Category: BUSINESS

Broadway’s biggest night is nigh, but a number of Hollywood heavyweights weren’t invited to the party.

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal were passed over for Tony Awards recognition for “Othello,” their high-priced William Shakespeare revival that was completely shut out of Thursday’s nominations.

Other big names including Robert Downey Jr. (“McNeal”), Julianna Margulies (“Left on Tenth”), Jim Parsons (“Our Town”), Kieran Culkin (“Glengarry Glen Ross”), Bill Burr (“Glengarry Glen Ross”), Bernadette Peters (“Stephen Sondheim’s Old Friends”), and Idina Menzel (“Redwood”) were similarly missing from this year’s Tony nods, which honor some of the very best plays and musicals in New York.

It was an ultra-competitive and unusually star-studded theater season, which routinely made headlines for its astronomical ticket prices and outspoken political firebrands.

Other notable omissions included Nick Jonas, who made a much-publicized Broadway return in “The Last Five Years” that was roundly dismissed by critics. More surprisingly, David Hyde Pierce and Jinkx Monsoon were both overlooked for their hilarious turns in “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” as was Helen J. Shen for playing an outdated robot in the tear-jerking “Maybe Happy Ending.”

“Maybe Happy Ending,” “Death Becomes Her” and “Buena Vista Social Club” led the nominations with 10 nods a piece, including best musical. The strange-but-true “Dead Outlaw” and World War II spy satire “Operation Mincemeat” rounded out the best musical category.

As expected, Cole Escola’s madcap “Oh, Mary!” was a major force with five nods, including best play, best actor (Escola) and best featured actor (Conrad Ricamora). The unlikely hit comedy, which tells a deranged alternative history of Mary Todd Lincoln, has attracted high-profile celebrity audience members including Dua Lipa, Jennifer Lopez, Meryl Streep, and Steven Spielberg.

The other nominees for best play were “The Hills of California,” “English,” “Purpose,” and “John Proctor is the Villain.” Notably missing from the category was “Stranger Things: The First Shadow,” Netflix’s high-budget yet critically divisive prequel to the sci-fi streaming sensation. Although, the theatrical spectacle still made off with five nominations, including best actor for newcomer Louis McCartney.

“Succession” star Sarah Snook earned her first Tony nomination for her one-woman tour de force in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” as did former Pussycat Dolls frontwoman Nicole Scherzinger for her bewitching performance as fading film star Norma Desmond in “Sunset Boulevard,” an audacious revival of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical.

A-listers George Clooney (“Good Night, and Good Luck”), Sadie Sink (“John Proctor is the Villain”), Mia Farrow (“The Roommate”), and Bob Odenkirk (“Glengarry Glen Ross”) all garnered their first Tony nods as well.

In addition, Audra McDonald looks to extend her record as the most Tony-winning performer in history. The Broadway legend, who has won six Tony Awards, is vying for her seventh trophy with a best actress nomination for the classic showbiz musical “Gypsy.”

How to watch Tony Awards

The 78th annual Tony Awards will air live on Sunday, June 8, from New York’s Radio City Music Hall (8 ET/5 PT on CBS and streaming on Paramount+). The ceremony will be hosted for the first time by Cynthia Erivo, the three-time Oscar-nominated star of “Wicked,” who takes over emcee duties from Ariana DeBose.

If the ground floor of Deyan Sudjic’s north London house looks a little bare – all white walls, stripped floors, high ceilings and a slick, steel-counter-topped kitchen – it serves all the better to display the furniture. This is, in its way, exactly the house you might expect the former director of London’s Design Museum to have: a perfect backdrop for a collection, in this case, of remarkable chairs, in a neighbourhood with gentility and grime within easy reach.  

These exhibits, though, are not on pedestals but in everyday use: a set of Hans Wegner dining chairs, a Gerrit Rietveld Red and Blue armchair that still looks ridiculously modern despite its design being more than a century old, and a pair of vintage Alvar Aalto plywood stools placed side by side beneath the tall kitchen window. 

