review

Feb. 5 (Asia Today) — South Korea’s Board of Audit and Inspection said Thursday it will begin a first-half audit of public institutions’ asset management, including the sale of broadcaster YTN, amid allegations that some state-linked assets were disposed of at below-market prices.

The audit agency released its 2026 annual plan and said it will focus on high-risk areas tied to financial soundness, including large public-sector projects, asset sales and the operations of overseas offices.

A Board of Audit and Inspection official said the agency will conduct a comprehensive review of cases in which assets were sold or leased at low prices without sufficient valuation, citing claims that public institution assets, including YTN, were subject to “fire-sale” pricing.

YTN became the center of controversy in October 2023 over allegations of forced privatization and a rushed or preferential sale after a 30.95% stake held by KEPCO KDN and the Korea Racing Authority was transferred to the Eugene Group, according to the report.

President Lee Jae-myung ordered ministries in November 2025 to halt and reexamine state asset sales, the report said.

The audit plan also includes reviews described as “visible to the public,” covering illegal drug customs clearance management, defect handling in multi-unit housing and the operation of information security certification systems.

In addition, the agency said it will conduct “innovation support audits” in new technology areas such as artificial intelligence and research and development. The plan also calls for an audit of relaxation facilities, including a cypress sauna and a bedroom, installed at the Yongsan presidential office during former President Yoon Suk Yeol’s tenure, according to the report.

An audit agency official said the board will aim to drive institutional changes that the public can feel.

— Reported by Asia Today; translated by UPI

© Asia Today. Unauthorized reproduction or redistribution prohibited.

Original Korean report: https://www.asiatoday.co.kr/kn/view.php?key=20260206010002246

Successful romances star at least one looker. I don’t mean someone attractive. I mean an actor who gazes at their scene partner with such delight that we swoon, too. Clark Gable was a looker. Diane Keaton was a looker. The combined eyeball voltage of Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone is so powerful that it’s turned silly scripts into hits.

Harry Melling is a late-blooming looker. Onscreen most of his youth as the Muggle brat Dudley Dursley in the “Harry Potter” franchise, Melling is only just now getting to show off that talent in the funny-kinky “Pillion,” which puts him on his knees beaming up at Alexander Skarsgård’s 6-foot-4 biker as though this blond hunk was the sun. His Colin, a shy gay man who sings the high notes in a barbershop quartet, is so visibly infatuated licking Skarsgård’s leather boots in a dark alley that you believe he lusts for humiliation. Colin has only just discovered that fact about himself. He’s yet to even learn this man’s name. (It’s Ray.)

Perhaps you’d like to be taken to dinner first, but “Pillion” is about Colin’s needs — specifically his need to please — and first-time feature filmmaker Harry Lighton challenges us to root for his bliss. This fetishy adventure is a minimalist romantic comedy in which submissive meets dominant, and submissive explores his physical and emotional vulnerabilities. Marriage and a baby carriage are off the table; the journey matters, not the destination.

“Pillion” is what motorcyclists call the passenger seat, at least in suburban England where this is set. It’s a passive position compared to the driver, but still a cooler upgrade from where Colin starts the movie riding in: the rear of a sedan. Out the car’s back window, he sees Ray zoom by in white Stormtrooper-looking gear and, by happenstance, bumps into him that night at a pub where Colin’s mother, Peggy (Lesley Sharp), has set up a blind date with a nice bloke. That guy gets forgotten the instant Ray slips Colin a note with a time and place to meet.

Peggy isn’t panicked by her son’s alpha-male predilections. “I think a biker sounds exciting,” she says with a grin. His father, Pete (Douglas Hodge), just wants him to wear a helmet. Neither parent is privy to the fact that Ray simply isn’t very nice. Ray controls the gobsmacked Colin quietly, calculating the bare minimum of kindness required to have a house boy willing to cook dinner, tend to his Rottweiler and sleep on the floor. He withholds his approval to keep the paler, smaller man anxious.

That Rottweiler contended for the Palm Dog at last year’s Cannes, a prize for the festival’s best canine. Frankly, Melling himself should have won. His performance is pure puppy, from the way he silently studies Ray’s silent cues to the eagerness with which he leaps up to fetch Ray a beer. When Ray lavishes attention on another biker’s pet pillion, Kevin (Jake Shears of the Scissor Sisters), Colin sulks until his master unzips his trousers and gives him a treat.

Flexing his abs in shiny Motoralls, Skarsgård uses his own appeal to expose an unattractive wrinkle in human behavior: Ray is so gorgeous that everyone just takes it as fact that Colin is lucky to be near him. When a coworker asks this scrawny geek how he bagged a hunk like Ray, Colin brags that he has “an aptitude for devotion,” which includes wearing a padlock around his neck and shaving his Byronesque curls so that he looks like a zealot — which in a way, he is.

Over and over, Colin takes stock of his own debasement. But then he looks at his model-handsome lover and calculates that his suffering is worth it. He’s good at compartmentalizing; he’s a parking violations attendant who tickets angry people all day. When he needs an excuse to cry, he finds one (and it hurts to watch).

