She has informed the WDF she will not be playing in the women’s championship, which starts on 28 November
A WDF statement said: “Although Beau will no longer be competing on the Lakeside stage, we wish her all the best in the next stage of her darting career.
“She has been a fantastic ambassador for our system since we returned from the pandemic in 2021, winning every major WDF title on the way.
“It’s been fantastic to see how her game has gone from strength to strength playing in WDF events and we know that she’ll continue to make even more history on the PDC circuit.”
A minimum of four women will compete at the PDC World Championship after a new qualifying structure was announced.
This year’s event will have an expanded field of 128 players, up from 96 in 2024-25, with the winner taking home £1m of a £5m prize pot.
Fallon Sherrock, the only woman to have won matches in the tournament – in 2019 – is the only other female player to have qualified so far.
With seeded players entering the tournament in the first round, rather than the second, Greaves and Sherrock could meet one of the top men.
Beau Greaves emerged victorious from a 6-5 thriller against Luke Littler as she became the first woman to reach the final of the World Youth Championship.
The 18-year-old had breezed through his three matches in the round-robin phase of the event, with wins over Dutchman Jeffrey Keen, Iceland’s Alexander Thorvaldsson and Belgium’s Matthias Moors.
However, the world champion put in a below-par last-16 display against fellow Englishman Charlie Manby.
Littler was on the brink of defeat at 5-3 down to the 20-year-old, before winning the next three legs, then rediscovered his touch in the quarter-finals with a 6-1 victory over Jamai van den Herik of the Netherlands.
Warrington teenager Littler found himself 2-1 down in the semi-final against Greaves but responded by winning three consecutive legs to seize the upper hand.
But three-time WDF women’s world champion Greaves – who is set to accept a PDC Tour card for 2026-27 – rallied to level the match at 4-4 and 5-5.
Greaves then blew Littler away in the decider as she threw an 11-dart leg – the 21-year-old from Doncaster sealing victory with a checkout of 80.
She will meet defending champion Gian van Veen in next month’s final after the Dutchman, 23, clinched a 6-4 win over Sebastian Bialecki of Poland in the other semi-final.
The World Youth Championship final will be played on 23 November in Minehead, before the Players Championship final on the same day.
Littler, who averaged 107.4 to Greaves’ 105, posted on Instagram after his defeat: “Fair play to Beau. All the best in Minehead. Some talent.”
Players aged between 16 and 24 are eligible to compete in the World Youth Championship.
Littler won the youth title in 2023 aged 16, a few weeks before he burst into the spotlight by finishing runner-up at the 2024 World Championship.
Corn is no stranger to Broadway musicals. In “Oklahoma!,” the crop is “as high as an elephant’s eye,” according to the lyrical measurements of the show’s opening number, “Oh, What a Beautiful Mornin’.”
But in “Shucked,” the hilarious countrified musical that brought “Hee Haw”-style comedy in a modern guise to Broadway, corn finally gets top billing. The North American tour production, which opened Wednesday at the Hollywood Pantages, is a folksy farcical riot, wholesome enough for widespread appeal but with just enough flamboyant oddity to tickle the funny bone of urban sophisticates.
The book by Robert Horn (who won a Tony for his exuberantly witty book for the musical version of “Tootsie”) employs two narrators. Storyteller 1 (Maya Lagerstam) and Storyteller 2 (Tyler Joseph Ellis) are our guides to this “farm to fable” tale about “a simple place that time forgot,” Cob County. The exact coordinates of this backwater are a bit hazy, but Storyteller 2 helpfully pinpoints the locale as “a place where being from somewhere is who you are.”
Cob County, as the name suggests, is corn crazy. The town’s livelihood depends on a flourishing crop, but just as the local sweethearts, Maizy (Danielle Wade) and Beau (Jake Odmark), are about to tie the knot, the corn starts shriveling up. Maizy halts the wedding until the crisis is resolved. Beau assures her that he’ll eventually figure it out, but time is not on Cob County’s side.
Maizy proposes to do the unthinkable: leave town to consult an outside expert.
Maya Lagerstam as Storyteller 1, left, and Tyler Joseph Ellis as Storyteller 2 in the North American Tour of “Shucked” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
As far as her alarmed friends and family members are concerned, she might as well be volunteering to go to Mars on an Elon Musk rocket ship. Beau is dead set against the idea, but Maizy won’t take no for answer and heads for the biggest metropolis she can imagine, Tampa, Fla., where she meets a seductive foot doctor, Gordy (Quinn VanAntwerp) who caters to lonely women and is desperate to pay off a gambling debt.
