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If I see one more person saying that the only way to truly experience Christopher Nolan’s vision of “The Odyssey” is to see it in Imax 70mm, I am going to start turning cinephiles into swine.

I understand that this is a technically true statement. As we all know by now, Nolan went on his own hero’s journey with this film, using an unwieldy and extremely loud Imax camera to shoot it (a feat only he and perhaps a few other directors would be given the finances to do). Like many, I applaud his efforts and those that were made to increase the number of theaters capable of projecting Imax 70mm (and 70mm in general).

There is an undisputed cultural magnificence to reimagining a nearly 3,000-year-old tale in the most artistically immersive format currently available to filmmakers. Unfortunately, the vast majority of filmgoers will never be able to see this master vision; only 25 theaters in the country are capable of showing the film in Imax 70mm — eight in California (including four in the L.A. area); two in Colorado, New York, Texas and Tennessee; and one in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

So a little more than twice the number of U.S. World Cup venues this year. But then, you could watch the World Cup on TV.

Not that you’ll be able to watch “The Odyssey” on TV anytime soon. As a rigorous defender of the theatrical experience, Nolan requires that his films stay in cinemas and off streamers for much longer than the average movie — “The Odyssey” will likely not be available on NBCUniversal’s Peacock until early 2027.

It is a noble mission; movie theaters need all the help they can get and heading into its second weekend, “The Odyssey” has already more than recouped its $250 million production budget. It will need to make between $625 million to $750 million to break even, which seems more than doable. “The Odyssey” could well become the third-ever R-rated movie to gross $1 billion.

Film snobbery notwithstanding, however, much of that will be accomplished via non-Imax 70mm screenings, which come in a near-Homeric list of types. On top of reacquainting the populace with a story that most of us have not thought much about since that middle-school project or college classics class, “The Odyssey” is offering a lesson in “premium formats.”

On the film’s website, one can view the trailer in Imax 70mm, regular Imax, regular 70mm, Dolby Vision and large format. Given the limitation of personal screens, this only reveals the varying frame dimensions, but it’s pretty fun to flick through them.

What is less fun is trying to figure out on which, and where and when, you can actually see the damn thing. While not on par with battling carnivorous Cyclops or world-weary witches, getting a ticket to “The Odyssey,” even after opening weekend, is a voyage filled with many obstacles.

Including but not limited to the recent crash of the AMC app.

I may or may not have contributed to this crisis, having recently spent well over an hour trying to get a measly two tickets.

Though it went against all my anti-elitist beliefs, I did try to leverage my L.A. privilege and see “The Odyssey” as Christopher Nolan intended — in Imax 70mm. Alas, the only seats available for days, even in standard Imax and 70mm, were in the first row. I was forced to “downgrade” to Dolby Vision at the Burbank 16, where, by the grace of Athena, I found two non-front-row seats, albeit in the middle of a weekday. (Mercifully, this actually counts as work for me.)

I am not equipped to argue saturation levels or whatever else differentiates one format from the other, but the Dolby experience was quite immersive, both in cinematic detail (The storms! The slaughter! The suitors’ slopping wine!) and cardiac-disruptive bass notes.

Certainly, I felt a bit like Odysseus as I crept — drained, disoriented and trailing popcorn crumbs like Ithican sand — out into the sun. It was an experience like no other (seriously, to survive Imax 70mm, I might have to go into training).

So I am a bit bewildered as pundits declare that the success of “The Odyssey” reflects some larger theme about what film audiences want. Beyond, you know, a very powerful movie.

This is one of the most singular films made in recent years. So singular that it all but defies any kind of tea-leaf-reading or, heaven forbid, attempts at replication. I don’t see a future in Homeric spinoffs (unless someone wants to do a limited series on Circe, starring Samantha Morton), and while it is vital to celebrate the craft of Imax 70mm filmmaking and projection, the theatrical experience cannot afford to put all, or even many, of its eggs into that basket.

An increased reliance on “premium formats” may seem like an obvious weapon in the increasingly one-sided war between at-home and theatrical viewing, but it is not the answer. Or at least not the only answer. (For one thing, there aren’t enough Imax 70mm cameras or projectors to go around.)

Like sports fans, many cinephiles are happy to spend hours, and dollars, to have the ultimate experience — tales of folks driving across state lines and/or paying thousands to see “The Odyssey” in Imax 70mm echoed the recent stories of international visitors saving up for a year to see their team play in the World Cup.

Though marvelously affirming for film fans, this is not a sustainable business plan. Movies are supposed to be for everyone. Not just those with a neighborhood Imax 70mm theater or the ability to pay $30 for a regular Imax seat. Going to the movies should not require hours of research to choose a theater, negotiating with a scalper or finding AI-aided plots to game the system. And there shouldn’t be such an obvious and geographically rigged hierarchy.

Before you know it, Live Nation will be involved and then where will we be?

Christopher Nolan’s non-CGI visions of the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the sacking of Troy, the transformation of men into pigs do not require an “ultimate” aspect ratio to be remarkable.

(Melinda Sue Gordon / Universal Pictures)

“The Odyssey” is a legitimate phenomenon and that’s terrific; more power to Nolan and the theaters that benefit. As a solution to flagging box office, well, if Hollywood does not want to go the way of — as Timothée Chalamet famously said — ballet and opera, it cannot afford to become dependent on premium experiences that are accessible only to a small percentage of the audience.

Of course it’s great that “The Odyssey” was shot, and is being shown, in Imax 70mm and regular 70mm, especially in a year when stories that originated on YouTube are also burning up the big screen. Art should never be an equation of replacement. Supporting all manner of work is always the best way of preserving and celebrating the splendid diversity of filmmaking.

No matter how unparalleled the form, it still must follow function. “The Odyssey,” in whatever format it is seen, is an epic adventure with emotional undertones beyond the original story and an existential message that resonates far more than its smattering of modern language. Nolan’s non-CGI visions of the Trojan Horse, the Cyclops, the sacking of Troy, the transformation of men into pigs do not require an “ultimate” aspect ratio to be remarkable.

All the various formats have their proponents and the conversations about them have been entertaining and informative, but no matter the film or screen size, it’s a very good movie.

And that’s the only template Hollywood needs to follow.

ESPN’s 30 for 30 will launch the first two of six podcast episodes July 28 examining the gambling scandal that resulted in Shohei Ohtani‘s interpreter Ippei Mizuhara going to prison for stealing nearly $17 million from the baseball superstar and gambling it away.

The podcast, titled “The Betrayal of Shohei Ohtani” is told by Tisha Thompson, the ESPN investigative reporter who led the outlet’s groundbreaking coverage in March 2024.

Ohtani, who signed a record 10-year, $700-million contract with the Dodgers in December 2023 after playing six years with the Angels, apparently trusted Mizuhara implicitly. He said he was unaware that the interpreter regularly ransacked his bank account for more than two years.

The podcast will recount Mizuhara’s life before he began working for Ohtani in 2013 when both were with the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in Japan. When Ohtani moved to the United States to play for the Angels in 2018, Mizuhara came with him.

Thompson interviews childhood friends and colleagues of Mizuhara, but the interview that will generate the greatest interest is a 90-minute phone call she had with him 16 hours before she published the story. Thompson got permission from Mizuhara to tape the call and it remains the only interview he has given.

Mizuhara told her that Ohtani had helped him pay off his gambling debts, a story he recanted a day later. The Dodgers fired him the same day they opened the 2024 season with a game against the San Diego Padres in Seoul, South Korea.

IRS special agent Chris Seymour gave Thompson the first interview of his career, and what he and prosecutors say about Mizuhara’s motive goes beyond the narrative that he had a gambling addiction, according to ESPN.

Another interview by Thompson is with bookmaker Mathew Bowyer, who explains on tape that his relationship with Mizuhara began during a hotel poker game with Angels players. Bowyer pleaded guilty last year to running an illegal gambling business, money laundering and filing a false tax return. He was sentenced to 12 months and one day in prison and ordered to pay $1.6 million in restitution to the IRS.

Episodes one and two — “The Letter O” and “The Interview” — will debut July 28, followed by episodes dropping every Tuesday and Thursday through Aug. 11.

This month, “Cool Machine,” a riff on 1980s New York in the form of a tightly plotted crime novel, arrives from Colson Whitehead. It concludes his Harlem trilogy, they say. If you’d told readers two decades ago that Whitehead would become a bestselling crime novelist, they might have thought you were kidding. He started out writing innovative novels with such intellectual and stylistic punch that the MacArthur Foundation gave him a fellowship in 2002.

His written output is fun, fearless and fantastic. Where to start? Here’s a cheat sheet.

For N.Y. lovers

With “Harlem Shuffle,” Whitehead begins his crime trilogy in the 1960s in a furniture store with stylish midcentury stock whose owner, Ray Carney, is trying not to be a fence. Love the evocation of Harlem as a place with a cool interconnected community. Worry about that cousin who’s always trouble. The follow-up, “Crook Manifesto,” is set in the 1970s. All of New York City is at a nadir; Ray is on the straight and narrow, but needs an influx of cash (for Jackson Five tickets for his daughter). Then comes “Cool Machine,” secrets to be revealed when it hit shelves this week . And as a bonus, his essay collection “The Colossus of New York,” which is vivid, episodic and yet still a story: “Talking about New York is talking about the world.”

To break your heart

The novel “The Underground Railroad” comes from an imagined misunderstanding, logical for anyone who grew up riding subways: that the path to freedom for enslaved people that we call The Underground Railroad was in fact underground. In Whitehead’s hands, that imagining takes us through both time and place while making visceral the horrors of enslavement. The book won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was adapted by Barry Jenkins into a limited series.

In a rare feat, Whitehead won the Pulitzer Prize a second time for his novel “The Nickel Boys,” another work of historical fiction dealing with the devastating effects of American racism. Based on the true story of a reform school where Black boys went missing, the novel pairs the stories of two teens, one a troublemaker and the other caught up by mistake. Barack Obama called it “a necessary read.” Cleverly structured, it seemed difficult to adapt, but director RaMell Ross made it into a brilliant film.

To blow your mind

In Whitehead’s debut novel, the not-realistic “The Intuitionist,” a Black female elevator inspector faces powerful forces aligned against her. Inflected with Thomas Pynchon-like wordplay and situations, it’s both ambitious and funny. So is “John Henry Days,” mixing narrative forms while telling the story of a Black journalist around the year 2000 going to every press junket he can, unmaking the myth of John Henry all the while. And “Apex Hides the Hurt” is a comic novel about the conflicts that arise in a small town when they hire a name consultant for a possible rebranding.

To eat your mind

Just around the time they started staggering onto TV, Colson Whitehead published a zombie novel. “Zone One” is a smart take on the shuffling hordes and pandemic survivors who try to take Manhattan back.

To beat the odds

Whitehead, an enthusiastic amateur poker player, wrote the nonfiction book “The Noble Hustle” about his entry into the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. It was a luxurious time in media, circa 2011, when ESPN’s Grantland paid his $10,000 entry fee and said he could keep his winnings. The book, expanded from what he wrote for them, includes his training, pending divorce, joking asides and playing for high stakes.

To take to the beach

“Sag Harbor,” set in the mostly Black, affluent beach community in the Hamptons, is the closest Whitehead has come to writing a coming-of-age story. Taking place during the summer of 1985, Benji and his teenage friends banter about culture and get their first taste of freedom.

When Washington celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on July 4th, the celebrations will arrive bruised. There will be the customary funding disputes, a federal commission fighting against a more partisan task force from the White House, and a public worn by years of political turmoil, all of which will turn what could have been an occasion of civic healing into another USA ‘celebration’ in the world. None of this has gone unnoticed in Beijing, given that this ‘celebration’ is being interpreted more as a diagnosis than a birthday. What is being asked throughout the commentaries from Qiushi (求是), on CCTV, in Tsinghua and Peking University, is simply put, what kind of America is turning 250?

Within the last five years, the interpretation given from both the official channels and the more informal academic channels in Beijing has varied considerably. Most importantly, these streams have been diverging for some time and therefore offer significant insight into how Beijing has been interpreting the country it has been comparing itself to for the last 20 years.

From “the East rising” to a measured retreat

Many are familiar with the upbeat version of the story. After 2020, the phrases that framed China’s worldview included “great changes, unseen in a century” (百年未有之大变局) and “the East is rising, the West is declining” (东升西降). The latter, used by Xi Jinping in remarks to senior officials in early 2021 and again in 2023, provided the slogan for the official narrative. The Covid-19 pandemic, the insurrection at the US Capitol, and a decade of US political instability seemed to provide the empirical evidence for a thesis, rooted in Chinese Marxist theory, that capitalist systems contain the principle of their own disintegration. This was rationalized and systemized after the 2008 financial crisis and has remained largely unchanged.

However, the reality is far more complicated than the slogan implies. Researchers who have traced the terminology in Chinese academic publications through the CNKI database have found that scholarly use of “the East is rising, the West is declining” (东升西降) peaked around 2021 and has subsided since then, even though the idea itself remained more prevalent than it was during the entire duration of Donald Trump’s first presidential term. In other words, the slogan was being diplomatically retracted within scholarly circles at the very moment it was most associated with official optimism. When Xi’s speech in 2023, which was published in Qiushi in January 2025, described the West’s decline, it was more a formal, official copy of a sentiment than a newly published speech.

The official rhetoric, however, did not soften. A Brookings study found a near doubling in the use of “American decline” terminology in official Chinese documents from 2025. State Security Minister Chen Yixin wrote in Qiushi in December of 2025, what could be described as a near complete inventory of the ills of the world: the usurpation of unipolar dominance gives way to economic decline and social disintegration, a domestic credit crisis and the collapse of foreign mythic structures. Around the same time, a popular phrase borrowed from gaming, the “kill line” (斩杀线) found its way to official Chinese publications. A Qiushi article from January 2026 described an America, the working class of which had been pushed (beyond the point of no return) along the path of ruin by an unrepairable (decomposing) industrial base while financial capitalism strangled the benefits. The conclusion that was drawn was that we had already entered the post-American world.

The correction of early 2026

Then the story changed once more, and the correction was from within Beijing’s own strategic community.

The consensus in Chinese policymaking following the Busan summit in October 2025, was that China had won the trade war and forced the US into a stalemate. The years of maximum pressure, they said, did not lead to the systemic concessions China had sought, but rather worsened American inflation and reduced productivity. For a few months, the optimism was high. However, by 2026, the optimism was replaced by apprehension. A series of adverse events for China, from losing equity in a German port buyout, to the Nexperia debacle, to the Iran war, led many to wonder if China’s victory was, in fact, a loss. The dominant question that the strategic community was debating was whether American power was in decline or if it was in fact, power rebounding.

