Category: Entertainment

The square and canals of Venice are famously packed with shorts-and-sneaker-sporting tourists in late summer and even historic homes on small cobblestone streets have been converted to Airbnbs. But across the water, on the barrier island of Lido, Laura Dern is chic in pale rose Prada, Rebecca Donaldson is turning heads in shimmering champagne and silver sequins, Claire Foy has chosen long scarlet opera gloves to match her ruched red gown and John Malkovich is sporting an Elizabethan ruffled collar with his Dior suit.

The Venice Film Festival is in full swing, and in addition to viewing Danny Boyle’s Murdoch saga Ink, there’s a lot to enjoy in the area — whether during the festival (assuming you’ve made arrangements far in advance) or on your next visit.

Rather than shuttling back and forth to Venice proper, you can stay right in Lido at The Excelsior, which was the scene of the first International Film Festival in 1932, and now hosts the opening ceremony on its beach as well as the opening and closing galas. It’s also less than a five-minute stroll from Sala Grande, where the screening of Lance Oppenheim’s Primetime was held.

The hotel’s entrance is lined with blown-up photos of legendary figures, from Greta Garbo to Federico Fellini. Water taxis that cross the Venetian Lagoon en route to the festival stop at the hotel’s dock, so even relaxing in the lobby puts you in the middle of some spectacular arrivals, and you can’t underestimate the convenience of having a room there in which to shower, change and nap. 

The Excelsior just reopened this past May after a major renovation, including a redesign of its nearly 200 rooms and suites and a new terrace restaurant called Amù Venice. The Iconic Hotels & Resorts property also has a spiffed-up beach club with private cabanas and views of the Adriatic — a perfect addition for the only five-star resort in the area that’s on the sand. Apart from sneaking in a dip in the large heated pool, guests can participate in stand-up paddle boarding, water skiing, boating and tennis.  Massages can be arranged in-room with the sea as a backdrop, and if you want to hop over to Harry’s Bar, the hotel has complimentary water taxis.

Near Lido is another island in the Venetian Lagoon, the 15-acre San Clemente, that is entirely occupied by a hotel, the Kempinski San Clemente Palace. It was built in a restored 12th century monastery that still houses a Medieval church. Each year people seeking a little privacy choose this spot, which has played host to Johnny Depp and Jennifer Lopez, as well as events for Armani and AmfAR.

The elegant, expansive rooms are palatial, with soaring ceilings, huge windows overlooking Mediterranean gardens or the canal, gilded mirrors and terrazzo floors. There is a large, tranquil heated pool surrounded by lush grounds, along with tennis and volleyball courts, a spa, and a waterside golf training area. The hotel has regular art and sculpture exhibitions, as well as outdoor screenings. There is a complimentary shuttle boat to Venice that runs all day, but if you want to remain on San Clemente, the main restaurant, Acquerello, sits on the lagoon and serves modern Venetian cuisine, with such dishes as scallops with sunchoke cream and tapioca chips, and lagoon spider crab with artichokes and lime bisque. For a more casual meal, diners can head poolside to La Specialità, which makes a variety of thin-crust pizza as well as salads, pastas and fish. 

Wherever you stay, it’s well worth booking excursions with SeeItaly, which can upgrade your trip with a 60-meter wooden sailing yacht that was a favorite of Maria Callas. There is no noise of a motor and a Michelin starred chef whips up dishes while you cruise the canals. The company can also curate other experiences including tours of local palazzos, intimate rooftop dinners overlooking the Grand Canal and appointments with local artisans, where visitors can have jewelry, scarves and shoes made. Fans of Eyes Wide Shut can even design their own Venetian masks.

Beloved Welsh musician Tom Jones has claimed he’s been fired from The Voice U.K. over “financial difficulty with insurance.”

The “It’s Not Unusual” and “What’s New Pussycat?” singer has featured on the British competition show on and off since it first aired on the BBC in 2012. Having been on the coaching panel for three years, Jones took a break before rejoining when The Voice U.K. moved to ITV, where it’s now produced by Lifted Entertainment, an ITV Studios company.

On Instagram on Tuesday, the 86-year-old said he has been let go as a judge and criticized the limited role he was offered instead. “To be clear, I did not want to leave The Voice as I love the show and really appreciate the audience,” he wrote. “ITV made this decision — obviously a while ago, and I was told just recently. The reason given is because of a financial difficulty with insurance.”

“They now say in the press they wanted to ‘refresh’ the show, and with a new coaching line-up there wouldn’t be a chair for me,” he continued. “They are offering a much-reduced role where I would make an appearance but without being actually involved from the start, and I’m not thrilled about that. So the only thing I know right now, is that there’s never a good time to fire an 86-year-old who’s still pretty good at his job.”