If anything jars in the elegant early-Victorian house it is not the modernist furniture but rather an elaborate stone fireplace, clearly an import from France and looking a little arrogant in this very British interior. “Before we bought it,” says Sudjic, 72, sitting across an enormous dining table that is as big as a bedroom, “this house belonged to Jasper Conran and John Galliano. They had their studio on the top floor. It was remodelled by [British architect] Nigel Coates, but unfortunately the people they sold it to had it completely remodelled. The fireplace is one of the few things that survives from that earlier period.” 

Its latest incarnation was designed “with a bit of advice from John Pawson”, Sudjic says. It shows. Particularly in the floor, the boards of which seem unusually wide. “Some of them go all the way, back to front,” he says. “We had to get a crane to get them in.” We head upstairs. “There’s too much furniture,” Sudjic admits, a little sheepishly. It’s not exactly rammed, but the airy (white) drawing room does look a little like a designer beauty parade. There’s an Eames lounger and ottoman right where you’d expect it. There’s an unusual Harry Bertoia chair clad in purple velvet, a Jasper Morrison sofa, a Le Corbusier chair, a Marcel Breuer coffee table and Dieter Rams’s unavoidable and possibly unimprovable shelves for Vitsoe, neatly stuffed with books. 

It’s a relief almost to find a lovely-looking old wooden sunbed and a pair of dining chairs that came from the home of Sudjic’s father-in-law, the architect John Miller. Sudjic’s wife, Sarah Miller, the founding editor of the UK’s Condé Nast Traveller magazine who now runs a brand consultancy (she is away on an exotic photoshoot when I visit), is from an architectural dynasty: her stepmother was Su Rogers, one-time wife of Richard Rogers who once had a practice with him. “Sarah is trying to implement a policy of one book in, one book out,” Sudjic says. “It’s not working that well.” 

I’m always a little wary of the word ‘design’ as if it’s a thing

Sudjic himself (his parents emigrated to the UK from the former Yugoslavia) began by training as an architect, though quickly gravitated towards media. He was a co-founder of Blueprint magazine in 1983, a big-format, lush and self-consciously cool mag that brought the disparate tentacles of London’s then-buzzing design scene together to suggest more coherence than there probably ever was. When I ask him where he now thinks design is going, four decades after he founded Blueprint, he says, not necessarily helpfully, “I’m always a little wary of the word ‘design’, as if it were a thing. It isn’t, it’s a method.”

Maybe. But the home of the co-founder of the UK’s former leading design magazine and former director of the Design Museum certainly does seem to have a lot of design in it. I ask whether he thinks there might be too many chairs in the world? He adopts a slightly pained expression. “As Jasper Morrison said, we don’t need to design a new chair just to refine an existing one.” 

Sudjic is finishing a book on the furniture manufacturer Vitra. The company has the licences to make some of the best-known and best-loved modernist designs, from Charles and Ray Eames to Jean Prouvé and Hella Jongerius, and an impressive museum in Germany. Now, under the leadership of CEO Nora Fehlbaum, it is making a radical shift towards sustainability. “Its former CEO, [Nora’s uncle] Rolf Fehlbaum, is a very unusual businessman. He has a PhD in utopian industrial settlements and what he’s built in Weil am Rhein, with buildings by Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, Álvaro Siza and others is like a contemporary version of something by Tomáš Baťa or Robert Owen. He made a kind of architectural collage that maybe no one else could have done.”

Vitra is a remarkable company. But it is joined in the design ecosystem by hundreds of other outfits churning out fast-fashion furniture, infinite chairs, sofas and unpleasant coffee tables. Is there not too much production in design now? Even Vitra itself admits its Eames loungers are CO2 intensive. “What makes [Vitra] different,” Sudjic insists, “is that it’s designed to last 50 years. If you were to have, today, a 1950s fridge, or a car, they’d both look quite eccentric. By comparison with all the other objects designed in 1956, I think this chair [he nods towards the lounger] has lasted pretty well. ”

As we look around, more and more chairs begin to trigger anecdotes, from a fantastically lightweight Cassina Superleggera by Gio Ponti (which he was given as a former editor of the Italian Domus magazine) to a chunky Ron Arad design made from an old Rover car seat that looks rare. Is he a collector? “Oh no, I’m far too disorganised to be a real collector,” he says. “Perhaps more of an accumulator.”  