What was most interesting was who took the cautious side. Both Chen Wenling and Yan Xuetong argued that the US had, and has, the military and economic capability to project power. In their view, the US had the edge, and Trump’s high stakes, risky policy decisions were based on the belief that the US had the dominant position. The gap was definitely closing, but was not yet a reality. The advice they gave was to be patient. If China was able to “manage its own affairs well,” it was likely that the US would be compelled to return to a more stable relationship.

The key observation regarding prominent intellectuals in Beijing is this. They have never been champions of the triumphalist position. Yan Xuetong has spent a great deal of time dismissing talks of “The East is rising and the West is declining” and multipolarity as delusional. His recently published book, Inflection of History (历史的拐点), which was published by CITIC Press in December of 2025, predicts a US-China bipolarity which, during the next decade, would be expected to stabilise rather than destabilise. In this scenario, over the next decade the gap in capability between the two powers would be expected to converge, although the US would retain an overall advantage. In this scenario, the US would retain overall dominance in services, cyberspace and global influence, while China would retain relative superiority in manufacturing and be dominant in the international arena. In this scenario, Yan does argue that Trump would be expected to damage American power, especially with regards to the international balance, through the closure of laboratories, the loss of researchers, and a declining international trade. However, damage to the leader of the bipolar order is not the same as the collapse of the order, and Yan is very cautious not to make confuse the two.

As China’s foremost authority on US studies, Wang Jisi (王缉思) of Peking University, has placed the greatest emphasis on the need for a clear and level-headed approach. His influential essay, titled, “Has America really declined? Chinese people should hold a sober understanding” ( 美国到底有没有衰落？中国人应有清醒认识), leads with the argument that the most important factors influencing the relationship are domestic political issues, and are not to be found in some quantifiable assessment of relative national strength, or within the confines of the Thucydides Trap. He has argued that the effects of Trump’s immigration restrictions would be more symbolic than real, and would not negatively impact the long-term potential of the US economy. Along with American scholar David Lampton, he wrote, that while both societies have convinced itself that the other is an existential threat, which is a dangerous narrative trap, similar to a noticeable shift of power.

Why AI keeps rewriting the script

If the quest for technological dominance was to be provided as a single reason for the inconsistency in the narrative, it would be the most accurate. The same confidence that characterized 2025 is the same that will characterize the sobriety of 2026. When Trump had his second inauguration in January 2025, DeepSeek had launched their R1. It disrupted the presumption of AI dominance in America and had a day effect of 200 billion on Nvidia’s valuation. For Chinese decision makers, since then, it has been electric. Carnegie researchers described it as the rediscovery of technological confidence. The effect was the realization of the theory of “The East is rising and the West is declining” (东升西降): a monumental achievement with controls on exports from a young lab in Hangzhou.

The second installment was more sobering. The launch of DeepSeek’s next model, V4, in April 2026, was received with indifference. In fact, DeepSeek’s own internal product documentation stated that V4 was between three and six months behind American models. Furthermore, V4 was reliant on domestic chips from Huawei, and was, in most assessments, dependent on American technology that was not easily replaceable. For Chinese analysts, this was not a case of falling behind, but one of the more difficult problems of maintaining the technological edge. Reshoring and tariffs told a similar story. The American industrial base, which the “kill line” (斩杀线) commentary presumed was a terminally stagnated industrial base, was the target of a renewed, aggressive, and partially successful push to bring industry back to America. A competitor with such a focus on rejuvenation and renewal is not, on the surface, a declining competitor.

The G2 Puzzle

There’s another element coming from Washington that adds to the complexity of the story of American decline. This element relates to Trump. Before the Busan meeting, Trump used the term “G2,” and several Washington officials followed suit. The decline thesis cannot account for this. If America is indeed in decline, why is it offering G2 (shared leadership) with China?

Chinese reflexive responses are interesting. The official position, as expressed in Zhou Li’s (周力) December 2025 article, is that G2 as a hegemony is incompatible with China’s commitment to a multipolar world and would alienate the Global South which China is trying to court. These scholars have found their own workarounds. Yan Xuetong and Zheng Yongnian have suggested that G2 is more a description of a scenario of existing bipolarity than a policy to adopt. Xia Liping of Tongji University has suggested that G2 be rephrased as “China-US coordination” (中美协调) instead of “China-US co-governance” (中美共治), which makes it easier for Beijing to accept peer status while not succumbing to a duopoly. The attempt to manage the terminology suggests that the US at 250 is still sufficiently powerful that its offer of co-leadership is significant, even to a China that is more confident than ever.

A mirror, not a verdict

What emerges from five years of this commentary is not a single Chinese view of America at 250 but a layered one. The loudest polemical phrase is that the US, a hegemon, is in an irreversible decline. Within a Chinese context, this serves a purpose unrelated to the US. The state media have found it convenient to juxtapose gun violence and homelessness against the backdrop of Chinese economic performance. The decline of the US economy flouts the-premise, as socialism is the ultimate victor among capitalist competition.

But that was in the loud tier. In the reserved tier, the people in Beijing who are actually relying on reading Washington have converged on a more cautious and, frankly, more accurate assessment. They have described America as a relative decline, but erratic, and still very formidable as well as technologically advanced, especially in the field of the upcoming and new challenges of competition. The assessments have consistently referred to America as “declining but dangerous,” and this phrase has proven to be the most accurate of the lot. Reality has justified the phrase. The same cannot be said of unqualified and total victory.

The inconsistency in narratives can be attributed to the fact that the accounts are serving two purposes simultaneously. They are both analysis and propaganda, and the two types of work are at odds with each other. After AI successes or trade wins, the propaganda is ahead of analysis. After the impacts of reshoring or when a Chinese model stays behind, the analysts bring it back. The occasion is provided by the anniversary, but the underlying reason is that China has not decided, and maybe cannot decide, if they think that simply waiting will work in their favour or if the gap they have slowly been closing over the past 25 years is going to be a stubborn gap.

At 250, in other words, the United States functions in Chinese discourse less as a subject to be judged than as a mirror. What Beijing sees in it, in any given month, tells you a great deal about how confident Beijing is feeling about itself

This article contains many spoilers for “Heartstopper Forever.”

In the early minutes of “Heartstopper Forever” — the feature film finale of Netflix’s hit teen romantic dramedy series — Charlie Spring (Joe Locke) notices a crooked photo strip on his boyfriend Nick Nelson’s (Kit Connor) bedroom wall. Gently pulling down the pictures, taken on the beach day they made their relationship official, Charlie smiles wistfully at their younger selves: “We look like babies.”

It’s a line that applies to the characters as much as it does to Locke and Connor. Four years after being catapulted into global stardom, the pair are bidding a bittersweet farewell to the roles that have defined their own coming of age.

“Season 1 does feel like an immensely long time ago that I do look back and think, ‘Yeah, we do look like babies,’” Connor says, with Locke nodding in agreement next to him on a recent video call from London. “‘Heartstopper’ itself was this tiny little show that was clearly something quite special to us, but we didn’t really think or know anyone was going to watch. And, suddenly, it became this thing that was immensely important to a lot of people.”

Adapted by Alice Oseman from her own bestselling graphic novels, which originated as a webcomic in 2016, “Heartstopper” chronicles the endearing love story between high-strung, gay overthinker Charlie and kind-hearted, bisexual rugby player Nick at an all-boys’ school in England.

Nick (Kit Connor) and Charlie (Joe Locke) in a scene from Season 1 of “Heartstopper.”

(Netflix)

Upon its debut in 2022, the show was lauded for its unabashedly joyful, tender portrayal of queer youth — a refreshing departure from the trauma-heavy narratives that dominate other teen dramas. Even as “Heartstopper” ventured into darker thematic territory, such as Charlie’s history of eating disorders and struggles with self-harm, Oseman’s writing never lost its deft, light touch.

From the outset, Oseman knew she wanted to end “Heartstopper” with Nick going off to university in Leeds and Charlie, who is a year younger, finding independence as head boy at school. But with her cast growing increasingly more in demand every year, the author-turned-screenwriter says it would have been logistically difficult to make a fourth and final season.

After Netflix greenlit a two-hour finale instead, Oseman elected to zero in on her protagonists — not unlike her comics — rather than give each character their own, heavily condensed arc. “I think that was definitely the right decision, because we really get to spend a lot of time with Nick and Charlie and not feel like we’re missing anything,” she says.

Directed by Wash Westmoreland (“Colette,” “Still Alice”), “Forever” finds the first loves grappling with the reality of an impending long-distance relationship, leading to a rash breakup and, ultimately, an emotional reconciliation. In a surprising role reversal, as Charlie confidently steps into a leadership role as an advocate for other LGBTQ+ students, Nick is left to discover his own identity and self-worth outside of being the protective, supportive boyfriend.

On the set of “Heartstopper Forever” as Connor and Locke film a scene from the movie.

(Samuel Dore / Netflix)

Connor, who also executive produced the film with Locke, felt Charlie and Nick’s romance would be better wrapped up in a feature-length format. “There were a few very important and crucial, but short and intense [plot points] — the breakup and the time apart, and the eventual makeup and the two of them discovering who they are without one another,” he explains. “Doing it in a shorter period, I thought, would make those things hit that much harder and feel that much more visceral.”

Unlike previous seasons in which she could rely on her existing comics as storyboards for the show, Oseman was working simultaneously last year on the sixth and final volume of the “Heartstopper” comics, released earlier this month, and the “Forever” screenplay.

Juggling the same story in two different formats turned out to benefit each end product. “When I finished writing the first draft of the script, it actually made me do a really big rewrite of the comic, because it helped me see which moments were really important and which moments didn’t need to be there,” she says. (One of the pivotal scenes was the Pride parade, filmed on the last morning of production.)

As first-time producers, Locke and Connor also provided script notes that directly influenced the story. For instance, “there was no scene between Charlie and Mr. Ajayi in the original script,” says Locke, referring to the gay art teacher, played by Fisayo Akinade, whose classroom became Charlie’s safe haven from bullying before he befriended Nick. “I was like, ‘That scene in Season 1 with them is so pivotal to the story. It would be really lovely to have just a little moment for them in the film that circles on that chapter of their relationship.’ And straight away, Alice was like, ‘Yeah, great idea. Let’s do this.’”

For his part, Connor always feared that the show’s “rose-tinted” approach, though part of the story’s appeal, “would not be nuanced enough to talk about the complexities of being human and being young.”

Locke says he proposed a scene with Fisayo Akinade, who plays art teacher Mr. Ajayi, as a way to circle back on their relationship.

(Netflix)

“There was one moment where I was like, ‘Oh God, I hope these young people watching “Heartstopper” don’t suddenly forget that these kids are human, and that these kids can make mistakes and still be lovely, delightful and good people,’” Connor says. With Oseman and Locke, Connor was adamant about “finding the place [where] these characters were being treated in a way that we all felt good about.”

According to Oseman, Locke and Connor were also heavily involved in selecting a new intimacy coordinator, Robbie Taylor Hunt. Over the years, the amount of sex — or lack thereof — in “Heartstopper” has been the subject of much discourse. “It always annoyed me slightly that people were like, ‘Oh, this is so unrealistic. They’re not having sex.’ They were underage. What do you want us to do?” Locke says with a wry laugh.

Oseman has learned to tune out that online chatter, accepting that she cannot please everyone — let alone represent the entire spectrum of the young queer experience. With each season and now this film, her creative team chose to age up the story slightly. After Charlie and Nick lost their virginity to each other at the end of Season 3, the film uses physical intimacy to reveal more about their maturing relationship.

Locke says those scenes were necessary to the plot. “The pier sex scene is this carnal lust between these two people who need to get it out. The sex scene in the pillow fort is a moment of connection for them,” he says. “And the big sex scene at the end of the film is the reconciliation of their relationship.”

In the end, Nick and Charlie decide to give their relationship another shot, confident that their love can defy the conventional wisdom that teen romances rarely last. But what they learn during their split is “that you can’t put all of your hopes and dreams, your mental health and your ability to survive into one person, because it’s not fair on yourself and on that other person,” Connor says.

Over the years, the amount of sex, or lack of it, in “Heartstopper” has been the subject of online discourse. The film shows more physical intimacy.

(Netflix)

The film’s epilogue, like in the comics, offers a brief glimpse of Charlie visiting Nick for a weekend in Leeds, ending with the two of them looking through the pages of a scrapbook that still has room for new photos. While Oseman has her own vision of Nick and Charlie’s future in 10 years — they’d be newly married with a dog, she believes — the actors who play them aren’t so sure.

“I feel like the beauty of ‘Heartstopper’ is that we get to see a chapter of these two young men’s lives, and it ends in a way that doesn’t promise anything,” Connor says. “Even if they were to not end up together eventually, it wouldn’t make the experience that they shared together any less special or pivotal to who they are as people. I think that’s kind of beautiful.”

Locke is reluctant to divulge his own interpretation of the characters’ future, preferring instead to let viewers make sense of the hopeful ending. “I hope they’re happy,” he says simply. (But for the record, the actors both believe that Charlie and Nick will stay together. “Of course, we all hope so,” Connor clarifies.)

Although she is ready to tell new stories, Oseman believes that she will be revisiting Nick and Charlie, who first appeared in her 2014 debut novel “Solitaire,” “in small ways for the rest of my life.”

“I think there definitely won’t be another 10-year-long webcomic — probably not — but I love thinking about what Nick and Charlie might be up to when they’re 40 or 60,” Oseman says. However, she adds, “I think the main story of ‘Heartstopper’ has concluded, and I do feel good about that.”

Like their high school characters, Locke and Connor are ready to graduate from the “Heartstopper” universe. Wary of being typecast, they have established themselves as versatile stage actors, making their Broadway debuts in “Sweeney Todd” and “Romeo + Juliet,” respectively. Onscreen, Locke joined the Marvel universe in “Agatha All Along,” while Connor has explored vastly different cinematic genres — his next major project, the film adaptation of the dark fantasy video game “Elden Ring,” will reunite him with “Warfare” director Alex Garland.

Even on the day of our interview, Connor and Locke looked a world away from Nick and Charlie. Locke wore an all-black designer outfit, while Connor — dressed in a light blue striped button-down over a white tank and khakis — had traded Nick’s signature floppy hair for designer stubble. Yet both actors have made peace with the reality that they will forever be linked to each other and their roles. “That’s part and parcel of the job,” Connor says.