Lately, it’s been a thrill to see queer stories confidently leapfrog over coming-out narratives to the trickier question of whether two individuals in particular are a decent match. Lighton leaps further than that — he goes full Evel Knievel by daring to ask how we feel about a relationship that’s indecent, but still has worth as a set of training wheels for a wobbly young man learning what he wants.

It’s a more optimistic take on Colin and Ray’s coupledom than was in the book that inspired the script, Adam Mars-Jones’ 2020 novella “Box Hill,” which was subtitled “A Story of Low Self-Esteem.” A study of the psychology of abuse, that story’s more brainwashed version of Colin finds him decades older looking back on the affair and pining for a relationship that reads as horrible between the lines.

Lighton isn’t oblivious to the power imbalance, but he’s made a movie about going forward, not being stuck. He trusts his naif with more agency, and so “Pillion” is freer to play its insults for laughs. You’ll giggle a lot. That gleam in Melling’s eyes makes it feel like a comic fantasy, although who knows? Perhaps there really are BDSM biker gangs hosting afternoon picnics with serving boys tied spread-eagled on a buffet table. That bucolic scene is filmed in a slow pivot around the park, cinematographer Nick Morris getting a chuckle from how the image shifts from Georges Seurat to “Hellraiser.”

Eventually, Colin’s parents will be more flinchy about his new boyfriend, leading to a beat or two that don’t land with the impact they could. Oddly, Lighton might be too restrained himself. Like his leads, he prefers to say everything with a look.

But while Melling is always endearingly open and responsive, Skarsgård stays unreadable. His Ray always seems to be hiding behind a motorcycle visor even when he’s not and when he deigns to speak, the words trail off in a huff of exhaustion. The only thing we know about Ray’s life are the names of his two previous dogs, and that’s only because he has them tattooed on his chest.

Any more personal facts about Ray — his own job or family or romantic history, even his favorite movie — would risk us clinging onto it too tightly as an explanation of what he gets out of this himself. Serving Ray’s pleasure is Colin’s focus. And our focus is on Colin’s pursuit of that.

Yet with subtle skill, Skarsgård reveals that Ray is thinking about Colin more than he’s willing to let on. Curiosity flickers across his face when his submissive surprises him. He stays gruff, of course, but you sense that Ray is as manacled by his authoritarian role as Colin literally is in his hungry, slurping devotion to his master. Puny and pathetic as Colin appears, he begins to seem like the braver of the two. It takes courage to map your own boundaries — then to cross over that line and get hurt, and get back up and out there. Lighton’s biker BDSM rom-com might sound niche, but free yourself to see it and you’ll discover it’s a universal romance.

Two figures will always haunt the human imagination: the woman in ecstasy, and the woman in madness. This enduring fascination may stem as much from the paper-thin line that separates the two states as it does from our deep-seated fear of both. If the devoted nun resembles the raving patient, does that not justify locking them away, protecting ourselves from their unsettling power?

Two recent novels go behind the walls of anchorite and lunatic cells in different centuries and for different purposes, yet wind up demonstrating how women forced by circumstance behind walls influence the lives of others into the future. In “Canticle,” a debut from Janet Rich Edwards, a young woman named Aleys enters religious life in 13th-century Bruges, Belgium, after a Franciscan, Brother Lukas, witnesses her fervor. A series of unfortunate events ultimately lead to her permanent cloister, a tiny cell built into the wall of a cathedral. Paula McLain’s new book, “Skylark,” spans several centuries in Paris, beginning in the 17th when Alouette Voland is sentenced to the Salpetrière asylum after protesting the arrest of her father, an expert fabric dyer, from prison, for the brilliant blue hue he has concocted — actually his daughter’s recipe, which contains dangerous arsenic. Alouette’s attempts to reclaim her work as her own instead of her father’s result in her consignment to Salpêtrière.

While both novels feature terrific and authentic detail about the rough confines Aleys and Alouette endure, the message beneath the descriptions is far more terrifying and authentic: for centuries, the fear of female agency and non-male approaches to power has led to deep trauma, not just for individual women, but for Western civilization itself. For instance, Aleys’s late mother cherished books, even though common people rarely knew how to read and write, let alone owned books. Aleys cherishes the tiny, exquisite psalter her mother inherited from an abbess aunt. Although Aleys’s mother cannot read, she knows the stories of the saints and relishes embroidering them with “goriest” details to keep her children interested. Yet, even as Aleys’s world begins to change with the rise of lay literacy, those lay people are almost entirely men. Women, whether secular or religious, remain forbidden to read, write or tell stories.

“Canticle” author Janet Rich Edwards.

(Laura Rich)

Aleys, at first, seems to be on a path toward personal enlightenment. Brother Lukas declares her a Franciscan, convincing his superior, Bishop of Tournai Jaan Metz, that the young woman possesses special spiritual gifts. The Bishop agrees, but insists that since no other Franciscans are female, Aleys must be sent to the nearby Beguines—laywomen who take no vows, live in community, and work to support the church. While Aleys initially finds the Beguines “wanton” due to their “strange rites,” including casual dress and meetings, their charismatic leader, Grand Mistress Sophia Vermeulen, convinces Aleys of the group’s higher purpose.

