the drama onstage.

“I’ve admired [Amandla’s] work since ‘Colombiana,’” Prince-Bythewood told Hostin and the MVAAFF audience. “But I auditioned every young actor for that role of Amari, and Amandla took it, grabbed it.”
​
Though the “Children of Blood and Bone” premiere is still several months away, “The Old Guard” director is content to let the work speak for itself until then.

“You’re going to feel every human emotion in this,” she said. “You’re going to be angry, you’re going to laugh, you’re going to cry, you’re going to dance, you’re going to cheer, you’re going to feel hope at the end. And that’s why I hope we go to movies, to feel something, to be moved. So I’m so excited about that. And as we know, these films are rare. I’m so proud of this movie, so excited about this movie and the thing that it can do for us when we see ourselves in this way.”

Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine has prompted a wealth of urgent nonfiction filmmaking documenting the harsh realities of life under siege, but comparatively little dramatic storytelling — a space that the new German-Ukrainian production “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” occupies with bold formal imagination and a commitment to illuminating lives neglected in wider views of the conflict. A timely collaboration between German director Isabelle Stever and her wife, Ukrainian screenwriter Anna Melikova, the film is an intimate, bracingly intersectional relationship drama centered on a queer Kyiv couple whose attempts to flee to safety are complicated by local prejudice: a reminder that selective discrimination can still endure within a collectively persecuted population.

Premiering in the main competition at Locarno, this is a warmer, more humane work than Stever’s last film, the coolly provocative 2022 incest drama “Grand Jeté.” If that film could travel, even securing U.S. distribution with Altered Innocence, there’s no reason to think “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” — with its topical subject matter and emotional accessibility, plus the imprimatur of producer Tom Tykwer — won’t gain wider exposure still. Paris-based outfit Outplay Films, which specializes in LGBTQ-themed titles, picked up the film for international sales shortly before its Locarno premiere; queer-oriented distributors and programmers will take particular interest in a work that would stand out for its candid depiction of transgender marriage even without its complicating wartime context.

What Stever’s latest shares with “Grand Jeté” is a crisp aesthetic rigor that some viewers may find distancing despite the immediacy of the drama, though it has ample sensory rewards. The director and DP Volodymyr Usyk (who shot the celebrated 2024 wartime doc “Songs of Slow Burning Earth”) rarely permit us a close, unobstructed view of their principal characters, Olya (Tania Myronyshena) and Oleh (Markus Bright), often shooting them from afar in slivered, reflective surfaces, over another person’s shoulder or through staggered doorways. Actually seeing these lives takes patience and some concentration; in the unforgiving world of the film, many choose not to.

It opens on a conversation — viewed through a boxy apartment window at night, and later revisited on the other side of the glass — that finds Olya and Oleh’s longtime relationship at breaking point. “I entered a heterosexual relationship against my will,” Olya seethes to her partner. “You promised me you’d stay the same person.” Gradually, their history emerges: They met and got together as women in Kyiv’s small but throbbing queer scene, before Oleh came out as a trans man.

That hasn’t weakened their bond; indeed, Olya even proposed marriage to him, to the surprise and delight of her conservative suburban family, who take it as given that their new in-law is cisgender. (Children are expected in short order; Olya tends to swerve the subject.) But Oleh’s transition did more or less coincide with the Russian invasion, which has severely hindered his ability to live freely and openly at a time when men are expected to serve their country in the armed forces.

Medical certification of Oleh’s gender dysphoria cuts little ice with the military, who exercise institutional transphobia while taking him at his word regarding his identity. The couple’s plans to cross the border are thus mired in an absurdist tangle of administrative contradictions, and through the prism of Oleh’s impossible bind — in the eyes of the law, he’s at once recognized and rejected as the man he’s fought to be — Melikova’s script thoughtfully addresses how masculinity is defined and confined in the national psyche.