Fittingly, the last scene Connor and Locke filmed as Nick and Charlie was the anniversary scene in the park where there is a fallen tree with the letters “N+C” carved into the trunk. “It was lovely because it was back to how a lot of the ‘Heartstopper’ experience has been, which is just me and Joe,” Connor says.

“I love thinking about what Nick and Charlie might be up to when they’re 40 or 60,” says creator Alice Oseman. However, she adds, “I think the main story of ‘Heartstopper’ has concluded, and I do feel good about that.”

(Netflix)

Would they be open to revisiting Charlie and Nick’s love story as older adults? “In 10, 15, 20 years, who knows? Maybe,” Connor says. “Even if Alice were to decide that they wanted to make a TV show about another character in the universe of ‘Heartstopper’ and they wanted us to cameo or something, then, hey, maybe.”

While the “Heartstopper” team expected the series to resonate with younger audiences, they have been particularly moved by the reactions of older queer viewers, who have marveled at the strides in LGBTQ+ representation onscreen. Coming from the world of young-adult fiction — where she notes stories of queer joy are abundant — Oseman recalls being surprised that “Heartstopper” was treated as an anomaly in mainstream media. Still, she is proud to have helped move the needle on LGBTQ+ representation, particularly when such characters remain underrepresented.

“My hope is that people will be able to look back … and say, ‘Hey, “Heartstopper” did really well. Let’s make another queer show that’s got the [same] ‘queer joy’ vibes,’” Oseman says. “I hope it’s been able to give that encouragement to the people in power to let there be more stories out there because we just need more, different kinds of queer stories.”

Connor believes that anyone can enjoy the show because “Heartstopper” simply captures the universality of “human beings being happy and being in love.”

“Obviously, the [queer] representation is incredibly important. I think that the very existence of the show and the comfort and safety that it can bring people is one of the things that makes it so special,” Connor says. And the demand for such stories “isn’t going to change,” he adds. “Queer people are always going to exist.”

On Monday, more than 40 fake trophies were stacked at the base of a 10-foot-tall “Iran War Participation Trophy” made for President Trump and placed on the National Mall by the anonymous satirical activist group Secret Handshake.

The large golden trophy is part of a growing trove of protest art pieces erected by the group since Trump was reelected to his second term in office. Previous installations, which have all received the necessary permitting for legal display, include one of Trump and convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein holding hands, and a playable retro video game called “Operation Epic Furious: Strait to Hell.”

The new participation trophy is equipped with a plaque that reads:

“We hereby award President Donald J. Trump this participation trophy for his enthusiastic involvement in the Iran War. While some concern themselves with military strategy, diplomacy, or measurable outcomes, President Trump demonstrated the courage to participate regardless of the final score.

As recipient of this prestigious award, President Trump joins the ranks of children everywhere who receive recognition for simply showing up. We join you in celebrating this remarkable achievement.”

Secret Handshake noted in a letter to The Times that the installation serves as the nation’s first official “Donald Trump Trophy Donation Center, encouraging the public to drop off their own personal trophies, medals, and ribbons at the base of the monument for The President to claim as his own. Together, we hope that if enough trophies are donated he will be perceived as a winner and not feel the need to bomb other countries.”

A representative for Secret Handshake said the dozens of donated awards include certificates, trophies, medals, a wrestling belt and a Kennedy Center sash.

“I’m really thrilled to see people taking an active interest in joining in and bringing their own creativity and having their own voice heard by adding trophies to the base of this instillation,” the representative wrote in an email. “I think it’s exciting and I think when people can take a moment to tangibly express their opinion about this government’s war it helps to create a reminder that we aren’t alone. This isn’t normal. This shouldn’t just be accepted at face value.”

One of the best offerings is titled, “First Place in ‘I Know a Pool guy,’” and reads in part, “Participation trophy for Donald Trump in recognition of his renovation of the nation’s historic reflecting pool to more clearly reflect his efforts to criminalize the touching of a public monument in order to cover up the damage he caused …” The award also recognizes Trump’s “development of American Flag Blue pool liner, which he said was indestructible (unless cut by left wing radical terrorist vandals).”

Secret Handshake has extended an offer to “hand deliver both the participation trophy and all smaller trophies to the Trump Administration for The President’s glowing collection of fake accolades.”

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt taking First Place in time wasted mulching my garden in the heat. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

FRIDAY

“Etai & Felipe Pantone: Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces” at albertz benda.

Etai & Felipe Pantone
“Parallel Practices: Tailored Structures & Kinetic Surfaces” combines Pantone’s wall-based artworks and a series of collaborative design pieces to challenge ideas of use, intimacy and lived experience, placing each work in the interconnected artistic system.
Opening, 6:30–9:30 p.m. Friday; exhibit continues through Aug. 8. albertz benda, 8260 Marmont Ln. albertzbenda.com

New Swan Shakespeare Festival
The Bard is back in the O.C. at the troupe’s open-air, Elizabethan-style portable theater with “The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove,” a musical adaptation set in a 1950s SoCal beach town, in repertory with “Romeo & Juliet,” the classic tragedy reimagined amid the scarcity of the Dust Bowl.
“Merry Wives,” 8 p.m. Friday, Saturday, Thursday and various dates through Aug. 30; “Romeo,” 8 p.m. Sunday, Wednesday and various dates through Aug. 29. New Swan Shakespeare Festival, Inner Ring Road, UC Irvine. newswanshakespeare.com/

SATURDAY

“Cyrano” at the Old Globe, San Diego.

(Ben Wiseman)

Cyrano
An irreverent take on “Cyrano de Bergerac” by Edmond Rostand, adapted by Jason O’Connell and Brenda Withers, directed by Annie Tippe.
Previews, 8 p.m. Saturday; 7 p.m. Sunday, Tuesday and Wednesday; opening night, Thursday, 7 p.m.; continues through Aug. 9. The Old Globe, 1363 Old Globe Way in Balboa Park, San Diego. TheOldGlobe.org

F**king Strangers
The world premiere of a dark comedy about love and loneliness by Erik Patterson, directed by Chris Fields.
Previews, 8 p.m. Friday; 8 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 4 p.m. Sundays; through Aug. 24. Echo Theater Company, Atwater Village Theater, 3269 Casitas Ave. echotheatercompany.com

Yoko Ono’s ‘Sky Piece to Jesus Christ’ + ‘Cut Piece’
A six-piece classical music ensemble from the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will be gradually wrapped in gauze until the musicians can no longer play their instruments in “Sky Piece,” first presented to the public by Ono at Carnegie Recital Hall in New York in 1965. In “Cut Piece,” performed by artist MPA, the audience will be invited to cut away pieces of the artist’s clothing to take with them while the artist sits silently onstage. The performance was premiered by Ono at Yamaichi Hall in Kyoto in 1964.
6 p.m. Saturday; 2 p.m. Sunday. REDCAT, 631 W. 2nd St., downtown L.A. redcat.org

Marvelous Musicals
Professional and student dancers perform numbers from classic shows to modern favorites.
6:30 p.m. Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Dr. thebarclay.org

Koak, “Portrait of Myself, the Shell,” 2024. Flashe and acrylic on linen; diptych. 74 x 118 inches

(Photo by Chris Grunder. Courtesy of the artist and Perrotin.)

Summerlove Sensation
A group show featuring Isabelle Albuquerque, Alex Anderson, Mustafa Ali Clayton, Gregor Hildebrandt, Susumu Kamijo, Rae Klein, Koak, Asuka Anastacia Ogawa, Katherina Olschbaur, Jean-Michel Othoniel, Andrew J. Park, Gahee Park, Aya Takano, Honor Titus and Pilar Zeta.
Opening, 6-9 p.m. Saturday; exhibition continues through Aug. 28. Perrotin Los Angeles, 5036 W. Pico Blvd. perrotin.com

A Weekend With Robert Rodriguez
The multi-hyphenate filmmaker will be on hand for anniversary screenings of “From Dusk Til Dawn” (1996) and “Spy Kids”(2001) with the filmmaker in person and performing with his musical groups, Chingon Band and The Rodriguez Family Spy Band.
“From Dusk,” 7 p.m. Saturday. “Spy Kids.” 2 p.m. Sunday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

SUNDAY

Tensions, Personified
Readings of four short plays by John Binder are presented as part of the Odyssey’s Thresholds of Invention series.
4 p.m. Odyssey Ensemble Theatre, 2055 South Sepulveda Blvd. odysseytheatre.com

TUESDAY

Ann Noble, left, and Robin McDonald in “Dead Man.”

(Carolina Rodriguez)

Dead Man
Ann Noble writes, directs and performs in this clown noir murder mystery co-produced by Theatre Ghosts. Co-starring Christian Haines, Jeffrey Johnson and Robin McDonald.
8 p.m. Tuesdays, through Aug. 4. Echo Theater Company at Atwater Village Theatre, 3269 Casitas Ave. echotheatercompany.ludus.com

UCBackrooms
A one-night-only immersive, participatory comedy experience turns the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre into an escape room.
Shows begin every 15 mins., 6-7:30 p.m. Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre, 5919 Franklin Ave. ucbcomedy.com

THURSDAY

Falsettos
The O.C. theater company The Wayward Artist presents William Finn and James Lapine’s Tony Award-winning, sung-through musical set in 1979 and 1981 about a Jewish man who leaves his wife and son for his male lover, and the ensuing upheaval to their lives.
8 p.m. Thursday, July 24-26 and July 30-Aug. 2. Irvine United Congregational Church, 4915 Alton Pkwy. thewaywardartist.org

Arts anywhere

Jason Huber, from left, Scott G. Jackson and Dana Dewes in “The Price” at Pacific Resident Theatre.

(Ian Cardamone)

The Price
The critically acclaimed production of the Arthur Miller drama at Pacific Resident Theater closes this weekend. “‘The Price,’ directed by Elina de Santos, thrives in the intimacy of Pacific Resident Theatre’s main stage,” wrote Times theater critic Charles McNulty when he reviewed it in April. “There’s not a moment in the play that isn’t deeply inhabited by a cast that understands the value of listening.” But don’t worry if you are unable to make it to the Westside. The final two shows will be available from the League of Live Stream Theater for $35, which includes a 24-hour on-demand replay.
2 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m Sunday. Pacific Resident Theatre, 703 Venice Blvd., Venice; streaming at lolst.org/theprice

— Kevin Crust

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Miller Friedman, Ashley Maimes, Jonathan Blandino and Torianna Turnbow in Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” at Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum.

(Ian Flanders)

Summer is the ideal time to see theater out of doors (well, maybe not this broiling week, but at other times), and Times theater critic Charles McNulty has compiled this breezy list of “11 enchanting places to see outdoor theater in Southern California.” Spoiler alert: Shakespeare is well-represented, but remember, the Bard’s work was originally staged in an open-air theater.

McNulty also headed to Pasadena Playhouse for the opening of the two-person hip-hop musical “Mexodus,” which tells the little-known story of an Underground Railroad route to Mexico. McNulty was taken with the show, which arrived at the Playhouse after its award-winning off-Broadway run, calling it “hands down the most charming, innovative and warmly embracing new musical I’ve seen in the last year.”

Artist Betye Saar is photographed at her home in Laurel Canyon on Tuesday, June 30, 2026.

(Christina House/Los Angeles Times)

Betye Saar turns 100 on July 30, but the famed artist is still more interested in creating new work than discussing her groundbreaking legacy. Times contributor Tara Anne Dalbow wrote this lovely profile of Saar after a visit to her vibrant home studio in Laurel Canyon. “There are certain people who redefined what was a very narrow definition of American art, and Betye is absolutely one of them,” curator Zoé Whitley told Dalbow.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art this week revealed that artist Vija Celmins and filmmaker Denis Villeneuve will be honored at its upcoming Art + Film Gala, the first to be hosted since the spring opening of LACMA’s new David Geffen Galleries.

Younes and Soraya Nazarian Center for the Performing Arts — better known as the Soraya — on the campus of California State University Northridge.

(The Soraya)

If you’re interested in buying single tickets to shows that are part of the Soraya’s upcoming season, now is the time. The venue just opened up its access from membership presale to the general public. Sutton Foster, Dance Theatre of Harlem and Audra McDonald are all making their Soraya debuts, as is the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

And you thought making the “Mona Lisa” out of Legos was hard. The company has now paired with Vienna’s Belvedere Museum to release a 4,000-piece Lego set of Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss.” You can buy the set, beginning Aug. 1, for $299.99.

Dodgers left-hander Justin Wrobleski could have been content with his performance the first couple of months this season. After all, he’d come into the year fighting for a rotation spot, and he’d shown in that time that he was ready to be a full-time major-league starter.

That wasn’t enough.

While still holding on to his identity as a pitcher who goes right at hitters, Wrobleski tallied 20 strikeouts over his last two starts of the first half.

“We’re just doing a good job with the plan,” Wrobleski said last week, days before he was named a first-time All-Star. “I feel like I’m continuing to get better at knowing where to go with two strikes, knowing where to go versus a certain hitter with two strikes and just kind of reading the game.”

Wrobleski is the only Dodgers pitcher set to appear in Tuesday’s All-Star Game in Philadelphia. Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani pitched too close to the game, and Ohtani eventually pulled out of All-Star activities altogether in order to have his left knee drained on Sunday.

The story of how Wrobleski got there, in his first full season in the rotation after debuting two years ago, includes plenty of twists and turns.

“It’s a chronicle story in his young career, the down to up, but at the end of the day, he’s been a rock for us these first three months,” Dodgers pitching coach Mark Prior said in a conversation with The Times. “Was hoping he got in on the first set of announcements, but at the end of the day, he’s an All-Star, and he’s earned every bit of it.”

When Wrobleski wasn’t included on the initial National League All-Star roster, the Dodgers coaching staff went to work lobbying for him to be a replacement player. Manager Dave Roberts publicly made the case for Wrobleski and closer Tanner Scott whenever he had the chance.

Then, a week later, Wrobleski (10-2, 2.69 ERA) got the call after Cincinnati Reds right-hander Chase Burns bowed out because of tightness in his groin.

“He’s done so many intangible things that I think get lost in the shuffle of numbers and metrics,” Prior said of Wrobleski. “But he’s eaten innings, he’s provided length for us when we needed length. He went toe-to-toe with [Phillies three-time All-Star Zack] Wheeler. He went toe-to-toe with [José] Soriano when he was dealing with the Angels, kept us in ballgames.”

Admittedly, a year and a half ago, Prior wouldn’t have imagined Wrobleski would be an obvious All-Star pick this quickly.