Easy marks don’t come any easier than naïve, trusting Maizy, whose bracelet of rare stones has caught con man Gordy’s predatory attention. She explains that her grandfather made it from the rocks that a flood washed under their home. And that is how a quack who treats the tender corns on pedicured toes suddenly becomes a world-renowned corn doctor in a show that seemingly never met a pun it didn’t like.
Danielle Wade as Maizy, left, and Miki Abraham as Lulu in the North American Tour of “Shucked” at the Hollywood Pantages Theatre.
(Matthew Murphy and Evan Zimmerman)
The humor, at once simple and clever, innocent and off-color, amiably wants to get a rise, and Horn isn’t too proud to go low in his genial wordplay. Peanut (Mike Nappi), Beau’s kindhearted, witless brother, is a geyser of potty-minded quips. “I just passed a huge squirrel, which is odd because I don’t remember eating one,” he tells his brother, who merely asked, “What’s going on?”
All of the elements of “Shucked” are perfectly calibrated to shamelessly win us over. First and foremost among these is Jack O’Brien’s precise and invigorating direction, which treats the characters as our country cousins, never condescending to them, even at their laughable worst.
The fresh look of the production, incorporating Scott Pask’s bucolic cartoon set, prevents the show from coming across as dated. Tilly Grimes’ sexy, small-town costumes lend an updated “Flashdance” feeling.
The sunshiny score by Brandy Clark and Shane McAnally, a blend of country, blues and Broadway pop, is intent on making theatergoers smile. “Corn,” the opening number celebrating the miracle and many uses of this magical plant, starts things off riotously, building sensationally to a chorus line of corncobs that choreographer Sarah O’Gleby sets into zesty motion.
The cast contains a wide range of gorgeous voices. Wade’s Maizy sounds like an ingenue Dolly Parton, exquisite to listen to, especially when her heart is in play, as is the case with “Maybe Love,” a number so good it returns in the second act as the jumbled romances get sorted out.
Odmark’s Beau, the boyfriend who gets shucked, if you will, never loses his country charisma. He performs with an affectionate twinkle in his eye, offering understanding even when his jealousy is put to the severest test. But, as he reminds himself in the handsomely performed hearbreak song “Somebody Will,” he knows his worth and that his innate goodness will carry him through.
Another vocal standout is Miki Abraham, who plays Lulu, Maizy’s whiskey-making street-savvy cousin, who sees straight through Gordy, even if she can’t help being enticed by his rakish game. Abraham practically brings the house down with “Independently Owned,” an anthem to her character’s emancipated spirit. But Lulu might protest too much: She’s clearly not so hard-nosed about love as she makes herself out to be.
“Shucked,” like “& Juliet” at the Ahmanson right now, are two clever contemporary shows that deliver the kind of delight you can’t find anywhere else but the musical stage. I might have enjoyed “Shucked” 15% more if it were 15% shorter. And I missed the uncompromising individuality of the original Broadway cast, which has been slightly homogenized for the North American tour.
On Broadway, Alex Newell, who played Lulu, became the first out nonbinary actor to win a Tony for performance. Kevin Cahoon was nominated in the same category for his captivatingly eccentric performance as Peanut.
The sense of a community fully able to express itself in all its variety is thankfully still an integral part of “Shucked,” lending warmth to the intoxicating silliness of a musical that made this city slicker long to move to corn country.
‘Shucked’
Where: Hollywood Pantages Theatre, 6233 Hollywood Blvd., Los Angeles,
When: 7:30 p.m. Tuesdays-Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays. Ends September 7
Tickets: Start at $57
Contact:BroadwayInHollywood.com or Ticketmaster.com
During a Q&A with her Instagram followers, one fan asked: “So pleased for you! Are you going to find out the gender?” Shaughna shared a screengrab of herself from a longer video where she was seen with her mouth wide open in shock. She wrote: “We do know the gender, this was my reaction.”
Shaughna teased the gender of her baby(Image: shaughnaphillips/Instagram)
The star added she’s due to give birth in November but will be undergoing a C-Section after having a ‘rough’ birth with daughter Lucia, who she also shared with convicted drug dealer Billy.