All those chairs might have fitted more easily into one of his former homes. “When we started Blueprint, I lived in a Wapping loft big enough to cycle around. It was a bit like living on the set of The Long Good Friday. The river had such a presence then but it was very quiet.” He continues: “In those days I believed an architecture editor should put his money where his mouth is, so I commissioned John McAslan to design a living pod in the middle of the loft.” His first flat was designed by the Czech émigré architect Jan Kaplický. “It was an indoor spaceship.” Anyone who has seen Kaplický’s media stand at London’s Lord’s cricket ground will know exactly what he means.  

Towards the top of the house, lurking in a hallway is yet another remarkable-looking chair, a bit of a miniature throne with its upholstery replaced by gleaming slats of brass. “That one was designed by Rei Kawakubo,” he says. “She gave it to me when I wrote a book about her.” Paul Smith introduced him to the Comme des Garçons designer on a trip to Japan. “I went to visit textile mills with her, and went to the Paris showing of her collections, where John Malkovich and Julian Sands were models. At the same time I was looking at an Issey Miyake store designed by Shiro Kuramata, and the dividing line between design, fashion and architecture began to dissolve.” He still gets his suits from Paul Smith’s bespoke operation (“it’s a very fine thing, a bespoke suit”).  

No longer leading the Design Museum, for which he commissioned John Pawson to reimagine the wonderful midcentury Commonwealth Institute as its new Kensington home, you might think Sudjic was slowing down. But he is writing books, has his Vitra volume coming soon, edits an annual design magazine, Anima, and is a professor of architecture and design at Lancaster University. And he regularly dips his toes into newspaper journalism, which he still clearly loves. “Really, it’s a licence for curiosity, isn’t it?” I agree, as I nose around his bookshelves one last time. 

Netflix’s new dramedy, “The Four Seasons,” highlights love and friendship with a star-studded cast.

Released on May 1, the show follows six married friends who go on quarterly weekend trips. However, old tensions and new conflicts arise when one couple decides to end their relationship.

“The Four Seasons,” created by Tina Fey, Lang Fisher, and Tracey Wigfield, is a reimagination of the 1981 movie with the same name.

“I’ve always loved this movie since I was a kid, and I do think that a series like this where you can really just expand things and take your time a little bit more felt like a perfect way to hang out with these characters a little bit longer,” Fey told The Hollywood Reporter.

Here’s what we know about Netflix’s “The Four Seasons”:

When and where does ‘The Four Seasons’ air?

The first season of “The Four Seasons,” which consists of eight episodes, is now available on Netflix. It premiered on May 1 at 3 a.m. EDT.

‘The Four Seasons’ episode list

• Episode One: “Lake House”
• Episode Two: “Garden Party”
• Episode Three: “Eco Resort”
• Episode Four: “Beach Bar”
• Episode Five: “Family Weekend
• Episode Six: “Ultimate Frisbee”
• Episode Seven: “Ski Trip”
• Episode Eight: “Fun”

‘The Four Seasons’: Tina Fey, Erika Henningsen bring real-life friendship to Netflix show

‘The Four Seasons’ trailer

‘The Four Seasons’ gets mixed reviews from critics

According to USA TODAY TV critic Kelly Lawler, “The Four Seasons” “feels surface-level at best, unfunny and dull at worst,” adding that it ” is a big miss when it should have been an easy home run.” Read the full “Four Seasons” review.

The Guardian says the show is “full of properly funny lines, rooted in properly middle-aged experience. In its comedy and its drama it captures the warm, weary affection for life and each other that only old friends and enduring couples really know.”

Per The Hollywood Reporter, the miniseries has “some pleasantly sweet moments and some poignant ones, but few of them land with much weight since the characters are so thin.”

The show has a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes so far.

‘The Four Seasons’ cast

• Tina Fey
• Steve Carell
• Colman Domingo
• Will Forte
• Kerri Kenney-Silver
• Marco Calvani
• Erika Henningsen

Taylor Ardrey is a news reporter for USA TODAY. You can reach her at [email protected].