Aleys later discovers that a beguine named Katrijn Janssens has been secretly translating Latin scripture into Dutch. In the evenings, the women often perform ecstatic dances while someone reads from the “Canticle of Canticles” (also known as the “Song of Songs”). Aleys already has a strong mystical bent, and after some time in the Begijnhof, she supposedly cures a young boy’s illness. Unfortunately, she’s unable to do the same when Sophia becomes sick. Her subsequent eviction from the Beguines leads to her accepting the Bishop’s offer of sanctuary—as an anchorite, destined to live out her days in a tiny stone outcropping. Her only contact with other humans is a slit through which she can hear daily mass, save for Marte, the low-ranking Beguine assigned to deliver her meals and empty her slop bucket.

Meanwhile, Alouette has become an adept of dye recipes. Even though she and other women are able to read, write, and keep ledgerbooks by this date, the complicated and often secret tinctures concocted for fabrics remain the province of men.

Like Aleys, Alouette forms alliances with other women, Sylvine and Marguerite, the latter of whom carefully documents the guards’ abuses in a ledger. These abuses include the murder of inmates’ infants, a fact that galvanizes the pregnant Alouette (the father of her child, Étienne, is a quarryman) into joining a plan for escape through the Paris sewers. The women find refuge in a convent and, ultimately, in a seaside town where some measure of peace awaits them.

It’s a far happier ending than Aleys’s, who is met with a darker fate. That is partly because McLain’s novel doesn’t end with Alouette’s relatively soft landing; “Skylark” continues in 1939 through the perspective of Kristof Larsen, a Dutch psychiatrist in Paris. His relationship with his Jewish neighbors, the Brodskys, grows closer as Nazi power corrupts France. Despite his ties to the resistance, Kristof cannot save the entire family during the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup, but he takes responsibility for their 15-year-old daughter Sasha. Along with his compatriot Ursula, they are guided to safety through the same Paris tunnels that sheltered Alouette centuries earlier.

“Skylark” author Paula McLain.

(Simon & Schuster)

The fragile tie between Alouette and Sasha rests in a tiny piece of glass found during the restoration of Notre Dame de Paris after the 2019 fire. A conservator uncovers the shard, which bears an intense blue figure of a skylark — evidence, at least to the reader, that Alouette’s recipe endured, and a symbol of how both she and Sasha escaped. Female creation and resistance, the novel suggests, endure, too.

At first, that seems at odds with Aleys’s tragic fate. “As the crowd parts before her, Aleys sees the path of gray cobblestones receding to the stake. Parchment is piled high at its base. Smaller fires have already been lit, dotting the plaza. They’re burning her words, too. . . ” Yet, it’s no spoiler to reveal that during her long weeks and months as an anchorite, Aleys found the means to slowly and secretly teach Marte, lowliest of the Beguines, how to read and write. “They write words on the sill between them and wipe them off, their palms and feet dark with dust.” Just as Aleys’s mother passed on her passion for books and Alouette pursued her passion for beauty, Marte will carry on a passion for stories.

More important, however, and something that ties “Skylark” to “Canticle,” is that Aleys and Alouette, Marte and Sasha, live on through work done by and with women. Whether it’s a recipe for dye, a hunger for divine knowledge, or the means to freedom, the main characters in both novels believe deeply in women’s full humanity. Aleys acknowledges the contentment of the Beguines, understanding that their communal labors knit their “hopes, their labor, even their disagreements” as “strands in a single weave. Kristof says of Ursula that she “charts her course in full light with eyes wide open, and still she chooses danger. Chooses–over and over–not to surrender.”

It’s true that the authors of these novels live in 21st-century North America, where many people believe in equality even if the full humanity of others is under attack, but neither Edwards nor McLain indulges in anachronisms. Aleys yearns for divine ecstasy but does not come across as a would-be influencer, let alone as a Mother Ann Lee fomenting spiritual revolution; she believes in the church, even if not fully in its leadership, until her end. Alouette and her comrades pursue a different life but do not seek it for everyone, which feels right not just for their era but for their experience of trauma. Even Ursula and Sasha rely on men for their escape, accepting that whoever has the correct experience and expertise should lead the way.

What “Canticle” and “Skylark” get right about their very different heroines and time periods is that change doesn’t happen overnight, nor does it benefit everyone. Aleys teaches Marte to read, but Aleys will suffer for her ideas. Sasha will escape Vichy France, but her family will still die in the concentration camps. Switch the clauses in those sentences around, however, and you’ll be reminded that change can and does happen, one determined woman at a time.

Patrick is a freelance critic and author of the memoir “Life B.”

You may have read recently how minions of the Trump administration removed an exhibit about slavery from the President’s House in Philadelphia (where George Washington lived, with slaves) as part of its ongoing sop to MAGA sensitivities and campaign to erase history in favor of a fairy tale in which the worst thing Washington ever did was chop down a cherry tree.