Speaking about Lucia’s birth, she said: “Induction, 2 days labour, pushed for an hour and she was not moving, She got really stressed and was rushed for forceps which FAILED because she turned around, and then she was rushed for an emergency C-Section and ended up with a postpartum haemorrhage.”
Shaughna’s partner was jailed in 2023 after pleading guilty to drug offences(Image: Met Police)
Billy was sentenced to nine years in prison pleading guilty to conspiracy to supply 4.5 kilograms of cocaine worth at least £360,000.
Shaughna said she planned the pregnancy, even tracking her ovulation to boost her chances of conceiving, but was stunned that her baby dream came true so quickly.
“It was the first time that my ovulation window coincided with Billy being home,” Shaughna said to The Mirror. “I was like, ‘You know what? Why not? Let’s just see’. And literally, the next day, I said to Billy, ‘I think I’m pregnant.’”
Her gut feeling was confirmed ten days later, when multiple pregnancy tests showed up positive. “I found out very, very early on,” she added. “I was doing maybe five tests a day. I’m not even exaggerating.”
And while she has so far been forced to raise her daughter as a single parent, the star says Billy is due for early release and should be reunited with his family in time for their new arrival.
“I know the date that he’s due to be home, but I’m not saying it just because anything could happen,” she added. “But hopefully he will be fully home before my baby is due.”
Webster was developing into anything but a gimmick. Like a host of all-rounders, success in one discipline fed the other.
In the 2023-24 season, his 938 runs were by far the most in the Sheffield Shield, supplemented by 30 wickets. Only one other player in Shield history had managed 900 runs and 30 wickets in a single season: the greatest all-rounder of them all, Sir Garfield Sobers.
Webster was getting noticed, but from a recognition point of view, his timing was horrific. Australia have not historically been blessed with seam-bowling all-rounders, but were in a bountiful period with Cameron Green and Mitchell Marsh.
It took a back injury to Green and a dip in form by Marsh for Webster to get his chance in the fifth Test against India at the beginning of this year. His parents, Rod and Tina, were so caught off guard by his selection that they had to make a short-notice trip to Sydney and their plea for a house-sitter in Tasmania hit the headlines., external
With the series still alive, he top-scored with 57 out of 181 in the Australia first innings and followed up with an unbeaten 39, including the winning runs, in the second. He also took a wicket and two smart slip catches. In the two Tests that followed in Sri Lanka, Webster dusted down his off-spin to show his versatility.
Green is fit again, albeit only as a specialist batter. Webster is hoping there’s space in the Australian XI for both of them at Lord’s, then in the Caribbean and the Ashes.
“It breeds the best in me when I’m up against guys and competing,” he says. “I’d welcome the challenge. I can only keep scoring runs and taking wickets to keep my place in that XI, but no doubt it will only become harder and harder.”
The marriage to Maddie came after the Sri Lanka tour.
“Coincidentally with the seam-bowling stuff, Maddie came into my life at the same time as my career took off, so she’ll probably claim some credit,” says Webster.
“Everything that goes with being a professional cricketer – there are more bad days than good – she’s my biggest fan.
“I’m sure we’ll do something for a honeymoon. We’ll find a window at some point in the next few months.”
Webster has already ticked off an Australia debut and a wedding. Now there is a World Test Championship final to win and an Ashes urn to retain.
CANNES, France — “The sun is my mortal enemy,” Ari Aster says, squinting as he sits on the sixth-floor rooftop terrace of Cannes’ Palais des Festivals, where most of the screenings happen. It’s an especially bright afternoon and we take refuge in the shade.
Aster, the 38-year-old filmmaker of “Hereditary” and “Midsommar,” wears a olive-colored suit and baseball cap. He’s already a household name among horror fans and A24’s discerning audiences, but the director is competing at Cannes for the first time with “Eddington,” a paranoid thriller set in a New Mexican town riven by pandemic anxieties. Like a modern-day western, the sheriff (Joaquin Phoenix) spars with the mayor (Pedro Pascal) in tense showdowns while protests over the murder of George Floyd flare on street corners. Too many people cough without their masks on. Conspiracy nuts, mysterious drones and jurisdictional tensions shift the film into something more Pynchonesque and surreal.