The tipping point came when Wrobleski surrendered eight runs to the Washington Nationals in his first start last season. And it didn’t help that his last start of the previous season was a 10-run slog against the Arizona Diamondbacks.

“It was a long, raw, emotional sit-down with him,” Prior said. He said after the conversation with Roberts, assistant pitching coach Connor McGuiness and the rest of the staff, “we left with like, ‘Which way is this going to go?’”

But persistence has been a hallmark of Wrobleski’s career, dating to his college years, when he infamously bounced back from a car hitting him on a scooter and a baseball breaking his jaw. He also underwent Tommy John surgery two months before the Dodgers selected him in the 11th round of the 2021 MLB draft.

So, committing to a delivery change last season wasn’t all that intimidating.

Wrobleski returned to the majors in mostly a bullpen role. And his steadiness in those shorter outings culminated in a strong postseason run that included four scoreless appearances in the World Series.

“We talk about, who can you depend on to not let the moment get too big?” Prior said. “And I think Wrobo had proved that all the way through September, but clearly proved that the moment is not too big for him to continue to make pitches. And that was exciting to see too as a staff.”

Still, Wrobleski wasn’t guaranteed a rotation role this season. And Prior was frank about that over the offseason.

Wrobleski’s first outing of the season was in relief, but the Dodgers had earmarked him as their sixth starter for the second turn in the rotation.

In his first five starts, Wrobleski posted an eye-popping 0.56 earned-run average.

His swing-and-miss rate and strikeouts were down, but pitching to soft contact was getting him positive results. The most glaring example came against the St. Louis Cardinals in early May, when he threw six shutout innings without recording a punchout.

Dodgers left-hander Justin Wrobleski recorded 20 strikeouts in his last two starts before the All-Star Game.

(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)

Wrobleski wasn’t going to coast on that early success, however. He kept fine-tuning his delivery and adjusting his pitch mix, right through a rough patch in late May and into a consistent June.

“He went from paring down his arsenal to kind of two pitches, to regrow his arsenal while he’s learning how to pitch at this level,” Prior said. “I think the big thing is now these guys have different looks.”

Wrobleski’s four-seam fastball and slider have done the heavy lifting. The rest of his secondary pitch mix has been a moving target.

He and the pitching coaches have talked through the most effective use of his curveball. He started integrating his sinker more consistently in late April, especially against left-handed hitters. He’s tinkered with different grips for his change-up, a pitch he started using more in mid-May. Three weeks ago, he introduced a sweeper. And in his last two starts, he threw that pitch 19 times.

“At the heart of it, though, is he never lets off the gas pedal,” Prior said. “He just gets the ball, he’s on the rubber, he puts the hitter on defense from the get-go before they’ve even seen a pitch. And that’s something that not everybody can do.”

So, despite the journey, when Wrobleski looks back at the pitcher he was a year and a half ago, he doesn’t see a complete overhaul.

“Same guy but different, I guess,” he said. “It’s crazy. I’ve had to go through a lot of small tweaks and changes. And it’s just all been about just having belief that I could continue to do it. And I knew that there were a lot of things that I could do just to get better, and I wasn’t as far away as maybe it seemed on the outside — or, as people thought it was.

“I felt like I was close that whole time, even though the results weren’t really there. It’s been cool to see the results come.”

The story of Dan Tana’s, in many ways, is the story of Los Angeles.

In 1980, Dan Tana’s burst into flames. At the time, the Tana family was vacationing on a remote Yugoslav island when a telegram arrived: “The restaurant burned down. Call me, Pearl,” recalls Katerina Tana, one of Dan Tana’s daughters.

Dan Tana flew back to Los Angeles, expecting charred remains. Instead, he found handwritten signs taped to the restaurant’s door: “Rebuild it. This is our home. Don’t change a thing,” recounts Katerina.

News of the fire reached musician Linda Ronstadt, who swore that Dan Tana’s served the best plate of spaghetti in the world. The rock star became the immigrant-run restaurant’s unlikely patron saint, calling on her relationship with then-Gov. Jerry Brown to help clear the way for its reopening. Just six weeks after the fire, Dan Tana’s welcomed customers again, even without a roof.

“They open up the restaurant with no roof on it. There’s no air conditioning unit. It was the hottest day,” says Katerina.

Oddly, the fire ushered in a new era for Dan Tana’s — a rebirth, even. Like Los Angeles, the restaurant endured by reinventing itself. “In a weird way, he rebuilt better than he ever could have, because if the restaurant hadn’t burned down, it might not have lasted this long,” Katerina says.

Stories like these fill the pages of “Everybody Came to Tana’s,” the late restaurateur’s memoir, which chronicles the outlandish journey that carried a young immigrant from communist then-Yugoslavia to the helm of one of Los Angeles’ most adored dining institutions. Dan Tana died last year at age 90, but his legacy lives on — inside the restaurant and now in his own words.

On a summer afternoon, his daughters, Gabrielle and Katerina, sit at the Sunset Marquis bar, recounting their father’s remarkable life — particularly his championing of soccer and his contributions to the sport. With the World Cup now unfolding across Los Angeles, the sisters say they can’t help but feel his presence. “One of his big wishes was to be here for this year’s World Cup. That’s why I know he’s here,” Gabrielle Tana says. “He was very instrumental in L.A. getting the World Cup. Our father was constantly helping connect people,” says Katerina.

In the final years of his life, Tana became determined to tell that story, working with writers in Serbia and eventually a ghostwriter, Todd Gold, who requested no credit; the resulting memoir feels wholly told in Tana’s voice. “Our father, for years, was talking about how he wanted to tell his story,” says Gabrielle. “He was always pinching himself about the life that he had — the stories, the adventures, and his luck.”

Tana had an unusual path to becoming the restaurant owner of the renowned Hollywood red-sauce hideout. Born in present-day Serbia, Tana’s early life was marked by political oppression under Communist rule. His father, a restaurateur, spent years as a political prisoner.

Gabrielle and Katerina Tana with their dad at Dan Tana’s, circa 2001.

(Suzette Van Bylevelt)

“When you live in a country where political powers are constantly in play, when you own a restaurant, you’re the person who’s hosting somebody who’s having a dangerous conversation,” explains Katerina. From an early age, Dan Tana’s mother made Dan promise not to end up in the restaurant business.

Instead, Dan Tana became a soccer star, touring Europe with Red Star Belgrade before eventually escaping to Belgium — a decision that would set him on the unbelievable path to Canada and then Los Angeles, where he would serve a stint managing a nightclub called Peppermint West and even launch a modest acting career with the help of Natalie Wood.

The chapters follow the restaurant’s improbable success, offering extraordinary anecdotes, such as how a Yugoslavian immigrant happened to open a red-booth, comfort-food Italian restaurant. The answer? Hiring Mussolini’s private chef. “It was one of two chef options that he was given by his partners: Dan Reeves and Clarence Dan Martin, who funded the soccer league. [Dan Reeves] also bought the restaurant,” says Katerina.

Beyond dispatches from his red-and-white-checkered tablecloth joint and name-dropping, Dan Tana’s memoir outlines his significant contributions to soccer. Throughout his life, he maintained deep ties to the international soccer community, supporting Red Star Belgrade long after he retired from the sport. “He became an evangelist for the game because he thought it was a game that this country would appreciate,” says Katerina. “Football was always the biggest love of his life.”

Craig Susser, left in black, has been greeting patrons at Dan Tana’s for decades.

(Stephen Osman / Los Angeles Times)

Last November, when England faced off with Serbia for the World Cup qualifying games, the stadium held a moment of silence for Dan Tana’s passing. “There were people within the game who really wanted to acknowledge his contribution to the game,” says Katerina.

“A good restaurant has a good bar, and a good bar has ghosts,” reads the introduction. For Dan Tana’s, as far as ghosts go, they comprise a who’s who of Hollywood royalty. Johnny Carson once called it his favorite restaurant. Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, Marilyn Monroe and other A-list stars were known to haunt the bar.

Even with its reputation as a watering hole for Hollywood’s biggest names, Dan Tana refused to pander to celebrities. “Everybody was treated the same. He never wanted the restaurant to be full of celebrities. He wanted to make sure that there were doctors, lawyers and teachers,” Gabrielle says. “He was almost a democratic socialist in that way.”

A revealing anecdote from the early pages of the book: Tana turned away Barbara Sinatra’s offer to buy out the restaurant for a night for Frank Sinatra’s birthday at $25,000. Tana refused. It wouldn’t be fair to his regulars. Frank Sinatra never set foot in the restaurant again.

Sonja Perencevic and Dan Tana attend the restaurant’s 50th anniversary party in Los Angeles in 2014.

(Alberto E. Rodriguez / Getty Images)

In many ways, Tana was one of Hollywood’s quiet power brokers, earning influence through humility and respect rather than status. In 1972, mysterious mafia members came into the restaurant to ask Tana to procure early-screening tickets for “The Godfather.” Naturally, Tana obliged. The mafia returned to report they loved the now-classic film.

The proximity to the Troubadour also made the restaurant a hangout for up-and-coming names in rock music. “He fed so many of those musicians. He wouldn’t charge them. These were kids that had nothing,” says Gabrielle. She recounts a night when musicians from the Troubadour celebrated the end of the Vietnam War at Dan Tana’s; the event went undocumented, lost to history.

Rock stars aside, the place is a writer’s joint too. Eve Babitz — who was a close friend of 93-year-old Deanne Mencher, who still makes the cheesecakes at Dan Tana’s — was known for socializing at the restaurant. “If you got hungry, you had to walk over to Dan Tana’s. Tana’s was delicious and evil — all that garlic,” Babitz once wrote in her semi-autobiographical novel, “L.A. Woman.” Screenwriters, journalists and famed L.A. writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were also known to frequent the restaurant.

In fact, Gabrielle and Katerina attribute the restaurant’s early colossal success to a Los Angeles Times review. It was 1966, and the restaurant was struggling. Art Ryon, a columnist at The Times, happened to stop at the restaurant before a screening at the Writers Guild of America and ordered mushrooms. “The L.A. Times made the restaurant,” Katerina says. “The next day there’s a line around the block, and my father has no idea what happened.” Tana was informed that he received a rave five-star review in The Times. Success soon followed.

Chicken Parmesan from Dan Tana’s.

(Jakob Layman)

The next generation of Hollywood — including comedy stars like Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller and Chris Rock — has continued the tradition. “SNL” cast member James Austin Johnson expresses his fondness for the restaurant. He discovered the restaurant after hearing Ed Begley Jr. rhapsodize about it. “The first intrigue is finding out who Dan Tana is,” says Johnson. “It has a West Hollywood mystique, like Chateau Marmont — like when Hollywood, the place and the business were all the same.”

Johnson loves restaurants that feel preserved in time. “It’s the idea that you can build something right the first time and then preserve it, so that people can be a part of your good idea when it happens,” says Austin Johnson.

Gabrielle and Katerina credit the enduring appeal of Dan Tana’s to its persistent lack of pretentiousness. The atmosphere evokes a Sinatra-era simplicity. “I think celebrities felt safe. They weren’t photographed, and they would be left alone,” says Gabrielle. The restaurant has kept its dim pink lights, which Gabrielle notes, “made everybody look good.”

The food has also remained consistent, with large portions and comfort food. “It’s not fancy, but it’s the best chicken Parmesan,” says Gabrielle. Over the decades, Dan Tana was approached about expanding the restaurant and opening second locations. He always refused, the restaurant’s humility always mirroring the man behind it. The restaurant, which felt like an anomaly, could not be replicated. “He always said: if I knew what I did right, I would do it again,” says Katerina.

Dan Tana’s originality continues to capture the city’s attention, its legacy now preserved in a memoir and carried on by its new owners, Mihajlo and Sonja Perenčević, who were friends of Dan Tana. Within its pages, the reader becomes one of Dan Tana’s beloved ghosts. “In a town that’s always trying to be something that’s not, it’s not trying to be anything,” says Katerina. “Dan Tana’s is longevity in the midst of ephemera.”

Connors is a culture journalist in L.A. She covers books, food, entertainment and offbeat Los Angeles. She’s currently at work on a book of essays about tourism in all its forms.

“Writers are always selling somebody out,” Joan Didion once wrote. She was talking about journalists, but it can be just as true of novelists. Whether the genre is romantasy or autofiction, making up stories often demands making up stories about real people — exploiting them — to serve a narrative purpose.

Cali Adeline’s debut novel, “People Watching in the Desert,” gives this thorny ethical business an impressively complex treatment for a book that comes on like a beach read. Sonny, its hero, has checked into Sanctuary, a spendy Phoenix-area resort, for an extended stay. She’s 25 and unemployed, and it’s unclear at first how she acquired the funds to splurge on an on-site cottage with a pool, 90-minute massages, and various forced-fun adventures. It’s also unclear why she chose a five-star resort for the splurging, given her discomfort with everything from the menu on down. Sitting down for dinner alone, she “discreetly googled some of the words on her phone under the table: cotija, calabacitas, tabbouleh, bisque.”

Adeline lays out a breadcrumb trail that eventually reveals that Sonny has lugged some especially heavy personal baggage to Sanctuary. Her neglectful, addict mom died when she was a child, only to be replaced with a repressive, overprotective grandmother who stomped on her every ambition. Early adulthood has been defined by failed relationships and uninspiring work. People are to be feared: She’d sooner indulge in croquettes at the resort’s cocktail party than make small talk with other vacationers, and when she braves the world outside her cottage it’s usually with a notebook in her hand.

The early pages of “People Watching” weave Sonny’s perspective with brief sketches of her fellow resort-goers, which usually open with godlike authority: “Allana was ten feet tall and beautiful.” “Chloe and Mark had been married for seven blissful years.” “Dale was invisible. He had that way about him.” The odd bluntness of these statements, combined with their touches of surreality (“ten feet tall”?), makes clear that these mini-bios are scribblings from Sonny’s notebook. Terrified of the world, but determined to better understand what she’s been excluded from for so long, she’s determined to imagine her way into reality.

Sonny’s Walter Mitty-like imaginings do some valuable double duty in the novel. For one thing, they offer some necessary conflict in a setting that’s all about relieving tension. Resorts are, almost by definition, boring, but as Sonny hangs out poolside or does yoga or endures a singing bowl, her mind (and the novel) is reeling with imagined infidelities, deaths, gambling debts and other domestic dramas. Second, her sketches serve as character-defining examples of projection on Sonny’s part, as her observations of others reveal her own concerns about love, sex, money and rejection.