The study of history is by nature messy, replete with conflicting interpretations and incomplete puzzles, but it’s what you need to know in order not to repeat it. PBS, lately defunded by conservatives but not disassembled, is among the institutions working to bring it to the people — indeed, the only television outlet seriously devoted to it. (History Channel is just a name.) Premiering Tuesday and continuing weekly is the four-part series “Black and Jewish America: An Interwoven History,” presented by Henry Louis Gates Jr., at the start of what happens to be Black History Month.

Gates, who also hosts the PBS genealogy series “Finding Your Roots,” has presented such documentaries as “Africa’s Great Civilizations” and “Great Migrations: A People on the Move,” has made cameo appearances in HBO’s “Watchmen” series and “The Simpsons.” He teaches at Harvard and is a well-known public figure — a history communicator, scholar and storyteller and a minor TV star the world also knows as “Skip.” Even-tempered and even-handed, he’s a good guide through the minefields of racial history — he keeps you from blowing up. You might find yourself angry at the material, but not with Gates.

“Under the floorboards of Western culture run two streams, continuously,” he says. “One is antisemitism, one is anti-Black racism,” whose purpose here is to explore “the areas of overlap.” They aren’t the only victims of bigotry in American history and modern America; Italians and Irish immigrants had their turn, too. White supremacy, which is very much alive in the land — turn on the news — disdains every people of color. But as people who shared the experience of being “mocked and feared, blamed and banished, envied and imitated,” often allied, sometimes antagonists, theirs is a special case.

Gates has assembled a stimulating, illuminating, maddening, saddening, but often inspiring, story of their relations with the world and one another. (Here and there he reaches a little outside his theme.) At 75, he’s lived through a good slice of the history illuminated here, including “our brief golden age” of the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and though he structures his series as a pendulum swinging between worse and better news, he scrupulously bookends it in a hopeful mood, with a Seder to start and a discussion with students to end. His insistence that no one is safe until everyone is safe, can seem to portend a future in which no one will ever be safe, though as a teacher I assume he’s more sanguine. His manner, at least, is encouraging.

The Seder, which begins with a singing of “Go Down Moses (Let My People Go),” gathers a tableful of Black, white and biracial Jews — each distinguished enough to have their own Wikipedia pages — in a roundtable discussion. Participants include New Yorker editor David Remnick, author Jamaica Kincaid, journalist Esther Fein, rabbi Shais Rishon, Angela Buchdahl (the first East Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi); and culinary historian Michael Twitty, who provides the doubly meal — kosher salt collard greens, West African brisket and potato kugel with sweet and white potatoes and Creole spice.

Though both Jews and Black people faced (and face) discrimination, their American journeys were launched, says Gates, “on different trajectories,” one group chased from nominally Christian countries, the subject of durable medieval superstitions, the other dragged from their homes. Though the mass of Jewish migration, escaping Russian pogroms and Nazi Germany in succeeding waves, occurred in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, some arrived before the revolution; but the Constitution, which enshrined religious freedom, granted them legal rights. (This presumably did not help the Jews of African descent Gates says were present here early on.) Black people, kidnapped and enslaved, had none, and as freedom was gained, new laws were written to hold them in place.

Gates posits a sympathy between immigrant and first- and second-generation Jewish Americans in the 20th century and disadvantaged Black people, based on a common experience of oppression; Jewish newspapers used the word “pogrom” to describe violence against Black people in the South. And Jews, many raised with a sense of social justice, were disproportionately represented among white activists in the Civil Rights Movement. This would change: Where Martin Luther King declared “I’m more convinced than ever before that our destiny is tied up with the destiny of our Jewish brothers and vice versa, and we must work together,” later Black activists, like Stokely Carmichael preferred to go it alone, promoting self-determination and even separation.

Still, many of the stories here are based on Black and Jewish friendships. We learn of W. E. B. Du Bois and Joel Spingarn, who sat together on the board of the NAACP and to whom Du Bois dedicated his 1940 autobiography “Dusk of Dawn.” Of Tuskegee Institute founder Booker T. Washington and philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, a president of Sears, Roebuck and Co., who built schools — more than 5,000 nationally, eventually — for systemically disadvantaged Black students. (Graduates included Maya Angelou and John Lewis.) Of Chicago rabbi Abraham Heschel, bringing 15 other white rabbis down to Selma, Ala., in 1964 at the request of King, where their arrest made headlines — which translated to political pressure.

In music, we meet Louis Armstrong, who as a boy worked and stayed with a Jewish family, and wore a Star of David, and his manager Joe Glaser. We’re told the story of Billie Holiday‘s lynching ballad “Strange Fruit,” written by Abel Meeropol (under his pseudonym Lewis Allan), recorded by Milt Gabler for his Commodore label and performed regularly by Holiday at Barney Josephson’s Cafe Society, New York’s first truly integrated nightclub. And we hear Paul Robeson, daring to sing in Yiddish in a concert in Moscow, in support of Itzik Feffer, a Jewish poet imprisoned (and later murdered) by the Soviets.