In advance of the movie’s July 18 release, “Eddington” has become a proper flash point at Cannes, dividing opinion starkly. Like Aster’s prior feature, 2023’s “Beau Is Afraid,” it continues his expansion into wider psychological territory, signaling a heretofore unexpressed political dimension spurred by recent events, as well as an impulse to explore a different kind of American fear. We sat down with him on Sunday to discuss the movie and its reception.
I remember what it was like in 2018 at Sundance with “Hereditary” and being a part of that first midnight audience where it felt like something special was happening. How does this time feel compared to that?
It feels the same. It’s just nerve-wracking and you feel totally vulnerable and exposed. But it’s exciting. It’s always been a dream to premiere a film in Cannes.
Have you ever been to Cannes before?
No.
So this must feel like living out that dream. How do you think it went on Friday?
I don’t know. How do you feel it went? [Laughs]
I knew you were going to turn it around.
That’s what everybody asks me. Everybody comes up saying [makes a pity face], “How are you feeling? How do you think it went?” And it’s like, I am the least objective person here. I made the film.
I know you’ve heard about those legendary Cannes premieres where audiences have extreme reactions and it feels like the debut of “The Rite of Spring.” Some people are loving it, some people are hating it. Those are the best ones, aren’t they?
Oh, yeah. But again, I don’t really have a picture of what the response is.
Do you read your reviews?
I’ve been staying away while I do press and talk to people. So I can speak to the film.
Makes sense. I felt great love in the room for Joaquin Phoenix, who was rubbing your shoulder during the ovation. Have you talked to the cast and how they think it went, or were they just having a good time?
I think that they’re all really proud of the film. That’s what I know and it’s been nice to be here with them.
Joaquin Phoenix, left, and Pedro Pascal in the movie “Eddington.”
(A24)
In the context of your four features, “Hereditary,” “Midsommar,” “Beau Is Afraid” and now “Eddington,” how easy was “Eddington” to make?
They’re all hard. We’re always trying to stretch our resources as far as they can go, and so they’ve all been just about equally difficult, in different ways.
Is it fair to say that your films have changed since “Hereditary” and “Midsommar” and now they’re more accommodating of a larger swath of sociopolitical material?
I am just following my impulses so I’m not thinking in that way. There’s very little strategy going on. It’s just: What am I interested in? And when I started writing, because I was in a real state of fear and anxiety about what was happening in the country and what was happening in the world, and I wanted to make a film about what it was feeling like.
This was circa what, 2020?
It was in June 2020 that I started writing it. I wanted to make a film about what it feels like to live in a world where nobody agrees about what is happening.
You mean no one agrees what is happening in the sense that we can’t even agree on the facts?
Yes. There’s this social force that has been at the center of mass liberal democracies for a very long time, which is this agreed-upon version of what is real. And of course, we could all argue and have our own opinions, but we all fundamentally agreed about what we were arguing about. And that is something that has been going away. It’s been happening for the last 20 something years. But COVID, for me, felt like when the last link was cut, this old idea of democracy, that it could be sort of a countervailing force against power, tech, finance. That’s gone now completely.
And at that moment it felt like I was kind of in a panic about it. I’m sure that I am probably not alone. And so I wanted to make a film about the environment, not about me. The film is very much about the gulf between politics and policy. Politics is public relations. Policy is things that are actually happening. Real things are happening very quickly, moving very quickly.
I think of “Eddington” as very much a horror film. It’s the horror of free-floating political anxiety. That’s what’s scaring you right now. And we don’t have any kind of control over it.
We have no control and we feel totally powerless and we’re being led by people who do not believe in the future. So we’re living in an atmosphere of total despair.
During the lockdown, I was just sitting on my phone doom-scrolling. Is that what you were doing?
Of course. There was a lot of great energy behind the internet, this idea of: It’s going to bring people together, it’s going to connect them. But of course then finance got involved, as it always does, and whatever that was curdled and was put on another track. It used to be something we went to. You went to your computer at home, you would maybe go to your email. Everything took forever to load. And then with these phones, we began living in cyberspace, so we are living in the internet.
It’s owned us, it’s consumed us and we don’t see it. The really insidious thing about our culture and about this moment is that it’s scary and it’s dangerous and it’s catastrophic and it’s absurd and ridiculous and stupid and impossible to take seriously.
Did that “ridiculous and stupid” part lead you aesthetically to make something that was an extremely dark comedy? I think “Eddington” sometimes plays like a comedy.