And, of course, she’s deflecting, too — better to make up drama about others than confront her own. The memories Sonny eventually surfaces are more potent than anything she makes up. But they’re also crueler, and you can understand why she’ll think and write about anything but. She recalls a time as a child when she was neglected for days on end and braved a trip to a neighbor for help. “The woman asked Sonny when the last time she took a bath or changed her clothes was and Sonny didn’t know the answer. Her only response was, ‘I’m four,’ as she proudly held up five fingers,” Adeline writes. “She was three.”

Remember the words “beach read” up there? It’s not difficult to predict how Sonny’s arc will curve: It’s a Walter Mitty story, but also an Ugly Duckling story. That notebook full of mini-dramas becomes a source of drama in itself. Say, that bartender is pretty cute, isn’t he? And Sonny eventually integrates with a few of her fellow resort-goers, and learns there’s more to them in reality than her imaginings. As one character gently chastises her, “People can surprise you, Sonny, but you have to let them.”

The pat-ness of Sonny’s Sanctuary journey makes her yet another entry in an evolving genre you might call “Is This Character Concussed?” In these novels, the main character has been so absurdly addled by a (late-revealed) trauma that everyday human interactions are wildly aglow with (at first) terror or (later) manic-pixie wonder. Prime examples include Gail Honeyman’s “Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine,” Sayaka Murata’s “Convenience Store Woman,” and multiple characters in the oeuvre of Sally Rooney and Ottessa Moshfegh. (Women are the most common character in these books, but guys can play too: See Fredrik Backman’s “A Man Called Ove.”) Socially awkward characters offer an opportunity for dry humor and deadpan prose. Because these stories have to dramatize a search for normalcy, its leads tend to be awkward in ways that strain credulity.

But you don’t have to wholly buy into the idea of a character like Sonny to find something intriguing about what Adeline is saying about storytelling throughout “People Watching.” In Sonny’s notebook, every observation is a moral choice, a mini-essay about what proper conduct is, what failure is, how you might get past it, and what our responsibilities to others might be. A notebook is a place of wish fulfilment, and a place for vengeance. Sonny explains at one point that she only started to get free of her grandmother’s clutches once she was capable of imagining her violently erased:

“I wrote a story. About her. And how one day while I was at work the house caught fire. Which wasn’t that far-fetched because the whole place really was a fire hazard. And … and … well, she was asleep inside the house, in the story, and didn’t make it out. I didn’t mean it. I was angry. And it was a story.”

Adeline stresses the word “story” three times in one brief passage. Sonny wants to reassure everybody that she was just making it up. But no writer is, not entirely.

Athitakis is a writer in Phoenix and author of “The New Midwest.”

Bestselling author Jessica Knoll’s protagonists mostly follow a specific pattern: They are women who have learned Not. To. Flinch.

And, apparently, neither does Knoll. Talking over Zoom about her fourth novel, the erotic thriller “Helpless,” which is out this month, the author is blunt about the challenges it took to complete the book. “It takes a lot of skill to write good sex,” Knoll says. “I relied a lot on feedback from my editor and from my book agents saying ‘this is hot; this is not.’”

Knoll has written romantic scenes before, but “Helpless” needed to be enthralling and economic enough not to get her kicked off of Target’s bookshelves. In the end, the author says, “I went by what felt good and natural for these characters and maybe a little bit of the really unfiltered talk you have with your girlfriends after a couple martinis or are on a girls trip.”

Knoll’s successful career as a novelist rests on her knack for creating provocative page-turners that depict the absolute worst things one person could do to another — but in such a sensational, tongue-prickling-sour-candy kind of way that her books come off as devilishly evil beach reads. Since her debut bestseller, 2015’s “Luckiest Girl Alive,” — a master class in braided narration between a Machiavellian magazine editor and her younger self who endured so much emotional and physical trauma that it’s no wonder she grew up to be extremely calculating — to 2018’s reality TV-set “The Favorite Sister” and 2023’s “Bright Young Women,” a response to the public’s obsession with immortalizing serial killers while also not knowing the name of a single one of their victims. Knoll’s books are not only stories about women who do not care if you like them but also ones where disastrous results await the women who do follow our cultural conditioning to be agreeable to men.

Her “Helpless” heroine is not so different from a lot of her previous main characters: Type A overachievers with cutting inner monologues that let the reader know they’re always one step ahead in the social Darwinism that is female relationships. This time, she’s named Faye Heron, an Emmy-winning Hollywood multi-hyph who found cachet while working on one of those edgy premium dramedies that probably aired on HBO. Faye, and her husband/producing partner, have parlayed this notoriety into indie, cool-kid projects that are just commercial enough that some of the target audiences’ boomer parents may also watch.

When Faye’s beloved college professor dies suddenly and she’s asked to speak at a memorial ceremony, nostalgia and flattery make her drop everything and hightail it back to the leafy northeastern college town. The place is a time capsule with sketchy internet service, drunken frat boys, and — most crucially — Faye’s college boyfriend Henry, who is now married with two kids and still lives in the area. The clothing references and song choices are popcorn for those old enough to remember the aughts but young enough to party during them. The Elsa Peretti-designed Tiffany & Co. heart necklace that was the it-girl accessory of the time, and now is one that Gen Zers are fishing out of the bottoms of their parents’ jewelry boxes, factors significantly into the plot.

Although the story eventually spirals into other tropes of the Knoll-niverse — kidnappings, cover-ups, affairs, the laissez-faire security that only old money affords — Faye stands out because she wants to be told what to do. In a secure and mutually consenting relationship, of course. And preferably after she’s told her partner what she wants.

“Helpless” was influenced by the 1995 Susanna Moore thriller “In the Cut” as well as Sarah J. Maas’ currently uber-popular romantasy series “A Court of Thorns and Roses,” both of which discuss power imbalances and smart women who become enamored with dangerous lovers.

Knoll has always been open about creating work that’s commercial. She famously wrote a 2018 New York Times opinion piece, titled “I Want to Be Rich and I’m Not Sorry,” that discussed her need to rank in money with an almost Scrooge McDuck fervor: “Success, for me, is synonymous with making money,” she writes. “I want to write books, but I really want to sell books. I want advances that make my husband gasp and fat royalty checks twice a year. I want movie studios to pay me for option rights and I want the screenwriting comp to boot.”

(Evelyn Freja / For The Times)

During our Zoom, with the background carefully faded behind her wavy blond bob, she promises that she doesn’t just copy and paste her subjects and settings from what sells.

“I’m just always looking on what the spin is; like, what the timely take is on something that happens to capture my attention,” she continues, citing a habit she credits to her early career working in women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and Self. She adds that “I just happen to be interested in, like, really dark s—.”

“Helpless,” Knoll stresses, is a work of fiction; even though fans may be looking to draw comparisons to her life since “Luckiest Girl” was heavily influenced by her own career and childhood. Like the book’s Faye, Knoll went to a private liberal arts college. She’s spent time in the Adirondacks with the wealthy families who vacation in bare-basics cabins on the land they own. And she has dealt with her share of studio executives. Unlike Faye, Knoll is happily married to her husband, financial technology executive Greg Cortese. They share a young daughter. Last year, the family moved back to New York after some time in Los Angeles.

She does relate to Faye’s wealth dynamics. Her “Helpless” heroine grew up middle class but now has reached the “made it” level of nervous cockiness that happens when you combine new money and fame; the dream of so many who move to L.A. Henry, Faye’s ex, and his family are so comfortable in their generational wealth that he was raised to wear the same, now-bleach-stained, chambray button-down he had in college than buy a new one because clothes aren’t sound investments.

Knoll says she doesn’t want “things to feel didactic,” but concedes that class divides offer a treasure trove of stories.

“I just find myself going back to, again and again, this idea of someone who is the outsider because they don’t have the pedigree of their peers, but however many years later they’ve accomplished something and they think that they’re on more equal footing with these people from their past,” Knoll says. “Then something happens that brings them back into this environment where maybe they felt less-than years ago. They think that they’re going to go back and be like, ‘well, I’ll show you now because I’ve made it’ and those feelings of inferiority are still there.”

As she’s grown older and her career has become more stable, Knoll says she doesn’t think about success and fame the same way she did when she wrote her viral opinion piece or gave interviews where she talked about money and her own financial security. She says now that her priority is “the longevity of the career.”

Like her heroines, no one tells Knoll what to do. Unless she gives the OK.

Friedlander is a pop culture and entertainment journalist based in Los Angeles who hates coffee but loves Coke Zero.

“Little House on the Prairie” is the third television adaptation to bear the name of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s 1935 autobiographical novel of life on the Kansas plains in 1869 to 1870. The first, the Michael Landon television series that debuted in 1974, set in Walnut Grove, Minn., is really based on Wilder’s subsequent volume, “On the Banks of Plum Creek,” while a 2005 miniseries, shown as part of “The Wonderful World of Disney,” was generally faithful to the letter and spirit of the text. The record shows that I liked it.

The new “Little House,” created by Rebecca Sonnenshine and streaming on Netflix, is fairly faithful to its spirit, and less so to its letter. At its center is the Ingalls family: father Charles (Luke Bracey), or Pa; mother Caroline (Crosby Fitzgerald), or Ma; serious older sister Mary (Skywalker Hughes), and adventurous Laura (Alice Halsey), whose story this is. They are heading out to Kansas to what they imagine is free land, though they will have a thing or two coming on that account. “This will be our new forever,” says Laura, who doesn’t yet know that her future will be in Minnesota.

To be sure, the character relations remain essentially the same. Pa will play his fiddle. Laura and Mary will dance, when not getting in one another’s hair, or sulking. There will be singing, frequently. Major episodes from the book — when Jack got lost, (Jack is the dog, and he will be found), the incident of Mr. Scott (Maclean Fish) down the well, Christmas, the one about malaria, and all the business of building the eponymous log house — are accounted for, if in some cases expanded upon or altered. So extensive are its innovations that, although I am going to point out certain departures from or additions to the text, because I am that sort of pedant, it may be best just to regard this “Little House” as an original thing, a variation on a theme by Laura Ingalls Wilder, or a reboot of the television show.

Some touches are drawn from Wilder’s own history. Her mother was a teacher before she married Charles Ingalls; her maternal grandfather died from drowning. The black cowboy hat Laura sports is straight from a photograph of Wilder as a girl. Laura is made a sort of mini-Scheherazade to foreshadow the writer she’ll become (though she’ll also ask, “What am I ever going to need in a book?”). Baby Carrie, in the novel from the start, is born, as she really was, in Kansas, meaning that Ma is pregnant through much of the season — a condition that may have seemed too complicated for a 1935 children’s book, but which adds new strains of drama to the miniseries. It also introduces a theme in which Ma, who has lost “so many” babies, is trying to give Pa a boy, though he is not the sort to be disappointed in another girl.

Also new to the story is Independence, Kan., itself, which in the book is an offstage place to which Pa will sometimes go to fetch necessities, disappearing from the story until he returns. Here it’s nearby — a nicely realized little movie town to which the whole family will sometimes repair, to shop, raise a church or join in a Founders Day celebration. It’s dominated by a less than transparent booster, Eli James (Michael Hough), who comes with a self-important wife, Jemma (Mary Holland), and a pair of teenage twin girls who might be described as all dressed up with nowhere to go.

Notably, the series’ treatment of Native Americans feels intended to rectify, or at least deepen, their portrayal in the book — naive or romantic, maybe, though not, I’d argue, negative — with added native characters and discussions regarding the land and treaties and such. While Ma frets about the natives in the neighborhood, for no reason she can articulate — one juvenile delinquent steals her cherished china figurine, but we understand that there are social causes for his behavior — Pa, who has built his house unwittingly on an Osage trail, has sympathy and perspective. (Ma will soften considerably, because this is that kind of show.)

It’s not an issue for guileless, outgoing Laura, who acquires an Indigenous best friend, Good Eagle (Wren Zhawenim Gotts). Her father, Mitchell (Meegwun Fairbrother) will be a friend to Pa and her mother, White Sun (Alyssa Wapanatâhk), will provide a skeptical counterpoint to Ma. Mission-educated, they live in a nice house with a crucifix on the wall and shelves full of literature.

Most every character gets some backstory, some traumatic. The Ingalls left Wisconsin under a cloud. (“Why didn’t anyone come to say goodbye?” wonders Laura.) (Still, it’s good to see Martin Donovan as Pa’s angry father in a fever-induced flashback.) Ma married Pa, her social inferior, against her mother’s wishes. Caleb (Kowen Cadorath), a new character who works for another new character, Emily Henderson (Barrett Doss), at the general store, was abandoned as a small child. Echoing the character played by Victor French in the TV show, Mr. Edwards (Warren Christie) has a drinking problem, brought on by a family tragedy. (In the book he describes himself as a “wildcat from Tennessee”; here he has wild … cats.) Much of the time, someone is sad. Halsey and Hughes, who are very watchable throughout, are especially good with worried looks, and Fitzgerald, perhaps the series’ MVP, is an artist when it comes to expressing concern.

Sonnenshine also invents tentative romances between Edwards and Lacey Aubert (Rebecca Amzallag), who is French, independent, runs the saloon, I guess you’d call it, dresses in black and wears trousers; between Emily and Dr. Tann (Jocko Sims), who is in the book, but much more established here; and between Mary and Caleb. All these storylines sacrifice the centrality of Laura as a character and observer and makes this “Little House” less a story of a family out on its own than a family in the context of community. (That’s for later volumes in Wilder’s nine-book saga.)

It’s very sentimental — which the novel, with its matter-of-fact, if sensually evocative prose, and its child’s-eye view, is not. The dialogue here is ripe with sampler sentiments and weighted with meaning (“Hope is everything,” “What if this is where we finally become who we’re meant to be,” “Life can get away from you if you don’t speak your heart.”) Much of the added material would have easily fit the TV series — temperamentally, it’s very much a case of late 20th century broadcast television — which to some may be a recommendation.

It’s pretty, often very pretty, to look at. The flat expanse of Winnipeg, Canada, where it was filmed, makes a good topographical match for east Kansas. Prairies are prairies.

Ariana Grande was announced for American Horror Story’s next all-star cast on Halloween 2025.

American Horror Story is coming very soon with fans desperate to know of Ariana Grande ’s involvement.

FX announced yesterday, Thursday, July 9, that American Horror Story would be returning for season 13, on Thursday, September 24, in the US with no fixed date yet on its UK debut.

But going by the last series, American Horror Story could very well land on Disney Plus also in September or early October.

Excitement has been building for the anthology drama’s return since Halloween last year when it was revealed that singer and Wicked star Ariana Grande was set to star.

At the time, she was confirmed alongside American Horror Story regulars such as Sarah Paulson, Angela Bassett, Jessica Lange, Emma Roberts and Billie Lourd.