As a social and political history covering two intersecting storylines for more than the length of the nation, it’s packed with incident and facts — the Klan resurgent after World War I (six million members, it says here); the 1936 Berlin Olympics, where Jesse Owens triumphed and the U.S. committee pulled two Jewish sprinters from competition; racist Nazi policies, borrowed from American Jim Crow, and the Holocaust. Also the domestic destabilizing effects of wars in the Middle East. Jews and Black people will find themselves on the opposite sides of some questions.

Even at four hours, it’s a survey course, streamlined but not simplistic, and as such it will fly through some points and elide others; there are whole volumes dedicated elsewhere to what constitutes a single sentence here, and libraries dedicated to some of these figures. (Why not read some?) The view is not singular, and as such, there’ll be something for everyone to question, especially as Jews and Black people are often described as a community, when neither is heterogeneous. (Jews don’t even agree on what makes a Jew.)

But whatever goes back and forth between then, the world has its own ideas. “People who hate Jews,” says Gates, “uncannily hate Black people too. Because when the stuff hits the fan, they’re coming after both of us.”

They don’t make musicals like “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” anymore.

The ambition on display is awe-inspiring to an almost alarming degree. Consider the lyrical and orchestral complexity of Stephen Sondheim’s score, the way Hugh Wheeler’s book (from an adaptation by Christopher Bond) blends horror and comedy as if the two were natural bedmates and a production concept that views the material of a fiendish penny dreadful through a Brechtian lens.

Could the American theater ever again pull off such an outrageously brilliant musical experiment? Harold Prince’s 1979 Broadway premiere, starring Len Cariou and Angela Lansbury, seems like eons ago in terms of creative possibility.

This is the reason revivals, such as the solid one that opened Saturday at La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts under the direction of Jason Alexander, are so important. They remind us not only of the richness of our theatrical past but they also challenge our artists and producers to dream bigger in the future.

Will Swenson stars as “Sweeney Todd” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

Alexander, the beloved “Seinfeld” star who made his Broadway debut in Sondheim and George Furth’s “Merrily We Roll Along” in 1981, knows a thing or two about American musicals, having served for a time as the artistic director of L.A.’s bygone Reprise Theatre Company. His direction has grown in sophistication and ease since he staged Sondheim and James Lapine’s “Sunday in the Park With George” for Reprise in 2007.

Alexander’s production of “Sweeney Todd” has breadth and heft, but also intimacy and lightness. The scenic design by Paul Tate dePOO III savors the show’s Grand Guignol flavors while leaving plenty of flexibility for antic comedy.

The barber chair, the locus of Sweeney’s revenge on the heartless cruelty of a Victorian London that wrecked his life, isn’t the elaborate contraption of other productions. His murder victims don’t fall down a chute after their throats are slit during their shave and a haircut. They have to be tilted into a dumpster that is moved into position, but Alexander makes the comic most of these clumsier stage mechanics.

Will Swenson, the accomplished Broadway actor, offers an unusually sympathetic yet never sentimentalized Sweeney. He understands that Sweeney is first and foremost a victim. The lust for vengeance eventually gets the better of him, but Swenson leads us step by step to depravity through sorrow, injustice and humiliation.

Andrew Polec, right, with the company of “Sweeney Todd” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

He’s man-made rather than a natural monster. The same could be said of Lesli Margherita’s Mrs. Lovett, the proprietor of a filthy and failing Fleet Street pie shop, but it’s a shakier case. She’s the one who gets the bright idea of putting all those corpses Sweeney is intent on piling up into culinary use. Meat is in short supply, and the taboo of cannibalism is no deterrent to a woman who has taken to heart the jungle law of 19th-century British society: Eat or be eaten.

Swenson and Margherita are singing marvels, but Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett’s numbers set up Olympian challenges, vocally as well as lyrically. Their comically macabre Act 1 showstopper, “A Little Priest,” in which they gleefully imagine the variety of human pies, needs a little more time in the oven. Margherita, who played Mrs. Wormwood in “Matilda the Musical” on Broadway, is a deft clown. Swenson may be a step slower in this regard, but he plays it perfectly by accentuating the delight Sweeney takes in the merriment of Mrs. Lovett’s perverse rhyming game.

Swenson, who starred in the Broadway premiere of “A Beautiful Noise, the Neil Diamond Musical,” has a lush baritone. But Sweeney’s descent into an even lower range produces a sound that emerges from unimaginable depths. Finding the beauty in that hellish croak — something that Josh Groban was able to do in the last Broadway revival — can prove exceptionally difficult. It’s Swenson’s detailed character work as a singer that impresses most. His handling of “By the Sea,” the Act 2 duet with Margherita, forensically details Sweeney’s growing distaste for the conjugal fantasies of his partner in crime.

Allison Sheppard and Chris Hunter star in “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

The romantic element of Sondheim’s score is best captured in the gorgeous singing of Chris Hunter’s Anthony Hope, whose crooning of “Johanna” provokes an epidemic of goosebumps throughout La Mirada Theatre. Allison Sheppard’s Johanna, Sweeney’s daughter under the lock and key of the wicked Judge Turpin (Norman Large), warbles as melodiously as the caged birds that mirror her plight.