Well, I mean there’s something farcical going on. I wanted to make a good western too, and westerns are about the country and the mythology of America and the romance of America. They’re very sentimental. I’m interested in the tension between the idealism of America and the reality of it.
You have your western elements in there, your Gunther’s Pistol Palace and a heavily armed endgame that often recalls “No Country for Old Men.”
You’ve got Joe, who’s a sheriff, who loves his wife and cares about his community. And he’s 50 years old, so he grew up with those ’90s action movies and, at the end, he gets to live through one.
Let’s step backward for a second about where you were and what you were doing around the time you started writing this. You were finishing up “Beau Is Afraid,” right? What was your life like then? You were freaking out and watching the news and starting to write a script. What was that process like for you?
I was New Mexico at the time. I was living in New York in a tiny apartment, but then I had to come back to New Mexico. There was a COVID scare in my family and I wanted to be near family. I was there for a couple months and just wanted to make a film about what the world felt like, what the country felt like.
Were you worried about your own health and safety during that time?
Of course. I’m a hyper-neurotic Jew. I’m always worried about my health.
And also the breakdown of truth. What were the reactions when you first started sharing your script with the people who ended up in your cast? What was Joaquin’s reaction like?
I just remember that he really took to the character and loved Joe and wanted to play him, and that was exciting to me. I loved working with him on “Beau” and I gave him the script hoping that he would want to do it. They all responded really quickly and jumped on. There was just a general excitement and a feeling for the project. I had a friendship with Emily [Emma Stone, whom Aster calls by her birth name] already and now we’re all friends. I really love them as actors and as people. It was a pretty fluid, nice process.
I haven’t seen many significant movies expressly about the pandemic yet. Did it feel like you were breaking new ground?
I don’t think that way, but I was wanting to see some reflection on what was happening.
Even in the seven years since “Hereditary,” do you feel like the business has changed?
Yeah, it is changing. I mean, everything feels like it’s changing. I think about [Marshall] McLuhan and how we’re in a stage right now where we’re moving from one medium to another. The internet has been the prominent, prevailing, dominant medium, and that’s changed the landscape of everything, and we’re moving towards something new. We don’t know what’s coming with AI. It’s also why we’re so nostalgic now about film and 70mm presentations.
Do you ever feel like you got into this business at the last-possible minute?
Definitely. I feel very fortunate that I’m able to make the films I want to make and I feel lucky to have been able to make this film.
There’s a lot of room in “Eddington” for any kind of a viewer to find a mirror of themselves and also be challenged. It doesn’t preach to the converted. Was that an intent of yours?
[Long pause] Sorry, I’m just thinking. I’m just starting to talk about the film. I guess I’m trying to make a film about how we’re all actually in the same situation and how similar we are. Which may be hard to see and I’m not a sociologist. But it was important to me to make a film about the environment.
I was asked recently, Do you have any hope? And I think the answer to that is that I do have hope, but I don’t have confidence.
It’s easy to be cynical.
But I do see that if there is any hope, we have to reengage with each other. And for me, it was important to not judge any of these characters. I’m not judging them. I’m not trying to judge them.
Ari Aster, left, and Pedro Pascal on the set of “Eddington.”
(Richard Foreman)
I love that you have a partner in A24 that is basically letting you go where you need to go as an artist.
They’ve been very supportive. It’s great because I’ve been able to make these films without compromise.
Do you have an idea for your next one?
I’ve got a few ideas. I’m deciding between three.
You can’t give me a taste of anything?
Not yet, no. They’re all different genres and I’m trying to decide what’s right.
Let’s hope we survive to that point. How are you personally, apart from movies?
I’m very worried. I’m very worried and I am really sad about where things are. And otherwise there needs to be another idea. Something new has to happen.
You mean like a new political paradigm or something?
Yeah. The system we’re in is a response to the last system that failed. And the only answer, the only alternative I’m hearing is to go back to that old system. I’ll just say even just the idea of a collective is just a harder thing to imagine. How can that happen? How do we ever come together? Can there be any sort of countervailing force to power? I feel increasingly powerless and impotent. And despairing.
Ari, it’s a beautiful day. It’s hard to be completely cynical about the world when you’re at Cannes and it’s sunny. Even in just 24 hours, “Eddington” has become a conversation film, debated and discussed. Doesn’t it thrill you that you have one of those kind of movies?
That’s what this is supposed to be. And you want people to be talking about it and arguing about it. And I hope it is something that you have to wrestle with and think about.