Will Ariana Grande star in American Horror Story season 13?

Unfortunately, Ariana Grande will no longer star in season 13 of American Horror Story, despite the initial casting announcement.

It has been reported that Ariana won’t make her debut because of conflicts with timing changes to the production dates of the horror series which are happening simultaneously with her Eternal Sunshine tour.

The 33-year-old hadn’t filmed any scenes for the new series with fans noticing her absence when the cast was previously spotted shooting exterior scenes.

Ariana rescheduled her Eternal Sunshine tour July concert dates at the end of June, shifting shows in Brooklyn and Boston to a couple of days later.

The star will continue her tour with upcoming stops including Canada, New York and London.

Unlike Ariana, previously announced stars Six Feet Under’s Frances Conroy and model Alex Consani were spotted shooting.

So far though, there has been no word on what American Horror Story season 13 will be about with details still under wraps.

American Horror Story is available to watch on Disney Plus.

I was in New York City with my family on the day Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce tied the knot at Madison Square Garden. Although our hotel was a few short blocks from the venue, which was surrounded by swooning fans, we managed to steer clear. Instead, we headed for the Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street to catch “Schmigadoon.”

The show, which took the Tony Award for best musical last month, was at the top of my must-see list, along with two other recent Tony winners — “Death of a Salesman” and “Giant,” — which I wasn’t sure would be as appealing to my 10-year-old.

There is a certain magic to Broadway despite the crush of commercial horrors a person must wade through in Times Square to get to a show, and “Schmigadoon” did not disappoint. I don’t remember the last time I laughed so hard during a live show. The jokes about a modern couple trapped in a magical town stuck more than 200 years in the past hit the mark with just the right amount of bawdy fun.

SNL alumn Ana Gasteyer is pitch perfect as the town’s vengeful moral crusader Mildred Layton, but the real hero of the show is McKenzie Kurtz, who plays Betsy, a love-hungry young farm girl desperate to catch a man and get married. Kurtz’s comic delivery is so over-the-top that laughter is the only option — and once you start laughing with her you can’t stop.

Like most Broadway musicals , “Schmigadoon” features an ensemble cast that represents the very best of the best when it comes to dancing and singing. It’s clear these actors like one another and know that they have a good thing. There is joy on the stage that transfers effortlessly to the audience. It’s one of those only-in-New-York experiences to be treasured. The show is scheduled to run through Jan. 3.

When we stepped out into the night after the show, we found it had rained. The temperature that day had reached 99 degrees and the city had wilted, but the downpour caused the mercury to plummet a good 10 degrees. The lights of Broadway sparkled in puddles as we made our way down the slick sidewalk, singing the show’s most catchy tune, “It’s not a metaphor, oh no it’s something more, it’s a literal bridge.”

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt wishing you a summer vacation that is also a journey. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

Arts anywhere

FRIDAY

John Travolta listens for evidence which he hopes will trap a killer in Brian De Palma’s 1981 suspense drama, “Blow Out.”

(Filmways Pictures)

Blow Out
The Academy Museum’s Summer Thrills series features a 35mm screening of Brian De Palma’s 1981 thriller about a movie sound tech who unwittingly uncovers a political assassination. John Travolta, Nancy Allen, John Lithgow and Dennis Franz star.
7:30 p.m. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org

SATURDAY

Defiantly Joni
The artist collective Muse/ique, in partnership with Center Theatre Group, presents a celebration of singer-songwriter Joni Mitchell, featuring Chris Pierce, Effie Passero, the DC6 Singers Collective and the Muse/ique Orchestra led by artistic and music director Rachael Worby.
5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 16 and July 17; 2:30 and 7:30 p.m. July 18; and 2:30 p.m. July 19. Mark Taper Forum, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A. muse-ique.com

Installation view of Alex Hubbard Abstract or Regular? at Regen Projects, Los Angeles July 11–August 15, 2026

(Evan Bedford, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects)

Alex Hubbard
The exhibition “Abstract or Regular?” features video animations projected on wood cutouts by the Los Angeles-based artist, as well as a painting that demonstrates experimentation with the boundary between representational form and abstraction.
Opening, 5-7 p.m. Saturday; exhibition continues through Aug. 15. Regen Projects, 6750 Santa Monica Blvd., L.A. regenprojects.com

The Shoebox Museum: A Private Immersive Experience
A “narrative video game” is brought to life by theatrical and sensory vignettes that enhance the interactive audience’s examination of artifacts and memories of a past relationship.
Shows begin every 30-45 minutes, 1-10 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays, through July 26. Afterhours Theater, 5628 Vineland Ave., North Hollywood. eventbrite.com

Earnestine Phillips, from left, Cynthia Kania, Susan Angelo and Ellen Geer rehearse “Waiting in the Wings.”

(Ian Flanders)

Waiting in the Wings
Noël Coward’s 1960 play about a feud between two female residents in a retirement home for actors joins “Romeo & Juliet,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Treasure Island” in the Theatricum Botanicum’s repertory season.
7:30 p.m. Saturday, through Oct. 3 (check schedule for specific days and times). Theatricum Botanicum, 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga. theatricum.com

SUNDAY

Journey Through Cahuenga: Indigenous Storytelling and Dance
Generations of Native narratives are expressed through music, poetry and dance. Scheduled participants include Dennis Garcia (Fernandeño-Tataviam, Chumash, and Tongva), Chad Hamill/ čnaq’ymi (Spokane), Eric Hernandez (Lumbee), and Carolyn M. Dunn, Ph.D. (Cherokee, Muscogee Creek, Seminole, Cajun, French Creole, and Tunica-Biloxi). Hosted by Tonantzín Carmelo (Tongva). An LA Soundscapes Family Concert featuring a pre-show activity and participatory artmaking. Doors open at 10 a.m.
11:30 a.m. The Ford, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. E., L.A. theford.com

Mahjong Social With Mahjong Mistress
A full afternoon begins with a screening of the late Taiwanese American filmmaker Edward Yang’s 1996 film “Mahjong” followed by an open mahjong session for all experience levels led by Mahjong Mistress, a collective of four friends united by their love of the game and its use in fostering cultural connection and conversation.
1:30 p.m. UCLA Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd., Westwood. hammer.ucla.edu

MONDAY

Hudson Hawk
A 35th-anniversary 35mm screening of the 1991 Bruce Willis heist satire with director Michael Lehmann and co-screenwriter Daniel Waters; introduced by Larry Karaszewski.
7:30 p.m. Brain Dead Studios, 611 N. Fairfax Ave. studios.wearebraindead.com

TUESDAY

“Apparition, ” circa 1880–1890 by Odilon Redon. Charcoal, powdered charcoal, black chalk, and black and yellow pastel with stumping on brown paper. 20 11/16 × 14 11/16 in.

(Getty Museum)

Odilon Redon: Otherworldly Visions
The exhibition includes charcoal drawings, lithographs and pastels by the French artist from the Getty’s collection, revealing the inspirations and imagination that helped create them.
Through Oct. 18. Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A. getty.edu

Harry Dean Stanton: Partly Fiction
On what would have been the actor’s 100th birthday, Vidiots welcomes the 2013 documentary’s director Sophie Huber for a screening hosted by Cherry Jones and a conversation with Logan Sparks, writer-producer of Stanton’s final film, “Lucky.”
7:30 p.m. Eagle Theatre, 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd. vidiotsfoundation.org

National Museum of the Aftermath screening series
The final screening in the series pairs Reginald Alan Hudlin’s 1994 sci-fi short “Space Traders: Cosmic Slop” with William Greaves’ 1968 meta-documentary hybrid “Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One.”
8 p.m. Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd. oxyarts.oxy.edu

Tchaikovsky & Beethoven
Cristian Măcelaru conducts the L.A. Phil for Tchaikovsky’s “Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35” (with soloist Leonidas Kavakos on violin) and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7 in A major, Op. 92.”
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

THURSDAY

The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring in Concert
The Pacific Symphony, soprano Kaitlyn Lusk, voices/LA and Los Angeles Children’s Chorus unite under conductor Ludwig Wicki for the 25th anniversary of Howard Shore’s Academy Award-winning score, performing live as director Peter Jackson’s epic film is projected on a 60-foot screen.
7 p.m. Thursday and Friday; 1 and 7 p.m. Saturday. Peacock Theater, 777 Chick Hearn Court, downtown L.A. peacocktheater.com

Mozart & Brahms
Spanish conductor Roberto González-Monjas leads the L.A. Phil on Korngold’s “Straussiana,” Mozart’s “Piano Concerto No. 19 in F major, K. 459” (with pianist Mao Fujita), and Brahms’ “Symphony No. 4 in E minor, Op. 98.”
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

— Kevin Crust

Dispatch: Remembering a master actor

Trisha Miller, from left, Josey Montana McCoy, Peter Van Norden and Dan Lin in “Misalliance” at A Noise Within.

(Craig Schwartz)

Peter Van Norden, one of Los Angeles’ most accomplished stage actors, died Wednesday at age 75. A graduate of Colgate University, he worked steadily in film and television, wracking up notable credits (“The Accused,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Murder, She Wrote”) over four decades.

But it was in the classical theater where he distinguished himself with his command of language and depth of human understanding.

He didn’t need to be cast as the star to elevate a production. His textual fluency and incisive, unfussy intelligence set a standard for his fellow company members, who might not be able to match him but couldn’t help gaining inspiration from his veteran example.

Cast as pompous Polonious and the mordantly witty gravedigger in the 2022 Antaeus Theatre Company production of “Hamlet,” he made me wish I could have turned back the clock to see him as Hamlet. I felt similarly when I saw him play Alonso at the Shakespeare Theatre Center in the 2023 immersive production of “The Tempest.”

What might his Prospero be like, I wondered longingly? Later that year, he got the chance to show me in a rackety Antaeus Theatre Company revival that unfortunately failed to make the most of his poetic gifts.

He was better served by the graceful 2024 production of “Misalliance” at A Noise Within, where he played the wealthy underwear industrialist John Tarleton in a voluble comedy of ideas that proved Van Norden was as adept in crisp, rational, talky idiom of George Bernard Shaw as he was in the more supple iambic pentameter of Shakespeare.

He was slated to appear as Capt. Shotover in Antaeus’ upcoming production of “Heartbreak House,” Shaw’s masterpiece. It was a role he had long wanted to play, and I can’t imagine the part being better cast.

For his heroic service to Los Angeles theater, Van Norden received the 2024 Michael McCarty Recognition Award, honoring Los Angeles–based Actors’ Equity members who have built their lives in the theater. I remember cheering from my desk the moment the announcement landed in my email inbox. Sometimes the award gods get things right.

Van Norden, who is survived by his wife, Wendy, and his son, Robert, a film producer, inspired that kind of hearty, spontaneous, grateful applause. Whenever I saw his name in a theater program, I breathed more easily, knowing that whatever else might happen that evening I would at the very least have the pleasure and the privilege of another Van Norden master class.

— Charles McNulty

Culture news and the SoCal scene

Nael Nacer, from left, Andrea Martin and Susan Pourfar in “Meet the Cartozians” by Talene Monahon at Second Stage Theater.

(Photo: Julieta Cervantes)

Times theater critic Charles McNulty knows a good show when he sees one — but also when he reads one. And this past week he helpfully compiled a list of eight works that he’s read for award consideration — or seen outside of L.A. — that he believes deserve local productions. I’m not going to spoil it for you by listing them here, so you’ll just have to read the story.

Are you a budding artist, or even a seasoned one looking to step up your game? Times contributor Sarah Fensom put together a handy list of seven L.A. figure drawing events and classes that feature unique concepts including high fashion and nude muscle men. Find your perfect match, here.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Los Angeles.

(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art is set to open on Sept. 22, but it announced some exciting news this week: It is giving free annual passes to its South L.A. neighbors in the 90037 ZIP code. The LM37 passes entitle holders to reserve tickets for themselves along with a guest. Tickets for non-pass holders go on sale July 21 and cost $25 for adults and $21 for seniors. Kids 17 and under are free.

On the heels of its 60th season, East West Players, the largest and longest-running Asian American theater in the country, announced its 2026-27 slate. “This season is the first chapter of East West Players’ next sixty years, a bold invitation to imagine what Asian American theater can become,” said artistic director Lily Tung Crystal in a statement. “By centering new voices, we’re not just honoring our legacy, but shaping the canon for generations to come.” The mainstage season will include the Southern California premiere of Jaclyn Backhaus’ comedy “Wives,” the Los Angeles premiere of the eponymously titled work “Kristina Wong, #Foodbankinfluencer” by the Pulitzer Prize finalist and East West Players’ New Works Festival. The group is also enticing theatergoers with new ticketing options: Pay-What-You-Will for every show and the Emerging Artist Membership, a free program for theatergoers ages 18 to 35, which guarantees $20 orchestra seats for them and a guest.

The Smithsonian Museum of American History on the National Mall in Washington.

(Pablo Martinez Monsivais / Associated Press)

A new White House report calls leadership of the Smithsonian Institution radical activists who “cannot be trusted to tell America’s story honestly and in a way that is inspiring, unifying, and worthy of our great republic.” The report specifically singles out the National Museum of American History, and culture watchers fear it’s paving the way for Trump to install his own team of leaders as he did at the Kennedy Center.

Speaking of the Kennedy Center, Trump appealed a court decision to remove his name from the building’s facade, but this week an appeals court denied his request.

— Jessica Gelt

And last but not least

We can all stop taking our kids to live-action remakes of Disney classics. Seriously. Times film critic Amy Nicholson breaks down why in this crushing review of the new live-action “Moana.”

The BBC has produced a number of critically acclaimed and beloved films and TV shows over the years – but one gritty crime drama may have slipped under the radar for many fans

A “gritty” BBC crime drama has left viewers “heartbroken” but it may well have gone completely unnoticed by some film fans.

The BBC has built a stellar reputation among TV and film enthusiasts thanks to its numerous top-tier productions which continue to be praised long after they first aired. There’s something to suit all tastes, from entertaining and fun sitcoms, steamy storylines and beloved period dramas, to powerful, unflinching crime thrillers, and much more.

Lots of BBC-backed films remain critically celebrated and adored to this day, from 2019’s musical crime drama hit Blue Story, and the thought-provoking Looted, to the 1989 Gary Oldman-led cult crime classic The Firm, and countless others.

The BBC’s television catalogue is equally respected, with the likes of hugely popular police drama Line of Duty, bleak favourite Happy Valley and the tense anthology drama The Missing frequently listed as among the best the broadcaster has produced.