Both non-professionals who bring a degree of lived experience to their characterizations, Myronyshena and Bright underplay effectively, communicating through finely expressive gestures and mirrored body language, and bringing an in-the-moment rawness to their frankly intimate, occasionally confrontational dialogue. “I Rarely Wake Up Dreaming” isn’t fashioned as a performance showcase, however: The actors often feel another dynamic element in Stever’s complex mise-en-scène, sometimes tellingly cramped in Usyk’s tight, stylized compositions, or muted in Andreas Hildebrandt’s hauntingly sparse sound design, which is given no score to contend with. There are passages of bravura technique here: One dazzling tracking shot spans the crowded, kinetic turmoil of the border in wartime, flooded with the red and blue lights of state authorities — visually redolent of neon-streaked queer club nights from the couple’s recent past, but a whole life away.

A third-act development that again redefines the couple’s place in heteronormative society is somewhat rushed, leaning too heavily into melodrama to be wholly convincing. But it’s moving just the same, underlining the filmmakers’ interest in unorthodox found-family structures, and their foregrounding of minorities whose rights are often the first to be disregarded in times of national crisis. As the conflict in Ukraine trudges on, Stever’s stark, surprising film is a reminder that we’ve barely skimmed the surface of the country’s war stories.

Indian National Award-winning filmmaker Srijit Mukherji is bringing to screen the making of Satyajit Ray‘s “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne,” one of Indian cinema’s most celebrated classics, in a new film titled “Maharaja Tomare Selam.”

Jeetu Kamal, Ritwik Bhowmik, Rudranil Ghosh, Satakshi Nandy, Sairity Banerjee and Arijit Dutta star in the film, produced by Hoichoi Studios and Friends Communication in association with Piyali Films Pvt. Ltd, the original producer of “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne.”

“Maharaja Tomare Selam,” which is also the title of a song in “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne,” centers on Ray himself – the pressures he faced and the choices he made against the backdrop of a politically charged Kolkata – as he willed “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne” into existence. Principal photography will commence in January 2027.

Released on May 8, 1969, “Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne” followed two inept village musicians, played by Tapen Chatterjee and Rabi Ghosh, who are banished from their homes and granted magical powers by the King of Ghosts, which they use to avert a war between two rival kingdoms. Beneath the fantasy, the film carried social and political undertones around class and the role of art, a thread Ray sharpened into direct satire of authoritarian rule with his 1980 sequel, “Hirak Rajar Deshe.” His son, Sandip Ray, closed out the trilogy with “Goopy Bagha Phire Elo” in 1992.

Ray built a body of work over more than three decades that includes “Pather Panchali” and “Charulata” among its landmarks. In 1992, weeks before his death, he received an honorary Academy Award for lifetime achievement, becoming the first Indian filmmaker so honored.

“I am just trying to tell the incredible true story of how one of the greatest classics of Indian cinema, ‘Goopy Gyne Bagha Byne,’ was conceived and made,” Mukherji said.

Mukherji’s own credits include “Chotushkone,” for which he won the Indian National Film Award for best director, along with “Jaatishwar” and “Baishe Srabon.” He is known for his engagement with Bengali culture and storytelling, and with “Maharaja Tomare Selam,” he takes on a pivotal episode in the country’s film history.

“Maharaja Tomare Selam” joins a run of Bengali films that have turned the camera on Ray’s own legacy. Anik Dutta’s “Aparajito” dramatized the making of “Pather Panchali,” with Kamal playing a character modeled on Ray, while Kaushik Ganguly’s “Apur Panchali” traced the later life of Subir Banerjee, the child actor who played Apu in that film. Mukherji’s debut feature “Autograph” is an homage to Ray’s “Nayak.”

Monica Bellucci’s sneer is a thing of wonder, so why have so few directors used it properly? When allowed full rein to her sense of irony, as given her by Giovanni Tortorici in “Ketticè,” Bellucci has few equals in her ability to project self-aware drama queen with just the right dose of camp icon. Hers is a supporting role, as the quasi-caricatured bourgeois mother of a far more authentically drawn teenager, but the young writer-director deliberately sets genuine adolescent nihilism off against the stereotyped adult world, rejuvenating a time-tested formula with the story of an aimless rich kid that feels anything but aimless.