Nicholas Mongiardo-Cooper’s Beadle Bamford, the judge’s henchman, has a malicious ebullience all his own. He’s not as unapologetically hammy as Andrew Polec’s Pirelli, the tonsorial con man who adopts a fake mustache and an even faker Italian accent, but he lends the musical a satiric gaiety.

Meghan Andrews’ Beggar Woman and Austyn Myers’ Tobias, giving voice to the downtrodden Dickensian masses, infuse the production with the charm of their singing. Myers makes the most of one of the musical’s most beloved numbers, “Not While I’m Around,” Tobias’ duet with Mrs. Lovett that both performers bring to poignant, demented life.

Austyn Myers, center, with the company of “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street” at the La Mirada Theatre for the Performing Arts.

(Jason Niedle / TETHOS)

Alexander’s staging occasionally overdoes the comic exuberance. The ensemble-cum-chorus, burdened with overblown asylum imagery, is sometimes called upon to inject a circus-like atmosphere, complete with acrobatics. Lee Martino’s choreography, like the production as a whole, is at its best when observing decorous constraints.

If some of the more seductive colors of Sondheim’s score get lost in the acoustic shuffle, it may have more to do with the sound system than Darryl Archibald’s music direction. Unfortunately, the shattering beauty of the music is sometimes swallowed in the devilish din.

The stark visual panache of the production, however, is an impressive sight to behold. Jared A. Sayeg’s crepuscular lighting and Kate Bergh’s humanizing costumes lend contrast and texture to the world-building scenic design.

Hats off to this Southern California “Sweeney Todd” and to La Mirada Theatre for undertaking this Herculean feat. Sondheim and Wheeler’s haunted masterpiece doesn’t need perfection to live again.

Prime Minister Keir Starmer says ex-envoy Peter Mandelson should no longer hold a seat in the upper house of parliament.

Police in the United Kingdom have announced they are reviewing allegations of misconduct in public office following revelations that London’s former ambassador to Washington leaked confidential government information to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

The announcement by the Metropolitan Police on Monday came after investigative files released by United States authorities revealed that Peter Mandelson shared government plans with Epstein while serving as a UK minister.

Mandelson, who served as business secretary under former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, told Epstein about asset sales and tax changes under consideration by London in 2009, as well as plans for the 500 billion euro ($590bn) bailout of the single currency in 2010, according to emails released by the US Department of Justice on Friday.

“Following this release and subsequent media reporting, the Met has received a number of reports relating to alleged misconduct in public office. The reports will all be reviewed to determine if they meet the criminal threshold for investigation,” Metropolitan Police Commander Ella Marriott said in a statement.

“As with any matter, if new and relevant information is brought to our attention we will assess it, and investigate as appropriate,” Marriott added.

The Metropolitan Police did not name Mandelson, but its statement came after the leader of the pro-independence Scottish National Party said he had written to the police commissioner urging him to investigate the former ambassador for alleged misconduct in public office.

Earlier on Monday, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced an inquiry into Mandelson’s ties to Epstein.

Starmer, who sacked Mandelson as London’s top diplomat in Washington last year after the emergence of correspondence detailing his ties to Epstein, also said the former minister should lose his lifelong appointment to the UK’s upper house of parliament.

On Sunday, Mandelson resigned from the governing Labour Party, whose return to electoral dominance he helped to engineer in the 1990s, citing his wish to avoid causing further embarrassment to his colleagues.

In further fallout in the UK on Monday, the charity launched by Sarah Ferguson, the ex-wife of Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, announced that it would close “for the foreseeable future” amid revelations about her friendly relationship with Epstein.

“Our chair Sarah Ferguson and the board of trustees have agreed that with regret the charity will shortly close for the foreseeable future,” a spokesman said in a statement, without elaborating on the reasons for the closure.

Separately on Monday, the US Justice Department said it had removed thousands of Epstein-related files from the internet after lawyers representing some of his alleged victims said their identities had been exposed due to insufficient redactions in the latest release of documents.

The poster for “Send Help” advertises the film as from the director of “The Evil Dead” and “Drag Me to Hell” — and notably not Sam Raimi’s bigger hit “Spider-Man” (or its two sequels). No, the kind of Raimi movie you’re getting here is irreverent, silly and very bloody: a character study that also features incredibly goofy scares. Written by Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, “Send Help” is a gonzo survivalist riff that works as well as it does because it features two incredibly game actors that surf the wave of Raimi’s tonal madness with a blend of absolute glee and carefully honed skill.

And if that poster were to present the star of “Send Help” in the same way as Raimi, the tagline would read “from the star of ‘Red Eye’ and ‘Mean Girls,’” because Rachel McAdams is fully in her horror-comedy mode here. It’s an excellent reminder of her range. Co-star Dylan O’Brien also proves himself once again to be one of the best actors of his generation: a former teen heartthrob who now operates more like a chameleonic character actor. Both McAdams and O’Brien move beyond expectations to deliver highly expressive, almost clownish performances — in the best way.