But a 90-minute crime film may have escaped many viewers’ attention – and if you’re partial to hard-edged legal dramas, it’s worth checking out.

It’s the 2014 made-for-television film, Common. It was written by Jimmy McGovern and directed by David Blair. The film stars Nico Mirallegro, Michelle Fairley and Harry Potter alum Michael Gambon.

The storyline follows 17 year old Johnjo O’Shea, portrayed by Mirallegro, who is asked to give his older brother’s friends a lift in his brother’s car to take them to a pizza takeaway.

Unbeknownst to Johnjo, one of his passengers has an ulterior motive for heading to the takeaway – he intends to confront a rival who’ll be there.

A row erupts between one of Johnjo’s passengers and an onlooker, Tommy Ward. Tommy is eventually stabbed and fatally wounded by the passenger.

Johnjo ends up in court charged as an accessory to murder, under the doctrine of common purpose; a component of the UK’s contentious Joint Enterprise legal doctrine which permits multiple people to be prosecuted and found guilty of the same offence – regardless of the different roles they may have played in a crime.

Writer Jimmy McGovern drew inspiration from the actual case of 16 year old Jordan Cunliffe, who received a sentence under this law for a minimum period of 12 years for the murder of Garry Newlove, who was beaten to death in August 2007 after challenging a group of youths outside his home.

Cunliffe was understood to have played no active role in the assault on Newlove.

The film traces the legal proceedings that follow, alongside the consequences and tensions that arise between the various families affected.

On Rotten Tomatoes, viewers have shared their opinions on the somewhat overlooked drama. One fan said: “Actor and storyline driven, this gritty British drama brings a new area of crime and punishment to light.

“Jodhi May stands out, but with many regular British drama faces, this is a tale that leaves no mother without an emotional pull.”

Another viewer wrote: “I thought this was a simple movie, but powerful all the same.”

A third added: “Very well made and acted, but so heartbreaking I never want to see it again.”

Critics were equally impressed, with The Guardian describing it as “a brutal and devastating drama” that’s “bleak, powerful” and “thick with political intent”, though it noted this “occasionally robs it of its quality”.

Common is streaming now on BBC iPlayer.

Edwin Díaz insists he did nothing wrong.

After facing live batters for the first time Sunday since undergoing elbow surgery in April, the Dodgers’ reliever pushed back against allegations linking him to illegal cockfighting in Puerto Rico.

“I’ve been doing that before because, like the story said, that’s legal in Puerto Rico,” Díaz said.

USA Today published a story in May highlighting social media posts advertising cockfighting tournaments that picture Díaz in his Dodgers uniform. The story also referenced a story in El Nuevo Día, the largest circulating newspaper in Puerto Rico, quoting Díaz.

No one from Major League Baseball has reached out to Díaz about a possible suspension, he said.

“They didn’t reach out to me because I wasn’t doing anything illegal,” Díaz said.

In 2019, a federal law banning cockfighting took effect in Puerto Rico. Before the law, the blood sport had been made illegal in all 50 states, but not U.S. territories. Many Puerto Ricans saw the ban as an attack on their culture and vowed to defy the law.

Puerto Rico responded by passing a law saying that it’s legal to host cockfights as long as people don’t export or import the animals or any goods or services related to cockfighting. The U.S. Supreme Court in 2021 declined to hear a challenge to the federal law brought by a group that argued Congress exceeded its power by applying the ban to Puerto Rico.

Anyone found guilty of taking part in cockfighting faces up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Spectators could receive a one-year prison sentence.

Still, some Puerto Ricans such as Díaz view the topic as part of the island’s history, initially brought to the Caribbean by 16th-century Spaniards when the island was first colonized.

“It’s a pastime I’ve followed since I was a child,” Díaz told El Nuevo Día in March. “It’s legal in Puerto Rico, thank God. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be here.”

Diaz is on track to return to the Dodgers after the All-Star break, although his exact return date remains unclear. His fastball felt good, so locating his slider was the next step toward his return.

Times staff writer Hannah Fry contributed to this report.

Viewers need to be quick if they want to catch the harrowing tale exploring the “twisted depth of maternal love”

There are now just days left to stream a film viewers believe “everyone should watch” once in their lifetime.

Currently available on Netflix, the story centres around two children, Victoria and Lily, who are found abandoned in a dilapidated house in the woods years after the death of their parents. Experts are left completely baffled as to how they have survived with seemingly no food or resources around them.

The sisters are brought in to a safe facility where they are monitored by childhood behaviourists who believe they have likely been alone for five years.

In order to reintroduce them into society, the girls are taken in by their uncle Lucas (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) and his partner Annabel (Jessica Chastain) who intend to provide them a safe and loving environment at home. However, they soon learn there is more to the case than first meets the eye.

The film in question is 2013 horror, Mama, which will be leaving Netflix at the end of the month. Viewers have until July 25 to stream it before it’s gone for good.

As per the official synopsis: “Annabel and Lucas are faced with the challenge of raising his young nieces that were left alone in the forest for five years…. but how alone were they?”

Alongside Oscar-winner Chastain and Game of Thrones alum Coster-Waldau, the cast also includes revered horror actor Javier Botet. Mama was directed by Andy Muschietti, famed for his work on the IT horror franchise, with Guillermo Del Toro also on board as an executive producer.

At time of writing the film has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 63 per cent from critics and 55 per cent from audiences.

“Mama expands a chilling short film into a full-length feature exploring the dark, twisted depth of maternal love,” penned one viewer, as a second declared: “Everyone should watch this movie at least once.”

“This is actually a pretty good movie,” said another. “I don’t understand the hate from some critics. I haven’t seen this movie in many years, but it has aged very well. It also has a lot of great scenes and creepy moments.”

Meanwhile a fourth watcher added: “I don’t know what it is about it, but this film somehow stuck with me. In my opinion, it does not get the credit it is due. Very atmospheric movie.”

Mama is now streaming on Netflix. It will leave the platform on July 25.

About six months after Toni Morrison died in the summer of 2019, Literary Cleveland began hosting annual community tribute parties on the Nobel Prize-winning author’s birthday, Feb. 18. Lorain, Ohio — a suburb of Cleveland — is where Morrison was born and raised, and where she set several of her novels. During these gatherings, participants were prompted to read aloud from their favorite Morrison works, and share why they savored those particular lines.

Over time, these meetings began to feel increasingly intimate, even “sacred,” according to Literary Cleveland’s Executive Director Matt Weinkam, which prompted him, in tandem with Ohio Humanities head Rebecca Asmo, to brainstorm how to take their program state-wide. “This is Toni Morrison, one of our greatest writers,” Weinkam recalls thinking. “We needed to do something bigger.”

At the time, Weinkam and Osmo were also trying to figure out how to commemorate America’s semiquincentennial. Weinkam was listening to Morrison’s entire oeuvre on audio and realized that when you organize the 11 novels in a certain order, “they tell the history of America.” So how, he thought, “could you use the literature of Toni Morrison to view our country through a different lens — through her lens?” He says they knew honoring Morrison as a consequential figure not just in literature but also in the context of American history would be central to Ohio’s celebration of the semiquincentennial.

“[But] only as the project was coming together did we strike on the fact that her novels trace American history from ‘A Mercy,’ set in 1690, through ‘God Help the Child,’ in the 2010s. Not only does her work re-center African Americans in the story of our country, it also tackles major events from our founding, through slavery, to the impact of Jim Crow, to the great migration and beyond.”

In the months leading up to the 250th anniversary, they decided to bring the Morrison salons they were curating in Cleveland to all 88 Ohio counties. For assistance they connected with Britt Lovett, a strategist, community leader and fellow Morrison acolyte.

“People say that reading Toni Morrison is challenging,” says Lovett. “[But] reading Toni Morrison is like my grandmother speaking to me.”

In February, on what would have been Morrison’s 95th birthday, they officially launched “Beloved: Ohio Celebrates Toni Morrison,” a yearlong homage including readings, workshops, lectures and a monthly book club that meets on Sunday evenings. They intentionally programmed the book club so that it would take readers through our U.S. history utilizing Morrison’s vision: Weinkam proposed reading Morrison’s novels in the order in which they are set rather than the order in which they were published. “That simple shift,” says Lovett, “changed everything.”

They began with “A Mercy,” one of Morrison’s later novels, published in 2008 — which is set in the late 17th century, before slavery took hold and the country became “racialized.” Next came “Beloved,” then “Sula” and “Jazz.” “Experiencing the novels this way reveals how Morrison traced generations of Black American life across centuries of our nation’s history,” Lovett says. “What may appear to be individual stories become part of a larger narrative about memory, freedom, family, belonging and the ongoing project of America itself.”

For Morrison, writing fiction was a form of “literary archaeology,” excavating history, and how the past hovers over the present. Her quest was what she termed “rememory.”

Eddie S. Glaude Jr. is a Princeton professor and author of “America, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries” who has studied Morrison. “She understood the ongoing national effort to disremember — this startling combination of dismembering and remembering — to protect the innocence of America,” Glaude says. “Instead, her novels relentlessly expose the horror and the magisterial efforts on the part of ordinary people to overcome them. In doing so, she takes us to the beating heart of this fragile experiment — something we desperately need to remember in this 250th year of the country.”

In 1973, as an editor at Random House, Morrison published and collaborated with collectors in compiling “The Black Book,” a seminal volume that tells the story of the African American experience in America in the form of an encyclopedic scrapbook that spans from 1619 through the 1940s. There is no narrator, and this is intentional. The visuals — newspaper clippings, slave auction notices, patent applications by Black inventors, photographs, sheet music, relate their own powerful story “Black life as lived” — great joy juxtaposed with the tragedy and legacy of slavery. From her work on that groundbreaking assemblage emerged the idea for “Beloved,” which won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Nearly seven years after Morrison’s death at 88, we are living in a golden age of Morrisonia. Three extraordinary new books, published this year, shed light on the brilliance and complexity of Morrison’s life and work, and place her as an American eminence, a visionary who saw fiction as a means through which to recast her country’s story. “On Morrison” by Namwali Serpell; “Toni at Random: The Iconic Writer’s Legendary Editorship” by Dana Williams; and a posthumously published collection of Morrison essays entitled “Language as Liberation: Reflections on the American Canon.” Serpell writes that “Morrison has shaped the way we think about everything.” Morrison herself said that she wrote to “think the unthinkable,” to write novels that were “relentlessly black,” giving no deference to the “white gaze.” Her refusal to sugarcoat the interior and exterior lives of her characters, whether enslaved or traumatized by the past — by events in American history — was purposeful.

“You’re confronted with horrific acts of violence,” Serpell says. “Not to present it in spectacular fashion, nor to feed any kind of voyeuristic or prurient interest on the part of the audience, but to use quiet language — beautiful language — in order to actually get us to step back and think about why this violence is happening and where it’s coming from.”

In that way, Morrison’s work was always a radical experiment — and is perhaps why, according to the American Library Assn., “The Bluest Eye” her 1970 debut — continues to be one of the most frequently “challenged” books in the U.S. “Beloved” runs a close second. But this also is among the reasons her books are considered must-reads in the classroom, and contemporary classics.

John Freeman is an executive editor at Knopf who oversees Morrison’s publishing program. “Her books persist today because they beckon us doubly: they invite us to look clearly at what America is, to come to grips with the fantasies and shadows developed to avoid this awful knowledge,” Freeman says. “They also tell us one phenomenal love story after another.”

Through her book club, cultural icon Oprah Winfrey introduced millions of readers to Morrison by featuring four of the author’s novels. “From ‘The Bluest Eye’ through ‘Beloved,’ ‘Jazz,’ ‘Home,’ ‘A Mercy’ and ‘Love,’ Morrison’s words have helped me become more of myself,” Winfrey says. “She understands the lives of Black women like no one else I’ve ever read. Reading her, I’ve often felt seen in places I didn’t know how to name.”

(HarperCollins; Penguin Random House)

In Morrison’s essays, lectures and other public comments — including as a professor at Princeton for nearly two decades — she occupied the role of public intellectual, always teaching us how to view America’s evolution as a country, and how it became “racialized.”

In a Granta interview conducted late in her life, she challenged the interviewer to consider that the concept of “whiteness” is peculiarly American: “Think about it, “ she prompted. “If you come to this country from Germany or Russia, or anywhere you got off the boat, got on the land, in order to become an American, you have to be white. That’s the quality that brings the country, its people together — having a non-white population. My concept is that if you were from Sweden, you were Swedish. You didn’t have to say, ‘I’m a white Swede.’ You know what I’m saying?”

As we prepare to celebrate America’s 250th, it’s useful to reflect on how Morrison viewed the intersection of fiction, history and memory, how the mission of her fiction was to uncover truths omitted by the standard historical records and history’s “sages.” In her 1987 essay, “The Site of Memory,” she utilized a river as a metaphor to discuss how imagination excavates forgotten histories and people. “All water,” she wrote, “has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were.”

Haber is a writer, editor and publishing strategist, and co-founder of the Ink Book Club on Substack. She was director of Oprah’s Book Club and books editor for O, the Oprah Magazine.

The country will celebrate its 250th birthday Saturday, and it seems nobody quite knows how to feel about it. Being a thoughtful American in 2026 has become an art form unto itself — a balancing act two-and-a-half centuries in the making. Marking the anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence requires the acceptance of a paradox so profound that it feels almost insurmountable: The great American experiment has failed; and it is also a triumph.

I’m writing this at near midnight on a muggy night in Pennsylvania — about 300 miles from Philadelphia, where in 1776 the Continental Congress adopted a document bearing one of the most famous and idealistic lines ever written: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Hundreds of years later, the course of human events has once again made it necessary for us to dissolve certain bonds, only the resulting revolution has been metaphorical and waged largely online. We have become a people pitted against one another in thought and in action. In the words we write on social media, the news we choose to consume on our siloed feeds, and the way we treat those who believe differently than we do.

How do we come together to celebrate the monumental achievement of this improbable democracy, which should be made stronger through our respectful disagreements and ability to compromise in search of a higher truth? It may be foolish to say we must lead with kindness when so much raw anger abounds, but that is all we can do. It is what we must do.

Art can help — the music, paintings, dances and plays that remind us in myriad ways that we are not alone. You’ll have access to plenty of such sustenance on this highly anticipated anniversary weekend. So if you are, like me, facing the fireworks with trepidation, find a way to lock into a favorite song, or read a poem that moves you, and the worry will pass. It always does.

I’m Arts editor Jessica Gelt, watching the fireflies. This is your arts and culture news for the week.