There’s no business like show business.

Take it from Bryan Cranston, who pulls back the curtain on the life of a working actor in “Everything’s Going to Be Great” (in theaters June 20). The “Breaking Bad” Emmy winner stars as Buddy Smart, a lifelong thespian who uproots his wife (Oscar winner Allison Janney) and sons (Jack Champion and Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) to New Jersey to run a regional theater.

The feel-good dramedy follows Buddy as he tries to keep his family afloat while they pursue their respective dreams in a new town. The film is rounded out by an all-star cast that includes Simon Rex (“Red Rocket”) and Chris Cooper (“Adaptation”).

“Everything’s Going to Be Great” will be released by Lionsgate and premiere at the Tribeca Festival in New York on June 9.

The trailer premieres exclusively at usatoday.com, along with the first look at the movie’s poster.

Join our Watch Party! Sign up to receive USA TODAY’s movie and TV recommendations right in your inbox

Audiences “are going to recognize elements of these characters in their own life because it encompasses adventure, sorrow, joy, aspiration,” Cranston said in a statement to USA TODAY, praising screenwriter Steven Rogers’ “beautiful” script and the “imaginative creative mind” of director Jon S. Baird. “I couldn’t be happier. I’m very proud of this movie.”

For Baird, who last directed “Tetris” in 2023, “this film restored my faith in the creative process,” he wrote in his own statement. “This movie, at its core, is about the importance of family. We were so lucky we found such a supportive group to help us achieve even a little bit of hope in the darkest of times.”

The early signs are in, and meteorologists are predicting a hard launch summer.

Lucas Bravo is taking the season seriously, heading to social media April 30 to treat fans to an Instagram-official announcement of his relationship with fellow actor Shailene Woodley.

The “Emily in Paris” heartthrob posted a carousel of photos, featuring one of the couple holding hands, one of the two sitting on the ground together while attending the Stagecoach music festival, and several of Woodley by herself enjoying the sights in nearby Slab City, California.

Shailene Woodley says she drank to cope with hunger, goes viral yet again

“Howdy Slab City,” Bravo, 37, titled the photo dump. The unincorporated California territory is just a few miles from Indio, where the Coachella and Stagecoach music festivals − both celebrity-packed affairs − are hosted.

USA TODAY has reached out to reps for Bravo and Woodley for comment.

Fans first began to speculate that Woodley, 33, was involved with Bravo when the pair were spotted together in Paris in March, in what appeared to be a PDA-filled outing.

Neither part of the duo has been particularly vocal about the new entanglement, though Bravo did offer a subtle confirmation earlier this month, responding to a question from People about the relationship by saying: “Yeah, I’m really happy.”

Woodley, who was previously engaged to football player Aaron Rodgers, has yet to post Bravo to her own grid.

Woodley, who first rose to fame as the lead in the book-to-movie adaptation of the popular young adult novel “Divergent,” has since become a mainstay on the film screen, and was recently tapped to join the cast of Hulu’s thriller series “Paradise.”

Bravo, best known for playing hunky Parisian chef and key love interest Gabriel on Netflix’s “Emily in Paris,” is an up-and-coming star. He has also appeared in several romantic comedies, including “The Honeymoon” and “Ticket to Paradise.”

As a young reader (probably too young, she admits), Ana Huang scouted her favorite romance books at the supermarket.

Her journey with the genre started, like many others, with Harlequin trade paperbacks. Here, Huang could find a guaranteed happy ending and arcs that made her favorite fictional characters feel real. But as a Chinese American reader, she rarely read any with characters who looked like her. 

Now, Huang is dominating the romance genre herself, even solidifying a place on the Top 5 bestselling BookTok authors with over 1.47 million copies sold in 2024, according to Forbes. Publishing is still a largely white industry. Four out of those top five bestselling authors are white women – Huang is the only Asian author and author of color represented in the entire Top 10. 

As we kick off Asian American Pacific Islander Heritage Month, USA TODAY talked with Huang about the representation she wants to see in the romance genre and how she crafted her new dark, steamy novel “King of Envy,” out now from Bloom Books. 