McAdams is astonishingly dowdy as beleaguered corporate workhorse Linda Liddle, a “Survivor”-obsessed loser who is passed over for a promotion by her slick new boss, Bradley Preston (O’Brien), a nepo baby. In an attempt to play the good ol’ boys game, she boards a private flight to Bangkok with the team, on which she bangs out memos while they laugh at her “Survivor” audition tape. One plane crash later, the tables are turned, with the injured Bradley now at the mercy of Linda and her survival skills on a tropical island.

The swap in the power dynamic thrills Linda, calling to mind Ruben Östlund’s “Triangle of Sadness,” specifically the relationship between Dolly de Leon and Harris Dickinson. But “Send Help” is more of a psychological exploration than overt class satire, though it does explore the ridiculous notion of what it would be like to be stranded on an island with your boss.

McAdams and O’Brien deliver almost silent-film era acting with their faces (there’s one bravura long shot of O’Brien eating a bug that’s absolutely virtuosic) and Raimi’s camera playfully pushes the audience around, offering exaggerated tilts and close-ups, screaming: Look at this. There’s no subtlety, but would you expect that from the director of the “Evil Dead” movies? You’re just waiting for the ghouls and blood geysers to pop out. We don’t come to a Raimi film for its natural realism.

If there’s any flaw to “Send Help,” it’s that it generates such nuance and empathy for both Linda and Bradley, even within such outlandish circumstances and style, that it feels impossible to root for just one of them to come out on top. The film paints itself into such a corner when it comes to their conflict that any ending would feel too clean, too pat. As it stands, the ending is just that. But it’s to Raimi and the actors’ credit that they manage to make such an odious character as Bradley actually sympathetic — and so clear a heroine as Linda complex and thorny. Nothing’s perfect but “Send Help” is a blast nevertheless.

In “Vanished,” premiering Friday on MGM+, Kaley Cuoco plays Alice, an archaeologist, a fact she repeats whenever she’s asked about herself, without particularly seeming like one, apart from passing mentions of Byzantine caves and “one of the earliest examples of Christian worship” to make her sound professional. Sam Claflin plays Tom, who works for a charity organization dealing with Syrian refugees in Jordan; in a flashback we get to see them meet cute on a dusty Jordanian road, where he has a flat tire and no spare. Alice gives him a lift to camp; they banter and flirt after a fashion. He does something heroic within her sight.

They have been long-distance dating for four years, meeting up, as Alice describes it, “in hotels all over the world” where they “actually want to have sex with each other all the time.” Currently they are in Paris (in a $500-a-night joint — I looked it up). But Alice, now working in Albania, has been offered a job as an assistant professor of archaeology at Princeton, which would allow her to settle down with Tom in a school-provided apartment and “build a life that’s mine, not just uncovering other people’s.” After an uncomfortable moment, he signs on, saying, “I love you, Alice Monroe.”

Would you trust him? Despite the script’s insistence otherwise, Cuoco and Claflin have no more chemistry than figures on facing pages in a clothing catalog. Fortunately for the viewer, Tom disappears early from the action — ergo “Vanished.” The couple are traveling by train down to Arles, where another hotel awaits them, when Tom leaves the car to take a call and never returns; nor can he be found anywhere on the train.

This happily makes room for the more interesting Helene (multiple César Award winner Karin Viard), a helpful Frenchwoman who steps in as a translator when Alice attempts to get an officious conductor to open a door to a room he insists is for employees only, and rules are rules. (Is he just being, you know, French, or is something up?)

They meet again when Alice gets off the train not in Arles but Marseilles; after she has no more luck with police inspector Drax (Simon Abkarian), who insists a person isn’t missing until 48 hours have elapsed, than with the conductor, she’ll turn to Helene again, who has the advantage of being an investigative reporter. (She’s also been made diabetic, which has no effect on the action other than halting it now and again so she can give herself, rather dramatically, a quick shot of insulin. Like Drax begging off because he’s late meeting his wife for an Alain Delon double feature, it’s a tacked on bit of business meant to suggest character.) Together they’ll ferret out and follow clues, as Alice comes to realize that it takes more than the occasional gauzy romantic getaway to really know a person, and Helene gets closer to nailing a big story.

Directed by Barnaby Thompson, whose credits are mostly in producing (“Wayne’s World,” “Spice World”), and written by his son, Preston — together they made the 2020 film “Pixie” — the series begins with a flash forward in which Alice flees for her life out an upper-story window, signifying action ahead. And indeed, there will be, leading to a climactic scene I don’t suppose was meant to make me laugh, but did, magnifying as it does one of the confrontational cliches of modern cinema. Many of the series’ notions and plot points (though not that particular one) may be found in the works of Alfred Hitchcock — who, you may remember, made a film called “The Lady Vanishes,” from a train yet — though they have been given new clothes to wear. But where Hitchcock never waited long to show you when a character wasn’t what they seemed, that information is held on here nearly to the end, with some added twists along the way to keep you confused.

Cuoco (unusually brunet here), has been good in many things, most notably her funny, winning turn as Penny across 12 seasons of “The Big Bang Theory” and more recently as the hallucinating alcoholic heroine of the “The Flight Attendant,” but she feels out of joint here. She’s not well served by the pedestrian direction and dialogue, but comes across as a person playing a person, rather than as the person she’s playing. Perhaps by virtue of their accents, the French actors feel more real; France, as usual, looks great.

Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before, since I’m admittedly something of a broken record on the subject, but I very much prefer Marvel’s television series, which tend to be fleet, original and unpredictable, to its movies, which tend not to be. “Loki,” “Ms. Marvel,” “Moon Knight,” “Echo,” “WandaVision” and its spinoff “Agatha All Along” — all (among others) are worth watching, even the ones that are dumped after a season.

Developing longer stories with less money, the TV shows makers need to be inventive, creative with their resources, so they invest in characters and ideas rather than special effects and action. They focus on secondary or ensemble figures who would never be given a theatrical feature of their own to carry, are particular about culture and family and place, and are often less contingent on the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with its phases and stages, its crossovers and cross-promotions and long-range marketing plans. At once higher concept and more grounded than the movies, they’re interesting on their own, to the point where, when they finally hitch on to the Marvel multi-mega-serial train, I find them disappointing.

“Wonder Man,” whose eight episodes premiere all at once Tuesday on Disney+, is perhaps the most grounded of these series. Created by Destin Daniel Cretton (“Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings”) and Andrew Guest (who has written for “Community” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine”), the series is a (generally) sweet, disarming tale of actors in Hollywood, tricked up with picture-business details that you don’t need to be au fait with the MCU to appreciate. There are things it might be helpful to know, but you can work out everything that matters through context. (Locals will enjoy playing Spot the Locations.)

Yahya Abdul-Mateen II plays Simon Williams, who as a child became a fan of a B-movie superhero called Wonder Man — not a “real” superhero, in this reality, merely a fiction. Now in his 30s, he’s a struggling actor in Hollywood, good enough to land a small part in an “American Horror Story” episode, but not clever enough to keep from slowing down the production with questions and suggestions when all he needs to do is deliver a couple of lines before a monster bites his head off. He loses the part and a girlfriend directly afterward.

Taking in a revival house matinee of “Midnight Cowboy,” he meets Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), who is back from having played the Mandarin — that is, he acted the part of a terrorist called the Mandarin, believing it was just a job — in “Iron Man 3” and providing appealing comedy relief in “Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.” The character here is more fleshed out, something of a mess (but 13 years sober, he likes to point out), serious but not a joke. Before it all went wrong, Trevor played King Lear (in Croydon), appeared in “Coronation Street” and in a movie with Glenda Jackson, was off-off-off Broadway in “The Skin Our Teeth” and briefly had the lead in a hospital show with Joe Pantoliano, who’s very funny playing himself.

Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley), left, and Simon Williams (Yahya Adbul-Mateen II) team up in “Wonder Man.”

(Suzanne Tenner / Marvel Television)

Slattery tells Simon that European art director Von Kovak (Zlatko Burić) is rebooting Wonder Man, a role Simon feels born to play. He makes an end run around his unconvinced agent, Janelle (X Mayo), and wheedles an audition — where he again meets Trevor, auditioning for Barnaby, Wonder Man’s pal, or sidekick or something. There are wheels behind wheels in this setup, some of which could use a little grease, but for most of the series they do their squeaking off to the side. It’s a love story, above all — “Midnight Cowboy,” not an accidental choice, is more of a touchstone than any Marvel movie.

Simon does have powers — things shake, break or explode around him when he’s upset, and his strength can become super in a tight spot — which puts him in the sights of the Department of Damage Control, embodied by Arian Moayed as P. Cleary, who would like to contain him. But he struggles to keep them secret, especially in light of something called the Doorman Clause — its history established in a sidebar episode, a cautionary Hollywood fable with Josh Gad as himself — which prohibits anyone with super powers from working in film or television, all Simon lives for.

There is little in the way of action, and you won’t miss it. The fate of the world is never in question, but a callback for a second audition means everything. The only costumed characters are actors playing costumed characters; the only villains, apart from the bureaucracy that seeks to bring him in, are Simon’s own self-doubt and temper. As things progress, Trevor will become a mentor to Simon. As is common in stories of love and friendship, a betrayal will be revealed, but if you have seen even a few such stories, you know how that’s going to go, and will be glad it does.

Whether discussing acting techniques or the traffic they’re stuck in on Hollywood Boulevard (Trevor: “Probably the Hollywood Bowl.” Simon: “It’s too late for the Bowl.” Trevor: “It’s usually the Bowl. I remember seeing Cher there once — breathtaking. Chaka Khan, now there’s a woman”), Abdul-Mateen and Kingsley work well together; their energies are complementary, laid back and loose versus worked up and tight and, of course, each will have something to teach one another about who they are and who they could be. I was genuinely anxious for them, as friends, more so than just wondering how such and such a superhero (or team) might defeat such and such a supervillain (or team).

“Our ideas about heroes and gods, they only get in the way,” says Von Kovak, putting a room of hopeful actors through their paces, and essentially speaking for the series he’s in. “Too difficult to comprehend them. Let’s find the human underneath.”