The week ahead: A curated calendar

SATURDAY

Richard Dreyfuss, left, Roy Scheider and Robert Shaw in the 1975 movie “Jaws.”

(Universal Pictures)

Jaws
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the theater, a series of shark attacks are expected across the city Saturday afternoon as Steven Spielberg’s 1975 blockbuster screens at the Academy Museum’s David Geffen Theater (in 4K), the American Cinematheque’s Aero Theatre (in 35 mm) and Vidiots’ Eagle Theatre.
2:30 p.m. Saturday. Academy Museum, 6067 Wilshire Blvd. academymuseum.org; 3 p.m. Saturday. Aero Theatre, 1328 Montana Ave., Santa Monica. americancinematheque.com; 1 and 4:30 p.m. Vidiots Eagle Theater, 4884 Eagle Rock Blvd., Eagle Rock. vidiotsfoundation.org

TUESDAY

National Museum of the Aftermath screening series
Kevin Jerome Everson and Claudrena N. Harolds’ short film “Foosball: U. of Virginia Charlottesville, VA 1976” (2013), inspired by a photograph of two students playing a game, examines Black life at UVA; and Andrea Fraser’s feature documentary “This meeting is being recorded” (2022) gathers a group of a self-identifying white women to discuss unconscious racism and their own roles in white supremacy.
6 p.m. Oxy Arts, 4757 York Blvd. oxyarts.oxy.edu

WEDNESDAY

Brian Quijada, left, and Nygel D. Robinson in “Mexodus.”

(Thomas Mundell)

Mexodus
Direct from an award-winning off-Broadway run, this new musical created and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson illuminates a lesser-known fork of the Underground Railroad, one that branched south across the Rio Grande.
Previews, 8 p.m. Wednesday, 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. July 10, 2 and 8 p.m. July 11; continues through Aug. 2. Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave. pasadenaplayhouse.org

New Swan Shakespeare Festival.

(New Swan Shakespeare Festival)

New Swan Shakespeare Festival
The annual summer-long event, featuring professional theater artists, UC Irvine alums, current graduate and undergraduate drama students and faculty, returns for another repertory season of classics under the stars at its intimate, 130-seat, portable, mini-Elizabethan space. “Romeo & Juliet,” directed by Rachael VanWormer, resets the tragic romance to the American Dust Bowl; “The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove,” adapted by Anna Fitzgerald & Eli Simon, with music by Zachary Dietz and directed by founding Artistic Director Eli Simon, brings the rollicking comedy to a 1950s SoCal surf town, powered by a live skiffle band.
“Romeo & Juliet,” 8 p.m. Tuesday and Thursday, and various dates through Aug. 29. “Merry Wives,” 8 p.m. Wednesday, and various dates through Aug. 30. UC Irvine campus, 4000 Campus Drive. newswanshakespeare.com

Wilkins Conducts Bernstein & Ellington
Thomas Wilkins guides the L.A. Philharmonic in a program of classical Americana featuring selections from Valerie Coleman, William Grant Still, a newly arranged song cycle from Shaina Taub’s Broadway hit “Suffs,” Leonard Bernstein and Duke Ellington.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

Zoot Suit
Join writer-director Luis Valdez and star Edward James Olmos for a 45th anniversary screening of the film, an adaptation of Valdez’s groundbreaking play, the truly L.A. story of the 1942 Sleepy Lagoon case and Zoot Suit Riots. Audiences are encouraged to come in costume and arrive early for the “Pachuco Boogie!” Produced in partnership with the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, Self Help Graphics and Pachuco Car Club.
8 p.m. The Ford Ampitheatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East. theford.com

THURSDAY

Randal Goosby.

(L.A. Phil)

The Classical World Cup
Tito Muñoz conducts the L.A. Phil in a salute to “the beautiful game” (soccer to Americans) with works spanning the Americas by Alberto Ginastera, Samuel Barber (with Randal Goosby on violin), Silvestre Revueltas and Aaron Copland; plus the world premiere of “The Art of the Goal,” an original mixed-media concept film by director Josh Kahn and composer Adam Schoenberg. Commissioned by the L.A. Phil, the piece blends footage of elite training and match play featuring the Los Angeles Football Club with orchestral music.
8 p.m. Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave. hollywoodbowl.com

The SoCal scene

(Matt Chase / For The Times)

Celebrations for the country’s 250th birthday have been muted thus far (at least compared to the bicentennial 50 years ago), but our Entertainment and Arts team noted the moment by examining the ways the artists we cover have interpreted the nation’s complex history. Times theater critic Charles McNulty wrote that a “cohort of playwrights, breathtakingly diverse demographically as well as aesthetically, has been rejuvenating American theater.” Contributor Shana Nys Dambrot looked to local museums and identified nine works of art “exploring and expounding upon, in celebration and critique, what it means and what it feels like to be an American.” Times classical music critic Mark Swed compared the artistic and institutional responses of 2026 to the past, lamenting that “None of this comes close to comparing with the attempted civic zest of 1976.” Check out the rest of the collection of stories and essays, including Mary McNamara’s column reminding us that even in troubled times 250 years is worth celebrating because “the Constitution was written ‘in order to form a more perfect union.’ Not ‘perfect,’ but ‘more perfect.’ As in better,” and a list of 10 essential movies that capture crucible moments in U.S. history; find out what Times pop music critic Mikael Wood calls the “quintessential American song,” and which books are being read in L.A. high schools and which classics remain relevant.

Carene Rose Mekertichyan , left, and Brent Charles in “Coriolanus” at the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival.

(Grettel Cortes)

It’s summer and that means that outdoor theater is upon us and McNulty reviewed the Independent Shakespeare Co.’s Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival production of “Coriolanus.” “It’s hard to love ‘Coriolanus,’ but it’s equally hard not to be impressed by its ambition, originality and dramatic rigor,” wrote McNulty. This “production isn’t going to win awards for subtlety, but the storytelling is crisp and vivid. And even those unfamiliar with the tale — the vast majority of attendees, in all likelihood — should find it engrossing.”

It’s hard to believe that the ABBA jukebox musical “Mamma Mia!” premiered 25 years ago. Times staff writer Eloise Rollins-Fife went backstage at the Ahmanson Theatre to visit with the behind-the-scenes crew who put so much joy into the sequin-bedazzled extravaganza on display in the show’s anniversary tour — many of whom worked on the original production and tours.

Katie Simons profiled 99-year-old Sierra Madre resident Monson de Kansky, a onetime top ballerina who went to teach Parisian royalty, raise a family and still teaches ballet.

Hollywood set painters whose work in the Tinseltown dream machine often went overlooked and uncredited are getting their due in “Staging California in Early Hollywood” at the UC Irvine Langson Orange County Museum of Art in Costa Mesa. Times staff writer Julius Miller spoke with museum director Kathryn Kanjo and assistant curator Michaëla Mohrmann about the institution’s first exhibition since UC Irvine acquired OCMA last September and Kanjo’s appointment in December.

Culture news

Rosalie Tucker, executive director of Pieter Performance Space (standing left); Andrew Pearson of Bodies in Play (second from left); Lena Martin (second from right) and Mandolin Burns (right) of Crawlspace; Dani Burd of Indigo Dance Company (bottom left); and Adie San Diego (bottom right).

(Ariana Drehsler/For The Times)

The last few years have been rough for most arts institutions and many L.A. dance spaces have closed. Contributor Steven Vargas reported on how surviving dance companies and artists are forging ahead in the wake of COVID-19 pandemic and diminished funding.

The Centre Theatre Group announced that a world tour of the acclaimed stage adaptation of Hayao Miyazaki’s Academy Award-winning animated film “Spirited Away” will open the Ahmanson Theare’s 2027-28 season. “We are honored to bring the wonder of ‘Spirited Away’ to the Ahmanson Theatre for an exclusive US engagement, offering our community the gift of experiencing one of the most cherished stories of our time, reimagined for the stage in a once-in-a-generation theatrical experience,” said Douglas C. Baker, Center Theatre Group producing director, in a statement. The production, from Toho Co., will open at the National Theater in Taipei on Dec. 16, before continuing on a national tour of Japan from March-August 2027, followed by stops at the Princess of Wales Theatre, Toronto (May-August 2027), and the Ahmanson (September–October 2027). The tour will conclude with a return to the London Coliseum (March-July 2028), where it had its European premiere in 2024 following a sold-out tour of Japan in 2022. Casting will be announced at a later date.

The British theater lost two stalwarts this week. Penelope Keith, best known for the sitcoms “The Good Life,” which aired on PBS in the U.S. as “Good Neighbors,” and “To the Manor Born,” has died at age 86. Keith joined the Royal Shakespeare Co. in 1963, won a BAFTA Award in 1977 for “The Good Life” and continued her stage career into her 80s. The New York Times reported that Michael Byrne, a noted actor of stage and screen, also died this week at 86. Byrne created the role of the suspected torturer Dr. Miranda in the premiere production of Ariel Dorfman’s 1991 play “Death and the Maiden” in London. Other notable theater roles were with Siân Phillips in “Juliet and Her Romeo,” Polonius in “Hamlet,” Cassius in “Julius Caesar” and Prince Hal in “Henry IV.” The actor also appeared in films such as “Force 10 from Navarone,” “Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade,” “Braveheart,” “Gangs of New York” and “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1.”

— Kevin Crust

And last but not least

If pyrotechnics (or drone shows!) are your thing and you’d like to celebrate the Fourth of July with a bang, Times staff writer Christopher Buchanan compiled 52 places and favorite spots to watch the festivities in Southern California.

TIJUANA, Mexico — Vivianne Petit Frere’s brightly painted Haitian restaurant sits blocks from the towering U.S. border wall in Tijuana.

Called Lakou Lakay, the name in Haitian creole means “home,” and it reflects her family’s deepening roots in their adopted homeland where her granddaughter was born two years ago, automatically making her a Mexican citizen.

Like the United States, Mexico extends citizenship to children born within its borders.

President Trump insists the U.S. is the only nation to do so as he seeks to deny birthright citizenship for children whose parents are living in the country illegally or have temporary legal status.

The U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in soon on the constitutionality of his birthright citizenship order. Trump signed it on Jan. 20, 2025, the first day of his second term, amid his Republican administration’s broad immigration crackdown. The idea has faced skepticism from conservative and liberal justices alike.

In April, Trump posted on Truth Social: “We are the only Country in the World STUPID enough to allow ‘Birthright’ Citizenship!”

In fact, about three dozen countries, mostly in the Americas, guarantee automatic citizenship to children born on their territory — among them, Canada, Honduras, Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela and of course, Mexico.

Petit Frere fled Haiti in 2019. She traveled from Brazil and walked through the Panamanian jungle to Mexico chasing the so-called American Dream with the intention of crossing the border and settling with relatives in Florida. But she soon learned that was an illusion, while Mexico opened its doors.

Her restaurant’s name symbolizes in her Haitian culture a shared space affording a sense of belonging. On the walls she has framed signs in Spanish, English and Creole that make clear it is more than an eatery offering tasty traditional Haitian dishes, such as fish with plantains, and rice and beans.

“Every dish tells a story, every detail connects cultures,” one sign says. “We aim to promote an authentic cultural exchange between two peoples with similar historical roots yet where Haitian identity proudly blossoms on Mexican soil.”

In just over five years in Tijuana, Petit Frere has established a thriving business, become fluent in Spanish and is getting a degree in social work.

And she welcomed the first generation Mexican in her family, her granddaughter, Alexca.

There are no figures on how many children born to noncitizens have received Mexican birthright citizenship. Tens of thousands of Haitians are living in Mexico. In 2021, when Mexico saw a significant increase in Haitian migration, at least 10 percent of arriving Haitian women were pregnant, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration.

Citizenship and birth

In the U.S., birthright citizenship was enshrined after the Civil War through the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, in part to ensure former slaves would be citizens.

The right was expanded to immigrants’ children in the late 1800s when the Supreme Court ruled nearly anyone born in the U.S. — no matter their parents’ legal status — has citizenship.

The practice, many legal historians believe, dates to the 1600s and 1700s, with European rulers encouraging migration to the expanding American colonies. Those colonists, though, wanted any of their children born overseas to retain European citizenship.

So even as the colonial boundaries shifted “you’re a citizen as long as you’re born within the domain of the king, of the monarch,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University. “But the legal tie between the home country in Europe and the settlers remained strong through the promise of birthright citizenship.”

Dominican Republic removed birthright citizenship

In 2007, the Dominican Electoral Council officially ordered the denial of citizenship to all children born to parents without legal status.

Six years later, a Dominican court applied it retroactively to 1929.

Over a decade later, as many as 130,000 people remained stateless despite passage of a law in 2014 to correct the court decision after it drew strong international condemnation, according to the Center for Migration Studies of New York. The law now impacts the next generation, which remains vulnerable to deportation.

Her growing Mexican family

Petit Frere was born in French Saint Martin, a Caribbean island that does not offer automatic birthright citizenship. She and her mom, who is Haitian, were deported to Haiti when she was 6.

Petit Frere left Haiti seeking a better life. She was dismayed to discover when her teenage daughter left Haiti to be reunited with her in Tijuana three years later, she was nearly five months pregnant. She had been a teen mother herself and had hoped for a different path for her daughter.

But Alexca, a bubbly toddler who giggles and runs about, has conquered her grandmother’s heart. Petit Frere said she’s grateful her granddaughter was born in Mexico rather than Haiti, where surging gang violence has left more than 1 in 10 homeless.

A Mexican passport will make travel easier, she said. Few nations allow Haitian passport holders to visit visa-free.

“As a Mexican citizen, she will have more opportunities,” Petit Frere said.

That’s also true for her three nieces who were born in Brazil and were made automatic citizens there, she said.

Petit Frere said she and her daughter had permanent residency in Mexico before her granddaughter was born. But other parents in Tijuana’s Haitian community did not. Mexico allows the parents of children with birthright citizenship to become permanent residents.

“There are a lot of children in Tijuana who are 6, 7, 8 years old now who are Mexican and their parents who are Haitian did not have legal status but now have become permanent residents because their children were born here,” she said.

Petit Frere started paperwork for Mexican citizenship, which would make it easier to expand her business.

Petit Frere also is a community organizer with the Haitian Bridge Alliance, advocating for the Haitian migrant community. She said she hopes to pursue another degree in international migration, possibly through a U.S. university.

“The children of immigrants are proving to be the most outstanding in the world,” she said. Efforts to limit birthright citizenship “could just be out of jealousy,” she said.

Watson writes for the Associated Press. AP writer Tim Sullivan in Minneapolis contributed to this report.