King of Envy is a ‘return to form’ for Huang

“King of Envy” is Huang’s 14th book and the fifth in her “Kings of Sin” series, each of which focuses on one of the seven deadly sins. The series uses the beloved billionaire romance trope – thank you “Fifty Shades of Grey” – often combining glitz and wealth with high-stakes action. In “King of Envy,” our pair is the tortured billionaire Vuk Markovic and renowned supermodel Ayana Kidane. When the novel opens, Ayana is engaged to Jordan, one of New York’s most eligible bachelors, but you quickly learn it’s a sham so that he can get his inheritance and she can get paid off enough to leave her abusive agency. 

It’s a perfect plan, except for when she finds herself falling for his best man – Vuk. The story is teeming with tension and morally gray love interests and a healthy dose of the “touch her and you die” trope. While her recent projects have had “softer” leading men and themes, Huang calls “King of Envy” and its palm-sweating suspense a “return to form.” She listened to angsty songs like “Let the World Burn” by Chris Grey and “Moth to a Flame” by The Weeknd and Swedish House Mafia to set the tone for “King of Envy.” 

‘King of Envy’ – like any Ana Huang book – has plenty of spice

Having written many “spicy” scenes across 14 books, Huang knows a thing or two about how to convey sex on the page. It starts with the emotion, she says. Rather than structuring a bedroom scene on mechanics alone, she asks the characters what they need to get emotionally out of a sexual encounter.

But how do you keep it from being formulaic? She admits it’s harder to write steamy scenes the more books she writes. 

“I tend not to be as liberal with the spice scenes as maybe my earlier stuff, just because I want to make sure they all serve a purpose. But also, I’ll be honest, sometimes I get a little bit tired,” she says, laughing. “I still love them, but it just takes a little bit more out of me.” 

Still, there’s plenty of spice in “King of Envy.” Though romance is often dismissed as “fluff” or “guilty pleasure reads,” Huang says she’s proud to offer a safe space for readers (especially women) to explore their sexuality. Readers told USA TODAY earlier this year that spicy romance is empowering and even translates off the page into developing healthy sex lives. The genre is booming and driving the publishing industry. It’s so big, it’s crossing over to the silver screen with adaptations like “It Ends With Us” and Huang’s own “Twisted” series coming to Netflix.

“It’s a place for play and exploration,” Huang says. “And I love that romance is a genre that centers female desire and pleasure. They can take agency over that. You can’t really say that of a lot of other genres.” 

In a video she made for Audible in 2023, Huang told the story of the time she told an Uber driver she wrote romance. He gave her a pamphlet of religious teachings. It’s an attitude many readers and non-readers alike have – that romance has no substance. But most of that is coming from people who don’t read the genre at all. 

“It’s so frustrating, as an author, to see those conversations play out from people outside of the genre,” she tells USA TODAY. “Obviously, a lot of it is rooted in misogyny … but I think the romance community is strong. It’s been here for so long, and the umbrella is growing every day.”

Huang’s books prioritize diversity. She wants publishing to be the same.

A hallmark of Huang’s work is her diverse cast of characters across race, ethnicity and life experience. In “King of Envy,” Vuk is selectively non-verbal and uses American Sign Language, which Huang included because it’s a demographic she doesn’t often see represented in the romance genre. Because the Kings of Sin series is set largely in New York City, one of the most diverse major cities in the U.S., not creating a diverse cast of characters would be a “disservice,” she says. 

She hopes to see the same reflected in publishing, at every level.

“At the end of the day, publishing is always about the bottom line,” Huang says. “But sometimes I find it a little frustrating because they’ll say, … ‘We published this book and it just didn’t sell that well and it just happened to be a diverse book by a diverse author.’ And I’m like, ‘Well, did you put as many marketing resources into this book?’

“This is something that needs to be at every level,” she continues. “You need to have BIPOC acquiring editors. You need that type of representation on the marketing team. It can’t just be like, ‘We acquired this book to say that we did it.’”