Jones’ post immediately earned hundreds of comments of support, including from English singers Olly Murs and Anne-Marie and fellow Voice coach Will.i.am.

“Love ya TJ,” said Murs. “I know how much that show means to you mate. Absolute legend and one of the very best to ever sit in that chair.” U.K. presenter Carol Vorderman wrote under the post: “Terrible decision [in my honest opinion]… I saw you perform at Car Fest and you remain simply incredible and A LEGEND. You ARE The Voice.”

ITV, which has yet to comment on the alleged firing and replacement judge, has also not responded to The Hollywood Reporter‘s request for comment.

Jones is currently appearing on season nine of The Voice U.K., in which amateur singers — some of whom are incredibly talented — perform while the judges’ backs are turned. Those who are successful are coached through to the final. Jones has won the show three times with his mentees.

His fellow coaches include McFly members Tom Fletcher and Danny Jones as well as Kelly Rowland.

The most moving relationship in Tenzing, Jennifer Peedom’s new narrative feature about the mountaineer, is not the one between Tenzing Norgay (Genden Phuntsok) and Edmund Hillary (Tom Hiddleston), who in 1953 would become the first humans to summit what the British call Mount Everest. It isn’t the hard-won mutual respect between Tenzing and his fellow Sherpa, Pasang (Tenzin Jigmey), nor his fierce love for his wife, Dawa (Thinley Lamo).

It’s the one between Tenzing and the mountain itself, known to him as Chomolungma. Where the Europeans see a battle to be won, and even the other Sherpa see a terrifying sacred force, Tenzing sees a heavenly mother — smiling down on him since childhood, bearing witness to his heartbreaks in adulthood, calling him now to come home.

It’s a subtle but lovely reframing of Norgay and Hillary’s historic climb, from an act of conquest to one of pure, spiritual love. But it’s not quite enough to free Tenzing as a whole from the usual sturdy-but-staid biopic formula. With its good-hearted heroes and pretty (but rarely breathtaking) landscapes, the Apple release is plenty likable, but also plenty forgettable.

The script, by Luke Davies, loosely braids three different timelines. In the 1920s, Tenzing is a little boy (Samdrup Dorje Lama, adorable) in a remote Tibetan village, fascinated by the foreigners (including Johnny Flynn as George Mallory) who’ve come to scale the mountain he thinks of as his.

Some years later, he’s a young man (Tenzin Dalha, gentle and sweet) headed to Darjeeling with his wife (Thinley Lamo, even gentler and sweeter) in hopes of getting a job as a Sherpa guiding European expeditions up Chomolungma. (In a respectful nod to Tenzing’s culture, the peak is almost never referred to as “Everest” in the movie.)

In the last and most central storyline, an all-grown-up Tenzing has been hired as head Sherpa for England’s latest attempt to complete the ascent — the one we know, but Tenzing does not yet, will become the first successful one. The movie follows the team through perilous terrain, grueling physical challenges and interpersonal disagreements and friendships over the course of the nearly two-and-a-half month trek.

Tenzing’s more spiritual perspective as a Sherpa is a welcome change of pace from the typically Eurocentric one represented by characters like expedition leader John Hunt (Willem Dafoe), who refers to the final ascent as “the Siege of Everest.” When Hillary bonds with Tenzing over their mutual admiration of Mallory, referring to the late explorer as “the reason we’re all here,” Tenzing amiably replies, “I was already here.” And when other Sherpas gripe to Tenzing that the Europeans are just playing at being heroes — they’re the ones doing most of the hard and dangerous work of lugging heavy cargo up this impossible mountain — we understand they have a point, even if Tenzing manages to calm their disgruntlement in the moment.

The trek is literally a matter of life or death, the pillowy pristine landscape hiding all manner of potential traps: snowdrifts that give way under one’s feet, impossibly sheer cliffs, air too thin and cold to breathe in without masks and oxygen tanks. It is surprising, then, that Tenzing rarely manages to quicken the pulse, to make you gasp with fear or applaud their daring.

You can chalk up some of this lack of tension to the fact that we already know how this story ends; even when Hillary suddenly finds himself dangling over a seemingly bottomless crevasse or Tenzing briefly passes out from lack of oxygen, it’s not as if there’s any question they’ll dust themselves off and press on.

But the bigger issue is that Tenzing keeps its title character and his closest ally (to say nothing of all the smaller characters around them) at a reverent distance, rendering them in broad strokes rather than fine shading. Phuntsok and Hiddleston are pleasant to watch and share a nice, friendly chemistry, with Tenzing as the relatively more excitable one and Hillary as the quieter one. But I couldn’t tell you what brings them together, other than a vague understanding that they both love climbing and both feel like outsiders within the team.