As proven with his terrific debut “Diciannove,” Tortorici masters the directionless depths of the under-20 set, and while some may protest the shallow depiction of working-class kids as opposed to their better-off peers, few will gainsay his thoroughgoing feel for character and mood as conveyed via camera angles and space.

The evocative voice of Lebanese singer Oumeima El Khalil accompanies a panoramic view of Palermo, her song’s dissociation from the locale and its simultaneous, unexpected suitability working in ways akin to the soundtracks of Luca Guadagnino, Tortorici’s mentor and producer. It’s 2012, Facebook is as indispensable as an iPhone 5, and Giulio (Salvatore Gallina) is on the verge of failing most of his subjects. In the first of several amusing slow-mo pans, the camera moves from fed-up teacher (Davide Cirri) across to bored witless students, continuing its sluggish progress outside the building and into the carpark, resisting normal speed until Giulio starts the ignition and “You Spin Me Right Round” pours forth from the radio.

This kind of playful yet expressive use of visual language is what makes “Ketticè” such a fun watch: When Giulio gets in his car right after kissing his girlfriend Elena (Ida Poerio), the camera sits on the floor to make the 16-year-old look like a big man, but after receiving a break-up text, the viewpoint switches to eye-level and returns him to normal teen-size. Not that he’s heartbroken, though the new angle makes it easier to see how he forces out a tear, takes a selfie, and posts it on Facebook.
 
The only real hardship Giulio faces is figuring out what he wants to do when he grows up. He lives with his parents, Vittoria (Bellucci) and Antonio (Tommaso Cristiano Wirz), in the family’s historic palazzo, and attends a private school where small classes make for tight-knit camaraderie but don’t guarantee that any learning sinks in. Neither do his grandmother’s attempts to impart culture, observed in a hilarious dinner table scene during which Vittoria launches acidic barbs at her impervious mother-in-law (Stefania Raffadali) while passive Antonio lets it all wash over him.
 
As bored at home as he is in school, Giulio becomes fascinated by Ketty, aka Ketticè (Rachele Testagrossa), a girl from the wrong side of the tracks with a reputation for provoking catfights. Confident, street-smart and far removed from his world of privilege, Ketty knows where to score the best weed in town, and thanks to Giulio’s generous allowance, the two head to Palermo’s Bonagia district where he drops €20 a day buying smokes from a guy dealing in a square presided over by a statue of Padre Pio. It’s hard to say whether Giulio becomes more dependent on the pot or the feeling of very mild danger he gets from hanging out with a girl whose hard-edged reputation is an attention magnet, but either way, everyone’s beginning to notice.

There’s an obvious contrast between Giulio’s world and Ketty’s. In his circle, where it’s not unusual for a 14-year-old to have their own car, the antics of the lower classes are a spectator sport, shared across Facebook posts and then forgotten. They’re protected by their parents’ money, whereas Ketty has no prospects apart from more bitch-slap fights with girls whose cheap makeup and nail extensions are their most distinguishing features. Whether deliberate or not, scenes with Ketty’s regular crowd have a built-in sniggering element not felt with the private school kids who don’t need to posture or defend themselves. We certainly laugh with Vittoria’s exasperated outbursts, but Bellucci’s deliciously ironic flamboyance means we don’t laugh at her in the way we do when Ketty’s hard-ass rivals seek revenge.

All too often when directors seek to get inside an adolescent’s world, the results unintentionally highlight the psychological distance between filmmaker and subject, but both here and in “Diciannove,” Tortorici understands that endless ennui isn’t the same thing as permanent emptiness, and angst isn’t the most interesting thing about a teen. Clearly he listens: to his actors (many of whom are first-timers), to younger generations around him, to the honest memories of his own youth. “Ketticè” shows how he’s also confidently playing more with the grammar of cinema, putting it to use according to character and mood, and in so doing solidifying the promise of his debut.