Clare Mulroy is USA TODAY’s Books Reporter, where she covers buzzy releases, chats with authors and dives into the culture of reading. Find her on Instagram, subscribe to our weekly Books newsletter or tell her what you’re reading at [email protected]. 

Tina Fey. Steve Carrell. Will Forte. Two-time Oscar-nominee Colman Domingo.

When actors of that caliber get tother, you expect greatness. You expect to be doubled over in laughter as deep characters engage in high jinks and tomfoolery, but in a thoughtful way. Particularly when you hear Fey’s name, creator and star of “30 Rock,” “Mean Girls” and “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt.” Which is why the writer/actress’s new Netflix marriage comedy “The Four Seasons” (now streaming, ★★ out of four) is such a disappointment.

Based on the 1981 Alan Alda film, “Seasons” follows three couples on four vacations (one each season) as they deal with the difficulties of relationships large and small. Monotony, sex, divorce, parenting − it’s all wrapped up in a very picturesque package in a lakeside cabin, on a tropical beach, on an autumnal New England college campus and on a snow-capped mountain and ski lodge. The vacations may be polished and seasonally appropriate, but the relationships are distinctly messy and complicated.

Thought-provoking and relatable to anyone who has ever been in a long-term relationship, the setup seems perfect for the melodrama and conflict that makes for great relationship comedies. The original film had it all, including a series of manic tableaus brought to you by legends including Alda, Carol Burnett and Rita Moreno. But stretched out over eight half-hour episodes as a miniseries, “Seasons” feels surface-level at best, unfunny and dull at worst. (This marks the second attempt to bring the story to TV: CBS ran a series in 1984 that lasted only 13 episodes). “Seasons” is a big miss when it should have been an easy home run.

The three couples at the center each have at least one A-lister on board: Fey and Forte as dorky Kate and Jack, Carell’s smarmy Nick married to free-spirit Anne (Kerri Kenney-Silver) and judgy Danny (Domingo), with artsy and emotional Claude (Marco Calvani). At the start of the series, when the group is at Nick and Anne’s lakeside house in springtime, everything seems as if it’s coming up roses. But the cracks immediately begin to show: Nick is thinking of leaving Anne for someone more “alive”; Danny is ignoring his health problems, much to Claude’s dismay; and dark humor and sarcasm don’t fully cover up the deep fault lines in Jack and Kate’s relationship.

More: Tina Fey talks ‘The Four Seasons’ on Netflix

The couples are set up to be ostensible powder kegs of emotion and pent-up resentments, and yet the series never satisfies us by showing the explosions. Most of the major relationship milestones and potholes happen offscreen between the seasonal vacays, leaving us to find entertainment and meaning in the puny aftershocks. And while Fey’s scripts, written with co-creators Lang Fisher (“Never Have I Ever”) and Tracey Wigfield (“The Mindy Project”), have occasional funny bits, you’ll find yourselves uncomfortably silent while watching what are meant to be jokes pass across the screen. And when the series takes an occasional serious turn, you’ll just be confused. All of this plays out to the familiar tune of Antonio Vivaldi’s concerti “The Four Seasons,” in case the series wasn’t on-the-nose enough.

“Seasons” is acutely reminiscent of Apple TV+’s “Palm Royale,” last year’s period dramedy starring Kristen Wiig. Like “Seasons,” “Royale” had an A-list cast, featuring Wiig, Allison Janney, Ricky Martin, Laura Dern and Burnett, but somehow it fell decidedly flat. The actors and the looks were there, but the jokes and the depth weren’t.

A few moments in “Seasons” speak to what the show could’ve (should’ve) been. It’s fun and illuminating to watch Anne, boxed in for decades as Nick’s wife and her daughter’s mother, forge a new identity. It’s not a remotely new story − there are dozens of TV shows, books and films about the divorced woman who finds herself − but it is definitely the best told one of the bunch.

The series has four hours to say something, anything, about marriage or aging or midlife crises, but by the end the show’s point of view is not at all clear. Is having a life partner meaningful? Worthless? Somewhere in the middle?

“Seasons” is, unfortunately, as clueless as its characters.