As an individual, Tenzing’s defining passions are his mountain, his wife and his daughters, seemingly in that order, but the only one of those three passions to get any real complexity is the mountain. His wife is an eternally supportive angel whose sole desire is to see Tenzing happy, their children are much the same, and the relationships between all of them are perfectly happy and perfectly nonspecific. (The only thing we learn about Hillary, randomly, is that he is unmarried but does have a lot of bees back in New Zealand. Sure!)

If there’s anything flawed or complicated or even slightly offbeat about its title character, Tenzing isn’t letting on. If there have ever been any hurdles in his path he’s struggled (or god forbid, failed) to overcome, Tenzing never shows us that either.

This Tenzing only seems to encounter minor blips. He bemoans that the British would never agree to make him a full climbing member of the team (as opposed to a lower-status Sherpa), and then a few scenes later Hunt agrees to do just that with a minimum of fuss. The tension between Tenzing and the other Sherpas, who regard him as an outsider because he’s technically from another tribe, simmers intriguingly under the surface for most of the climb, only to be healed for good with a single friendly conversation.

Tenzing is ostensibly about a man who’s overcome incredible obstacles to achieve something no other human ever had before; indeed, that great feat is the only reason for this movie to exist at all. Instead, accidentally, it tells the story of a man for whom obstacles just seem to fall out of the way at the slightest prodding. Tenzing’s historic ascent begins to look straightforward and inevitable, a matter of preordained fate, rather than one brought about by his choices, his efforts, his courage, his determination.

Maybe that makes the movie easier to swallow — something you can fire up on Apple on a lazy Friday night before bed. But I’d be hard-pressed to say it does its fearless subject justice.

Producer Scott Rudin is back on Broadway this season with the boldest works of his comeback thus far: a critically acclaimed play about four convicted sex offenders and a starry, but nearly wordless play, Small Mouth Sounds, with Julia Roberts and Paul Rudd. 

The play, Downstate, written by Bruce Norris, premiered in 2018 at Steppenwolf Theatre Company and Off-Broadway at Playwrights Horizons in 2022, where it received positive reviews. Joe Mantello, who has led all of Rudin’s Broadway projects after his comeback, will also direct this piece, which runs this fall at the Booth Theatre starting Oct. 17, ahead of a Nov. 15 opening. 

Small Mouth Sounds, written by Bess Wohl, last season’s Pulitzer Prize winner for Liberation, will run this spring, starring Roberts and Rudd as well as Martin Freeman, Greta Lee, Sarah Paulson and Isaac Powell. The comedic play, which is set at a silent retreat, has the unique convention of having the majority of its characters barely speak, and rather rely on their physicality. It comes to Broadway after well-reviewed runs Off-Broadway in 2015 and 2016. 

Mantello also directs this play, which is set to begin performances Feb. 18, 2027 at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, ahead of a March 18 opening. 

Downstate has previously attracted some controversy for taking on the topic of pedophilia, as one of the sex offenders, who lives with the others in a group home, is confronted by a former student. Sen. Ted Cruz responded to a positive review of the play in The Washington Post by tweeting “So now the corporate media is praising pedophilia,” alongside other critiques from right-wing commentators. 

The cast of Downstate will feature The Bear’s Liza Colón-Zayas, K. Todd Freeman and Francis Guinan, both of whom appeared in the original Chicago cast, Cassie Beck, Adrian Martinez, Al’Jaleel McGhee, Thomas Sadoski and Ivy Wolk. Rudin made the rare choice to tease the play, and its director, on signage that appeared above the Booth Theatre last month. He is producing both plays with Barry Diller. 

The announcements follow Rudin’s return to Broadway producing last season with Death of A Salesman, starring Laurie Metcalf and Nathan Lane, which won six Tony Awards, including best revival of a play, as well as Little Bear Ridge Road, last fall. 

Rudin also teased that he will present another work this season starring Metcalf which is yet to be announced.

Rudin had stepped away from producing in 2021, after a Hollywood Reporter story detailed multiple claims from Rudin’s former employees of bullying and verbal abuse as well as throwing objects at staff. This also sparked a protest on Broadway, and Rudin’s resignation from the Broadway League. While there has been some behind-the-scenes tension, there has been little outward pushback to his return to the industry.

Throughout his career, Rudin has been known for bringing newer works from modern playwrights to Broadway, to varying degrees of success,alongside big titles, like Death of a Salesman or Hello, Dolly! with Bette Midler. This time, in an effort to get patrons to both, Rudin is offering a discount ticketing deal on Small Mouth Sounds for the first group of attendees that also buy tickets to Downstate.